Based on Donald Trump’s public behavior, some of America and the world’s leading psychologists, psychiatrists and other clinicians have concluded that the president of the United States is mentally unwell. Trump appears, in their opinion, to suffer from malignant narcissism. He is also a compulsive liar who lacks empathy for his fellow human beings and shows no remorse for his bad behavior. Most importantly, Trump’s personality defects amplify his authoritarian values, beliefs and behavior. The results of this could be catastrophic.
This week, Donald Trump met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the first time an American president and a North Korean leader had ever met in person. This encounter quite literally had the potential to be explosive. Trump has alternated between threatening Kim with nuclear annihilation and praising him and other totalitarian leaders for their “strength.” Moreover, in many ways Kim Jong Un is everything Trump would like to be — a despot with no restraints on his personal and political power. Kim is also free to dispense with his enemies as he sees fit. He is literally the law in his nation and leads a society where he is worshiped as a god: North Korea is the ultimate cult of personality. For the moment, disaster has been averted. At the Singapore summit, Trump and Kim engaged in an alpha-male bromance with one another. At this point, it appears that North Korea’s leader outmaneuvered Trump and the United States. Kim left Singapore with more international prestige and seemingly extracted important concessions. Donald Trump’s ego was stroked while the security of the United States and its allies in the region was weakened. Given Trump’s impulsive behavior, cultivated ignorance and hostility towards serious experts in diplomacy, East Asia and North Korea in particular, war may merely have been postponed for a later date, one that depends on the mercurial whims of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
What role does Donald Trump’s mental health play in how he governs? Is the stress of Robert Mueller’s investigation and the other scandals swirling around Trump’s White House accelerating his mental decline? Why are so many of Trump’s supporters and other members of the general public still in denial about the global and national crisis that is Trump’s assault on American democracy? Can anything be done about a president who appears unstable yet still maintains the unilateral power to order the use of nuclear weapons? In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. John Gartner, a former professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump.
I keep hearing that if Trump fires Mueller we’ll face a constitutional crisis. Or if Mueller subpoenas Trump to testify and Trump defies the subpoena, it’s a constitutional crisis. Or if Mueller comes up with substantial evidence that Trump is guilty of colluding with Russia or of obstructing justice but the House doesn’t move to impeach him, we’ll have a constitutional crisis. I have news for you. We’re already in a constitutional crisis. For a year and a half the president of the United States has been carrying out a systemic attack on the institutions of our democracy. A constitutional crisis does not occur suddenly like a coup that causes a system of government to collapse. It occurs gradually, as that system is slowly weakened.
The current crisis has been unfolding since the waning days of the 2016 campaign when Trump refused to say whether he’d be bound by the election results if Hillary won. It continued through March 4, 2017 when Trump claimed, without evidence, that Obama had wiretapped his phones in the Trump Tower during the campaign. It deepened in May 2017 when, by his own admission, Trump was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to fire FBI Director James Comey, who had been leading the bureau’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and then admitted to Russian officials that firing Comey had relieved “great pressure” on him “because of Russia,” according to a document summarizing the meeting.
A constitutional crisis becomes especially dangerous when a president of the United States tells the public it cannot trust the government of the United States. Over the last few weeks, Trump has done just this. First he accuses the FBI of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes.” Then he “demands” that the FBI investigate the spying—resulting in the Justice Department sharing portions of the FBI investigation with Trump’s allies in Congress. Trump blames the entire Mueller investigation on a conspiratorial “deep state” intent on removing him from office. He uses pardons to demonstrate to those already being investigated that they shouldn’t cooperate because he can pardon them, too. He claims he has the absolute right to pardon himself and can thereby immunize himself from any outcome; and asserts he has the power under the Constitution to end the investigation whenever he wants.
