There is no question that serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) rants at his rallies and on his social media account are becoming more frequent and vicious. It seems like he never stops attacking his opponents and some of his harshest vitriol is aimed at the law clerk assisting Judge Engoron in the New York City fraud trial. Why he picks on the hapless clerk is hard to understand. The latest one was unleashed at 2:00am on Thanksgiving morning, a time when most people are asleep.
“Happy Thanksgiving to ALL, including the Racist & Incompetent Attorney General of New York State,” Trump wrote Thursday morning at 2:03 AM. He also extended his holiday greetings to “the Radical Left Trump Hating Judge, a ‘Psycho,’ Arthur Engoron, who Criminally Defrauded the State of New York, & ME, by purposely Valuing my Assets at a “tiny” Fraction of what they are really worth.” Trump also once again mentioned Engoron law clerk Allison Greenfield by name, describing her as “Politically Biased & Corrupt.”
The 45th president of the United States also attacked President Joe Biden in his early morning rant, saying he “WEAPONIZED his Department of Injustice against his Political Opponent, & allowed our Country to go to HELL.” He concluded the post mentioning “all of the other Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.”
We have become so used to these outbursts that we tend to say, “There he goes again” and just move on, treating them as if they are part of a deliberate strategy by him to appeal to his base and keep him in the media eye. But Brian Klaas argues that this is a mistake and that the media is not paying anywhere near enough attention to the fact that SSAT is clearly losing his mind.
There are now two leading candidates for the American presidency.
One of them is a 77 year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power.
The other is 80 years old with mainstream Democratic party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips. (There may be other reasons to criticize Joe Biden, but the main one discussed in the press is his age).
One of those two candidates faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit “takes” arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).
…On the political left, there has long been a steady drumbeat of admonishment on social media for those who highlight Trump’s awful rhetoric. Whenever I tweet about Trump’s dangerous language, there’s always the predictable refrain from someone who replies: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
The press, to an astonishing extent, has followed that admonishment. I looked at the New York Times for mention of Trump calling to execute shoplifters, or water the forests, or how he thinks an 82 year-old man getting his skull smashed in his own home by a lunatic with a hammer is hilarious. Nothing. I couldn’t find it.
…There’s a puzzle at the heart of Trump news and it’s this: why doesn’t the press go FULL BLOCK CAPITALS when a leading presidential candidate, yet again, incites violence?
If Joe Biden called to execute shoplifters, do you think there’d be a big headline in the New York Times, or do you think you’d have to scroll well past the articles on pumpkin spice lattes and DogTV to find out about it?
…Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.
Klaas is not alone in thinking that SSAT has crossed over into insanity. This article quotes a whole lot of psychologists who say that SSAT shows all the signs of paranoid behavior that would with anyone else have resulted in calls for him to be treated.
“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”
In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”
…Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:
His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.
At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,
the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under, and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.
Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:
If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.
Basically they are saying out loud and in clinical language what the rest of us have been hesitant to say. SSAT is nuts.
Regarding the reporting: I think it all comes down to basic capitalism and how the news divisions of major networks/papers are seen as “profit streams”. First, they want to appear balanced so that they can achieve the highest readership. Thus, they do not want to say anything that could be seen to be one-sided or inflammatory, even if it’s true (this is particularly true when the group who might be offended is “all about grievance”). Second, if you can say something negative, (especially about someone/some group that won’t fight back for fear of themselves being seen as belligerent) that helps boost the bottom line. In a recent column, Paul Krugman noted this asymmetry, saying that you won’t see headlines like “Unemployment at 50 Year Low”, and instead you’ll see “In Spite of Low Unemployment, Biden Struggles with High Interest Rates”.
As far as “clinical diagnoses” are concerned, even though there’s a lot of material out there from TFG, it was always my impression that a proper analysis needs to be done in person, not relying on just public statements and the like. Has everyone forgotten how GOP Senator Bill Frist was (rightly) attacked for his “diagnosis” in the Terry Schiavo case?
I think the real problem here is that the sort of things being said appear to be perfectly fine with a sizable portion of the populace.
Crazy or not, this is a clear violation of the gag order, which specifies no targeting of court staff. It’s time (well past, really,) for a sleepover for Donnie at a detention facility.
clinical language what the rest of us have been hesitant to say
There have been plenty of people who have not hesitated to say “guy’s got problems” -- “Big Psych” officially refuses to diagnose non-patients, but at a certain point, someone who is shouting at telephone poles is probably suffering from something. As Dylan said “you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing.”
As someone who has a lot of experience with alzheimers and dementia suffering relatives, I don’t have to lean on my undergraduate psych degree to tell the big guy is declining. It’s pretty obvious to us when grandpa starts getting out of touch, and it’s only non-obvious when it’s the president of the USA because his enablers are trying to conceal it a bit.
Tangentially, Big Psych does have a problem because a lot of self and third party reported mental states are hard to diagnose because the patient may mis-report. Then, the media does have a problem saying “the president has dementia” because no matter how well-evidenced, it’s still a hypothesis. Some diagnoses like dementia can be tested, with cognitive tests, but others like “malignant narcissist” amount to matching a laundry list of symptoms -- there is no test for a physical manifestation of a disorder. Big Psych really does not know if malignant narcissism is a result of a collection of behaviors, or something in the brain or neurochemistry. In other words a skeptic could argue that we don’t really know what some of these disorders are. In my opinion diagnosis by laundry list is dangerous because we don’t really know what it is.
