It’s way past time to talk seriously about Trump Derangement Syndrome — his, not his critics’.
For years it’s been clear to mental health experts as well as the armchair variety, to Republicans as well as Democrats, that Donald Trump is not well in the head. Yet his behavior — the pathological lying, childish name-calling, grandiosity and narcissistic obsession with crowd sizes, open bigotry, erraticism, desire to be liked (loved!) by murderous dictators — long ago became normalized.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Trump’s fire hose of cray-cray has inured Americans to his outrages. He unabashedly owns the offenses, then repeats them. And enough of our fellow citizens like that about him, and dislike his opponents, that they elected him president and may do so again.
“God help us,” in the words of retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff.
But now that President Biden, a normal and empathetic man, has been pushed out of the 2024 race over concerns about his age and mental acuity, Trump’s more manifest unfitness for office should be ignored no longer — by the media, former advisors and military leaders who remain silent and, yes, Republicans.
Trouble is, Americans can talk about Trump’s madness, but what’s to be done? Republican “leaders,” who privately concede the truth about their nominee, won’t push him out. They’ve enabled him this long, through repeated down-ballot losses, impeachments, incitements and indictments. And unlike Biden, Trump won’t go voluntarily: He lost an election but was so determined to keep power that he provoked an insurrection.
Forget Republicans’ and Trump’s resistance: A serious discussion and debate about Trump’s state of mind wouldn’t be pointless. It might tip the scales for the few undecided voters in the half-dozen swing states who will decide the election. Do they really want him to control the nuclear codes?
Since 2015, when he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy with the sort of megalomaniacal monologue to which we’ve become desensitized, mental health professionals have shied from publicly addressing Trump’s psyche, cowed by the half-century-old “Goldwater rule” of the American Psychiatric Assn. The rule holds that it is unethical to give a professional opinion about a public figure’s mental health without examining the person and receiving their permission.
During Trump’s presidency, however, several dozen professionals invoked a civic “duty to warn”; they wrote and later expanded a bestseller assessing Trump’s psychological maladies. (Among the purchasers of the first edition: Kelly, to better understand his White House boss.) Meanwhile, privately, other professionals aren’t shy on the topic: Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wrote in her just-released book that psychiatrists flocked to her at a memorial service for one of their colleagues to vent about Trump’s behavior.
And Trump calls her “Crazy Nancy”? Projection.
He seems plainly triggered since Biden’s withdrawal from the race, a race Trump had seemed to be winning, by the ascendance of the Harris-Walz ticket and the large crowds, donations and polling gains the Democrats are getting. He tried to steal back the attention with a news conference on Thursday, a MAGA rally in Montana on Friday and assorted public statements — only to raise more questions about his well-being.
“Umm, @GOP, is @realDonaldTrump ok?” former Republican Party chairman turned apostate Michael Steele posted after one Trump rant on social media. Trump had dubbed Vice President Kamala Harris “Kamabla,” said that she and other Democrats had staged “a COUP” against Biden and suggested Biden would “CRASH” Democrats’ convention next week to seize the nomination. That’s playground babble.
At the Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump claimed his crowds are not only bigger than Harris’ but also that his Jan. 6 audience near the National Mall exceeded the estimated 250,000 who heard the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington in 1963. It didn’t; Trump’s was estimated at 53,000. But who boasts about a crowd that went on to attack the Capitol?
So much of what he told reporters was a lie or the tall tales of an old man —162 misstatements in 64 minutes, by NPR’s count. All it took were calls to Willie Brown, the former San Francisco mayor and California Assembly speaker, and to Nate Holden, former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, for reporters to debunk Trump’s claim he’d once nearly crashed in a helicopter with Brown. His point was that Brown, who once dated Harris, badmouthed her, on a trip the two men never took together.
Trump also denied that he falsely said what millions of Americans have heard or can easily find on YouTube: that Harris identified as Indian American until she decided to “turn Black.” “I didn’t say it,” he lied, adding for mean measure that she’s been “very disrespectful” to both racial groups.
Since the assassination attempt against him, Trump repeatedly has mocked talk that his brush with death might transform him. “I’m not nicer,” he told donors at one event.
Truth, finally.
He told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that Harris “destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed the state of California, along with Gov. Gavin New-scum.” In Montana, he falsely claimed Harris won’t debate him, “because she’s dumb.” On the weekend, video emerged on social media of Trump, with teenage son Barron beside him in a golf cart, calling Harris a “f–ing bitch.”
A rich donor at a recent dinner asked Trump to describe a positive vision for the country. The New York Times reported that the question “appeared to be a request for reassurance.” But Trump stayed negative, further assailing Harris before adding, “I am who I am.”
Whatever that is, Trump is not fit to be president. Put him on the couch, not behind the Resolute Desk.