The constitutional crisis worsens every time Trump berates judges who disagree with him, attacks intelligence agencies that won’t do his bidding, and calls journalists and news organizations that criticize him “enemies of the people,” and their reporting, “fake news.” It deepens when he avoids news conferences and instead communicates with his followers through tweets and rallies. And when he treats Americans who didn’t vote for him or who disapprove of him as his personal opponents, rather than as citizens to whom he is as constitutionally accountable as to his most loyal supporters. It intensifies when he uses the presidency as a personal fiefdom to enrich himself and his family; unilaterally breaks treaties and starts trade wars with long-standing allies; and expresses admiration for some of the most murderous dictators in the world.
The crux of America’s current constitutional crisis is this: Our system of government was designed to constrain power, but Trump doesn’t want his power to be constrained. Our system was conceived as a means of promoting the public interest, but Trump wants to promote only his own interest. Our system was organized to bind presidents to the Constitution, but Trump doesn’t want to be bound by anything. The crisis will therefore worsen as long as Trump can get away with it. A megalomaniac unconstrained by countervailing power becomes only more maniacal. He will fill whatever political void exists with his unbridled ego. The only legal way to constrain Trump is to vote for a Congress this November that will stand up to him. And then, in November 2020, vote him and his regime out of office. If he refuses to accept the results of that election, as he threatened to do if he lost the 2016 election, he will have to be forcefully removed from office. Friends, we are no longer trying to avert a constitutional crisis. We are living one. The question is how to stop it from destroying what’s left of our democracy.
The most troubling part of that deranged outburst is that Trump is repeating a dangerously anti-American rant that he has embraced for months. By calling CNN and NBC the biggest of America’s enemies he’s proving that he doesn’t understand foreign affairs or the risk scenarios that this country faces. He is completely wrapped up in his ego-bubble that informs him that only criticism of him is an actual threat. That could end up being a tragic mistake for the welfare of the nation. Setting aside how delusional and perilous Trump’s paranoid fantasies are, they are also contradicted by hard data. A new poll by Public Policy Polling shows that the media that Trump detests so much is held in much higher esteem by the American people. The survey asked voters who they trust more, Trump or a variety of news enterprises. Here is a summary of who is more trusted:
CNN: 53% / Trump: 38%
NBC: 53% / Trump: 39%
ABC: 53% / Trump: 39%
CBS: 53% / Trump: 39%
New York Times: 52% / Trump: 38%
Washington Post: 51% / Trump: 38%
Fox News: 32% / Trump: 26%
Media: 48% / Sarah Huckabee Sanders: 35%
The trust of the media is pretty constant no matter the source. It’s a clear majority in the low fifties. The lack of trust for Trump is also consistently dismal in the upper thirties. Even poor Sarah Sanders is regarded as less credible than the media she lies to on a daily basis. The one anomaly in the group is Fox News. That’s likely because the survey respondents couldn’t decide who they trust most or least because they couldn’t tell the two apart. But even Fox News media correspondent Howard Kurtz says Trump’s media bashing has gone too far.
There was plenty of other bad news for Trump in this survey. For instance, Democratic voters are more excited about the upcoming election than Republicans. And voters overall prefer Democrats to the GOP. Trump’s approval still can’t crack forty percent. He’s considered dishonest, a liar, mentally unbalanced, in cahoots with Russia, and that he hasn’t made America great again. The people think Trump should resign if proof emerges that he was working with Russia. They don’t want him to fire special counsel Robert Mueller or pardon himself. A plurality believe he should be impeached. And by wide margins people want a DACA bill passed, but do not want a wall along the Mexican border. His views on gun reforms are rejected by most Americans. And every Democrat posed as a 2020 challenger defeats him.
Other than that it’s clear sailing for Trump. And these results come after two years of endless bashing of Democrats and progressive policies by the President on Twitter and his State TV colleagues on Fox News. No wonder Trump thinks the biggest enemy is the media. Because it’s his enemy. Not because it’s biased against him. But because anything that might reveal more of his deceit and corruption is going to anger him. And that’s the only thing he cares about. And it’s also something that he has no control over, which only exacerbates his rage.