That all obscures things. For example it is a fact that Trump bragged about his performance on a popular diagnostic test for memory/cognitive decline. The media just shrugged past that but they should have done more research and follow up. Why was the president taking metrics to measure cognitive decline? Maybe that should be normal diagnostics for a president over 60, but currently it’s not. We saw with Reagan that the national security establishment will conceal a president’s cognitive decline, but that’s really a) wrong b) dangeous c) defrauding the electorate. Voters are voting for a president who is able to do the job, and if the president is taking tests to see if they can still do the job, that is a matter of public interest and because of the president’s national role, I would argue their privacy rights are open to challenge. Of course Trump will write his own diagnosis for a doctor to sign, bigly, bestly, fraudulently.
Reagan was in bad shape at the end of his presidency. Why didn’t he resign? Was that fraudulently clinging to power? (I say yes)
As far as “clinical diagnoses” are concerned, even though there’s a lot of material out there from TFG, it was always my impression that a proper analysis needs to be done in person, not relying on just public statements and the like.
This only applies to analysis of a patient for the purpose of devising treatment for the patient’s own benefit. It does not, and should not, apply to assessing a person’s mental state for the purpose of protecting ourselves or others from that person’s sickness. This is not psychiatric treatment, this is threat assessment; and we are required to do it for our own protection, whether or not the patient chooses to cooperate. Psychiatrists’ expertise is helpful, of course, but the rules of psychiatric ethics and practice don’t apply here.
Has everyone forgotten how GOP Senator Bill Frist was (rightly) attacked for his “diagnosis” in the Terry Schiavo case?
Frist — and the entire “pro-life” loony right — were pretending to “diagnose” Terri Schaivo for her own benefit (she was no threat to anyone else), not to mention flat-out lying through their teeth the whole time. This is why they were in the wrong.
Reagan was in bad shape at the end of his presidency. Why didn’t he resign? Was that fraudulently clinging to power? (I say yes)
Just to be precise, Reagan himself was almost surely too far gone to do anything either knowingly or fraudulently. His core supporters and Cabinet were the ones committing fraud. They could easily have agreed to ask the Congress to declare Reagan incapacitated.
jimf @ # 1: … a proper analysis needs to be done in person, not relying on just public statements and the like.
True, but a trained eye can see more than the rest of us by watching hours (and hours and hours!) of video, especially of one-on-one interviews.
Just seconding what Raging Bee said @4.
mikey @2, no, it’s not, because the gag order was lifted:
https://apnews.com/article/trump-letitia-james-fraud-trial-gag-order-c25e51a094dbcdeffbf67589b1c07f37
I agree with @4, Raging Bee: Terri Schiavo was lying in a bed in a medical facility and Frist never actually saw her--in person or on tape. She didn’t speak, she didn’t write, she couldn’t communicate in any way. As we know now after her autopsy, years in a vegetative state had turned her brain into a shrunken mush, her skull infiltrated by cerebro-spinal fluid. She had died the night she collapsed on the bathroom floor of her home, but her body didn’t realize it. How ironic that it was the “party of small gov’t” who wouldn’t allow her husband to let her go with whatever dignity she had left.
As for Trump, we have close to 40 years of him on film and news tape, plus his own words on his own social media platform and in rallies and interviews--the man simply can’t shut up, leaving little doubt about what’s obsessing him. Even discounting the fact that nobody can officially diagnose him from a distance just by being aware of what he does and says, as Marcus Ranum points out, anyone who’s dealt with a loved one with dementia knows the signs, and indeed, film from 40 years ago shows him more focused and more able to form complete and sensible sentences.
Yeah, that was a major travesty for the misnamed pro-lifers.
Half her brain was dead and gone.
They knew this long before she died.
For years afterwards, trolls would show up and claim that Terry Shiavo was murdered.
Each case of dementia is somewhat different.
What I’ve noticed is that whatever the core personality is or was, it seems to get amplified as the disease progresses.
People who are calm and steady, tend to stay that way and just get more and more confused.
People with hostile, aggressive, and/or paranoid personalities tend to get more hostile, more aggressive, and more paranoid.
It is like they have a braking system that keeps their behavior and thoughts in check, and it wears out with age.
If Trump is suffering from progressive dementia, in another year or so, he is going to be like he is now…except a lot worse.
Trump, 40 years ago, was not under threat of 91 indictments and a quarter billion dollar civil suit. The pressure on him now is so much greater that such comparisons are moot. While some decline is obvious, it is not obvious that his behaviour indicates dementia rather than panic. He is not flailing about randomly in all directions, his rantings are well targeted. Most are directed at the civil triers, the most immediate threat, and none at all toward judge Aileen Cannon. I think he knows what he is doing.
it is not obvious that his behaviour indicates dementia rather than panic
Panic does not make you slur your words or walk with the specific characteristics of hippocampus damage.
Trump is not restricted to only having one disorder at a time. He has severe behavioral problems, AND cognitive decline, AND he’s facing prison and bankruptcy, AND he’s an asshole.
PS-nor does panic make your doctors give you tests measuring cognitive decline 4 years ago.
She’s a woman who is not praising and deferring to him.