The Madness of the
Anti-Trump Shrinks
Posted: 09 Jan 2018 03:52 PM PST
In October, 125 psychologists and assorted mental health
professionals marched to New York’s City Hall while wearing red tags warning,
“DANGER.” Leading the march was Peter Fraenkel, author of Sync Your
Relationship, Save Your Marriage, mournfully beating a drum in a solemn
march. Fraenkel, a psychologist and “professional drummer” was able to
combine his love of drums and hatred of Trump.
The ‘Duty to
Warn’ march had begun at New York Law School where the experts demanded that
Trump be removed from office based on their inability to understand the 25th
Amendment. And then the mental health experts marched to the beat of
Fraenkel’s drum in what they insisted was a “funereal and dignified”
procession.
"Please wear professional attire or dark clothing," the mental
health experts were instructed. "There will be a slow drum beat,
‘DANGER’ tape, and flashing warning lights.”
The paperwork urged, “Bring a drum if you have one” and, “come as your
solemn, concerned self.”
If only the organizers had put a fraction of their obsessive delusions into
actually trying to justify the claim on their shiny blue banner that, “Trump
is psychologically unfit to lead this country.”
There were no drums when Bandy X. Lee, the organizer of Yale’s ‘Duty to Warn’
conference showed up on Capitol Hill to “brief” Dem politicians about Trump’s
mental illness that she diagnosed over Twitter. Lee, a self-proclaimed expert
on the prison system, apparently isn’t even currently licensed to practice.
But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been "licensed on
two continents," has "excellent credentials," a "flawless
ethics history" and speaks "four languages.” On Vox, Lee claimed
that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem was a “pathological” example of him
“resorting to violence”. Then she blamed him for “an increase in schoolyard bullying.”
Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump “could be the end of humankind.”
All this craziness didn’t stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from
inviting her for briefings.
Around the same time that Fraenkel was beating his drum in Manhattan, The
Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was released by Macmillan. The book contained
unsolicited accusations and diagnoses from “27 psychiatrists and mental
health experts”. It was edited by Bandy X. Lee.
Contributors included Tony Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter who had
worked on the Art of the Deal with Trump. His mental health qualifications
are unclear. Also included is Gail Sheehy, a former New York Magazine writer,
who had written a Hillary biography. The epilogue features Noam Chomsky, whom
Lee describes as a “linguist and philosopher-historian”. Not to mention
leftist genocide denier.
What makes Tony, Gail and Noam, mental health experts? In a movement that
diagnoses the President of the United States over Twitter and then insists he
be removed from office, that doesn’t really matter. And it’s why none of the
media accounts have even bothered to note that some of Lee’s mental health
experts are actually members of the media with no apparent mental health
credentials.
In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz diagnoses Trump with a
risky “sense of self-worth”. Gail Sheehy accuses him of “narcissism and
paranoia” and a “trust deficit.”
In a book already dedicated to violating the professional ethics of the
Goldwater Rule, Lee manages to include amateur armchair diagnoses by writers
who are even more unqualified than her to make them.
But it’s not as if the professionals are any better.
Bandy X. Lee boasted, “In the book we have as authors Phil Zimbardo, Judith
Herman, and Robert Jay Lifton, who are notable not only for their
contributions to mental health but for their amazing ethical record. These
are living legends who have also stood on the right side of history.”
Lifton is a “leading psychohistorian” who accuses President Trump of
"malignant normality" and urges other "psychological
professionals" to confront "the malignant normality of Trump and
his administration." He appears to define “malignant normality” as
behavior he disapproves of for political reasons, but that isn’t actually a
form of mental illness. That undermines the whole theme of the book.
And it’s in the book’s foreword.
Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword accuse Trump of being a “present
hedonist.” And this is “based on Zimbardo’s time perspective theory.”
Zimbardo is both the inventor of the theory and the guy writing about it.
Rosemary doesn’t seem to have a degree, but as “part of her Hawaiian
heritage, she was trained in the Hawaiian psychology based on forgiveness
known as ho’oponopono.”
Ho’oponopono was derived from appeasing the Hawaiian gods. The Hawaiian gods
must hate Trump.
Zimbardo and Sword claim “that Trump qualifies as among the most extreme
present hedonists we have ever witnessed comes from the plethora of written
and recorded material on him, including all his interviews, hundreds of hours
of video, and his own tweets.”
