The Madness of King Don

Matt Taibbi has another great article in Rolling Stone which covers the (un)likelihood of America getting rid of Donald Trump before the 2020 presidential election, and the painful truth that we have the president we deserve. Perhaps the bottom line is:

As the "world's greatest person" at restricting immigration, who is "good at war" and "knows more about ISIS than the generals," and who is the "least racist person" with "the best temperament" who knows "more about renewables than any human being on Earth," insists "nobody reads the Bible more than me," and even knows more about New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker "than [Booker] knows himself," Trump by his own description is not a splenetic rightwing basket case at all, but just a cleverly disguised cross of God, Norman Schwarzkopf, Coretta Scott King, Gloria Steinem, Pope Francis and, apparently, Cory Booker's mother, Carolyn.

[...]

"As someone who's studied Trump, as someone who's met Trump, who's interacted with him socially, I can say with absolute confidence that he suffers from severe personality disorders, perhaps a cluster of disorders," says Ben Michaelis, a New York-based psychologist who has run into Trump over the years. "But to get a sense of outright psychotic behavior ... There's some possibility, but you really need to examine him in a clinical setting."

[...]

The president's ludicrous grandiosity was a running joke throughout the campaign season, but having a personality disorder is not a disqualifying feature in a president. Even his most vocal critics in the mental-health community concede that being a narcissist, even a very sick one, does not make him unfit for office.

  Rolling Stone

On the other hand...

John Gartner, a psychologist who trained residents at Johns Hopkins, has found a way around [the major problems in applying the unfit test]. The Goldwater Rule [the American Psych Assn dictum to avoid diagnosing public figures from afar] he just ignores, because, he argues, the graveness of the Trump threat renders it quaint. Lots of his colleagues seem to agree, as Gartner has managed to gather more than 62,000 signatures from self-described mental-health professionals attesting that Trump "manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of president of the United States."

Gartner's argument is relatively simple. Add paranoia, sadism and antisocial behavior to narcissistic personality disorder and you have a new diagnosis: "malignant narcissism."

A term that media and politicos are beginning to use more and more.

Treat yourself to the whole thing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.