Trump's Mental Illness Is Dangerous For The Country

(This caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey)

With each passing day, more people become convinced that Donald Trump is not just dim-witted and ignorant of the facts, not just a rampant narcissist, and not just a serial liar -- but that he is seriously mentally ill, and poses a significant danger to this country (and the world). His delusional behavior could wreck the economy and/or start a war.

Republican political operative and MSNBC host, Nicolle Wallace says she is hearing from sources inside the White House about Trump “is that he increasingly projects a delusional version of himself to himself and his Twitter followers. This is someone staring in the mirror of his own most rabid fans, and feeding them only what he thinks they will believe without acknowledging that it’s moving further and further away from reality.” 

And Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes says:

Going forward, I would not be surprised by anything.

If he would try to dissolve Constitution, that wouldn’t surprise me, fire the Supreme Court, wage nuclear war North Korea. These things might seem shocking, but they’re consistent, he has always been consistent in this. Once you understand he is about him, and it’s a very deeply disturbed issue. He has to protect himself from what he sees as an existential threat by denying the reality. Once you understand that, everything else follows, and it’s extremely dangerous.

When he goes back and denies reality, people have trouble understanding that . . . The simple explanation for it which people don’t want to hear, he is not in control of himself. This is what we say when somebody is becoming psychotic or briefly psychotic. So all of his delusional ideas come up when he is stressed in some way and then he loses track of reality because it doesn’t fit what he needs to believe.

An extremely dangerous thing for anybody, especially somebody who has been so wantonly unconcerned about the welfare of others and willing to do anything to promote himself . . . He is an enormous present danger to us from the standpoint of creating a nuclear war and even from the standpoint of doing what he can to destroy democracy as well as attacking ethnic groups the way he has done . . . this is a very sick man, he is truly very sick.

And then there is this from Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine:

At its center is mental illness. It radiates out of the center like a toxin in the blood. And this, again, is nothing new. On Trump’s first day in office, with respect to the size of his inauguration crowd, he insisted that what was demonstrably, visibly, incontrovertibly false was actually true. At that moment, we learned that all the lies and exaggerations and provocations of the previous year were not just campaign tools, designed to con and distract, but actually constitutive of his core mental health. He was not lying, as lying is usually understood. He was expressing what he believed to be true, because his ego demanded it be true. And for Trump, as we now know, there is no reality outside his own perfervidly narcissistic consciousness. . . .

This is a man who inhabits his own world — and it is not the one you or I or anybody else inhabits. And he does not do so passively. His delusions are so fixed and profound that he constantly lashes out at anyone, from a grieving Gold Star widow to random black NFL players to the prime minister of Great Britain, when they dare to inhabit the actual world and proffer a different point of view. He is a man who believes that the random, context-free videos he retweeted from a neo-fascist hate group really do show the fundamental nature of Islam, i.e. that Muslims beat up people on crutches, routinely smash Christian statues, and throw people off roofs. This is what he feels, and therefore it is what he believes, and nothing can convince him otherwise. . . .

And now, we have the necessity for this madman to have a “victory” in the Congress. This matters much, much more than the content of such a victory. All Trump cares about is the “win” — and he will describe its content as what he wants it to be, not what it is, and most of his supporters will believe him. And so, at a time of deeply destabilizing social inequality, this law will actively shovel billions more to the super-rich, add more than a trillion to an already unprecedented peacetime debt, eviscerate affordable health care for millions, increase taxes on many middle-class blue-state residents, and eventually require massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare as we inevitably face a future fiscal collapse. But again, Trump’s delusional vanity simply wishes all these consequences away. They will not happen. Believe him. And not only are his absurdly rosy predictions true, they are actually going to be surpassed. As he said last Wednesday night: “They’re going to say Trump is the opposite of an exaggerator.”. . .

The only form of reality that will hit sooner is, of course, whatever Mueller discovers. But Trump has already declared this a media and Democratic hoax, and his own reality must mean that Mueller is fired, that the entire justice system be derided and discredited as a corrupt form of elitist convenience, and the super-storm of this week will become a hurricane, made all the deadlier by the ever-warmer waters of the tribalism and polarization Trump daily seeks to intensify. I have no idea what follows; but this liberal democracy is in a death rattle. And so is the international order it once sustained.