Lies, Lies & More Lies
The way the conservative base has succumbed to tribal indignities, allowing themselves to be swayed by the constant bombardment of Trump/echo lies, distortions, exaggerations & gaslighting, has sacrificed the integrity of the GOP & has become an abomination to the moral character of our nation. Trump keeps gaslighting us since his base somehow believes whatever he says, so the prez does have an audience for his nonsensical drivel, with Trumpeters being mentally preconditioned to not believe Mueller’s findings no matter what the evidence says. With some, the brainwashing is so complete, if the Mueller final report included facts the ceiling is above & the floor below, those loyal Trump fans wouldn’t believe the obvious reality when Trump tells them the exact opposite. Some of what that Trump/echo-crowd are willing to believe has gone so bonkers, it’s beginning to cross over into pure madness.
We should all endeavor to spread truths like presented here in this blog without worrying about the ones stubbornly inconvincible. We only need to convince a portion of the Trump base to doubt Trump when the facts are presented, the ones who’ll believe Mueller when he spells out a compelling case the ceiling really is above & the floor below. If 1/3 or perhaps just 1/4 of those Trump supporters abandon him when the evidence proves criminality, that should be enough erosion of political capital to sway many GOP congresspeople to go along with impeachment. But let’s keep exposing Trumpeters to the facts along the way, so they won’t be totally persuaded by the Trump-echo noise & become more open to accepting the facts whenever Mueller provides his conclusions.
Trumpeters & Fox viewers (mostly one in the same) have displayed an incredible level of naivete, buying into the lies & buzzwords they’ve been force-fed. The term Spygate is just one in a long line of false conspiracies, with old-favorite slogans like deep state & drain the swamp still popular among that crowd. That IG report from yesterday is the latest conspiracy they twist around & lie about. Sure, it’s only natural in any large organization there’ll always be bad actors among them, so with the DOJ/FBI having 100K+ employees there’s certain to be some bad apples, but the DC establishment as a whole is still responsible for upholding the underpinnings of our constitutional democracy. If these civil servants are driven out in masses, the vacuum could likely be filled by power-hungry opportunists subservient to a demagogue leader seeking to usurp unbridled power. Or it could so sabotage & weaken our democratic institutions, we’d become vulnerable to our enemies filling the void. So Trump fans wanting to kill off the deep state better be careful what they wish for. It’s a crying shame as much as it is dangerous the way this deliberate Trumpian strategy is eroding public trust in our nation’s intelligence & law enforcement agencies, strictly for the purpose of protecting a corrupt leader.
As a result, the Republican Party appears united now not by fealty to ideas or policies but to a man, one who defied the odds to win the presidency and who has magnetically drawn the party’s power bases to himself. “It’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it?” Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee told reporters Wednesday morning. “It’s not a good place for any party to end up with a cultlike situation as it relates to a president that happens to be of — purportedly — of the same party.”
A longtime conservative commentator and former Republican politician says he’s voting for Democrats in this year’s midterm elections. Phil Heimlich, the host of conservative talk show “Hard Truths with Phil Heimlich” who served on the Cincinnati City Council from 1993 to 2001 and the Hamilton County Commission from 2003 to 2006, wrote in The Cincinnati Enquirer on Thursday that, despite being a Republican for decades, he’s casting his vote for Democrats in November.
“I’m scared — scared of losing our rights to free speech, fair elections and the rule of law,” Heimlich writes. “You see, we’re witnessing a dangerous trend in which dictators come to power in once-promising democracies and crush dissent.” Heimlich says President Trump lacks respect for democratic values, and pointed out how Trump admires people like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, two leaders who have cracked down on independent media in their respective countries.
Heimlich then lays out his objections to many of the things Trump has said about the press in recent years, such as calling for toughening the libel laws and labeling the media the “enemy of the people.” But his strong criticism isn’t pointed just at Trump. He admonishes GOP lawmakers in Congress, saying they’re not being patriots, but “partisans willing to sell out the country rather than stand up to the Republican base.” “I lived through the Watergate era in the 1970s and know that if cowardly Republicans like [Reps.] Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Paul Ryan controlled Congress then, there would have been no investigation into Richard Nixon’s crimes and no threat of impeachment,” he writes. “That’s why in 2018 I will vote for Democrats in U.S. Senate and House elections.”
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