So there’s a practitioner of the Hawaiian art of ho’oponopono diagnosing
Trump over Twitter. And her colleague, a living legend, is accusing him of a
condition that appears to emerge from his own theory.
Everyone in the book agrees that Trump is bad. They just can’t agree on a
diagnosis.
Michael Tansey claims it’s a delusional disorder. Laurence Dodes blames
sociopathy. Craig Malkin argues it’s narcissism. David Reiss pushes for
dementia and cognitive impairment. Steve Wruble claims he has daddy issues.
That is, he claims that both he and Trump have daddy issues.
Thomas Singer believes Trump mirrors “our collective attention deficit
disorder, our sociopathy” and we must “recognize our own pathology.” Not only
is Trump crazy, but we’re crazy for electing him.
Everyone except Singer is probably nuts.
“Donald Trump is so visibly psychologically impaired that it is obvious even
to a layman that “something is wrong with him,” John D. Gartner insists. But
nobody can diagnose him because “Trump’s is a genuinely complex case.” Even
though “many writers have tried to analyze and diagnose Trump, and have
gotten pieces of the elephant right. What is missing is the whole elephant.”
What’s the whole pink elephant? According to Gartner, possibly, malignant
narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, the bipolar spectrum, hypomania
and also maybe, pure evil.
What are his medical sources for these claims?
"Insight into this question comes from, of all sources, Joe Scarborough,
host of the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe," he writes. Then he
mentions, "David Brooks is not a mental health professional, but he
astutely commented on what appeared to him to be Trump’s increasing
hypomania."
Ho’oponopono looks a whole lot better than a shrink who watches MSNBC and
reads the New York Times and then tries to diagnose a man he never met based
on media rants. And that is what all these diagnoses are reducible to. They
originate from the media and then the media reports on them.
Do we even need psychiatrists to diagnose Trump over Twitter and television?
“We don’t have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not
consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had
vastly more exposure to Donald Trump’s observable behavior, his writing and
speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years,”
Gail Sheehy insists.
That’s quite a turnabout in what was supposed to be a book by psychiatrists
and mental health experts proving their case. Instead Sheehy, who isn’t a
psychiatrist, insists that we don’t actually need psychiatrists because we’ve
seen Trump on television.
But does that mean Sheehy’s readers can start remotely diagnosing her?
James Gilligan insists, “If psychiatrists with decades of experience doing
research on violent offenders do not confirm the validity of the conclusion
that many nonpsychiatrists have reached, that Trump is extremely
dangerous—indeed, by far the most dangerous of any president in our
lifetimes—then we are not behaving with appropriate professional restraint
and discipline. Rather, we are being either incompetent or irresponsible.”
And so psychiatrists must back up lefty biases against Trump.
It’s not medical science, but leftist politics, that’s calling the shots
here.
Many of the essays don’t even attempt to diagnose Trump. Instead they
self-diagnose the political trauma that Trump inflicted on them. Jennifer
Contarino Panning even invents a “Trump Anxiety Disorder.” The strangest
essay belongs to Steve Wruble who attacks his Orthodox Jewish father for
supporting Trump in an essay, titled appropriately enough, “Daddy Issues.”
He moans that
when he told his father that “Trump was unconsciously sabotaging his chances
of winning the election” his father dismissively replied that a Hillary win
would be bad for Israel.
"Despite giving my father what I felt was my intellectual gold, he only
commented on what was important to him," Wruble whines. "Donald and
I are expert at putting our fathers on pedestals while at the same time
trying to knock them off in order to make room for us to have our time being
seen as special."
Steve Wruble’s essay is in its own way the most honest of the bunch. Because
it’s not really about Trump. It’s what Wruble and the other mental health
professionals and amateurs project onto Trump.
Wruble blames Trump for the conflicts with his father. And identifies with
him. These aren’t essays, they’re Rorschach inkblots. The ‘Duty to Warn’
movement tells us nothing about Trump and everything about the sort of people
who take to the streets beating a drum against him.
Trump isn’t crazy. But his accusers often don’t seem too sane.
Noam Chomsky concludes the book by suggesting that Trump would perpetrate
“some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act.” The epilogue of a book
accusing Trump of mental illness ends with a crazy conspiracy theory by one
of the accusers.
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