"Your Noble Son Is Mad"

A little over 13 months ago (September 3, 2016 to be precise), I posted an essay entitled "Sundowning?"which speculated about whether or not the then-candidate Donald Trump was showing signs of presenile dementia - of "sundowning" (a term used to refer to behavioral changes that often occur in the late afternoon or evening in people with Alzheimer's disease and similar conditions). The piece was quickly picked up by the online Daily Kos and republished under the title "Is Donald Trump Suffering From the Sundown Syndrome?" Because the Daily Kos has a far, far larger readership than The K.F. Stone Weekly, it attracted something like twenty times the number of comments I might normally expect; many of these comments were positive; quite a few were negative. The main objection readers seemed to have about the essay was not that I was speculating on whether Mr. Trump was evincing signs of clinical madness, but rather that I - a non-psychiatrist/psychotherapist/clinical psychologist - should be so bold as to diagnose a person I had neither met nor spoken with. Among analysts, I was repeatedly told, this is a deeply unethical no-no.

(n.b. More than a half-century ago, an informal ban, known as “the Goldwater Rule," was put into effect. This "rule" is the legacy of an embarrassing episode from 1964. That year, Fact magazine published a petition signed by more than a thousand psychiatrists, which declared that Barry Goldwater, who was then the Republican Presidential nominee, was “psychologically unfit to be President.” Goldwater lost the election (by a far, far greater margin than Hillary Clinton), but he won a libel suit against the magazine. The bad publicity seriously tarnished the reputation of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and armchair speculators like yours truly. And up until the rise of Donald Trump, the "rule" was pretty much observed.)

And while I am neither so egotistical nor deluded to think that my essay Sundowning? was in any way a factor for serious inquiry into '45's mental state, it was one of the earliest. Over the succeeding 13 months long-distance psychological analysis of the POTUS has become a burgeoning cottage industry. Back in February of this year Psychology Today published a piece entitled The Elephant in the Room: It's Time We Talked Openly About Donald Trump's Mental Health. This in-depth article, coauthored by Rosemary K.M. Sword and Phillip Zimbardo, discussed in great detail the need to toss aside the "Goldwater rule" and seriously investigate the mental state of the then-newly inaugurated president. Their essay - which quickly went viral - stimulated a chillingly robust discussion within the mental health community. It also led to the creation of an organization called Duty to Warn, a nationwide group made up of mental health professionals. One of the first things the group did was to publish a petition which read, in part:

“We, the undersigned mental health professionals, believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Within six months, the petition was signed by more than 60,000 mental health professionals.

Just the other day, Bandy Lee, (M.D., M.Div, Assistant Clinical Professor in Law and Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine) published an epochal work, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Putting the Goldwater rule on the top shelf of a closet marked "ethics" for the nonce, the 27 writers (including Gail Sheehy and Tony Schwartz, Trump's The Art of the Deal ghostwriter), and doctors (including possibly the two greatest living American thinkers in the field of mental health Robert J. Lefton, and Judith Lewis Herman, as well as, among others, Luba Kessler and Henry J. Friedman) reached some truly troubling - though easily observable conclusions. The various physicians, analysts and writers find '45 to be an “extreme present hedonist.” He may also be a sociopath, a malignant narcissist, borderline, on the bipolar spectrum, a hypomanic, suffering from delusional disorder, or cognitively impaired. It should be noted that '45 is not the first POTUS to suffer from one or more of these mental issues. As The New Yorker's Masha Gessen has noted: "Lyndon Johnson was bipolar, and John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton might have been characterized as “extreme present hedonists,” narcissists, and hypomanics. Richard Nixon was, in addition to his narcissism, a sociopath who suffered from delusions, and Ronald Reagan’s noticeable cognitive decline began no later than his second term." But the saving grace for all these flawed presidents - even Richard Nixon - was that they surrounded themselves with seasoned professionals - men and women who were experts in their various fields - and were, more often than not, willing to listen and incorporate both the advice and analyses they were given. Not so '45, who appears to listen only to himself. Needless to say, this puts America - indeed the entire globe - in a potential state of peril. For a "leader" to be as unstable, bullying, insecure and narcissistic as '45 is, he could, like a petulant child, wage nuclear war just to get back at people who don't like him. The world simply cannot afford to have a POTUS who is still - at age 71 - going through the so-called "Terrible Twos."

It should be noted that 45's father, Fred Trump, spent at least the last decade of his life in the throes of Alzheimer's Disease. At the time of his death at age 93, he had great difficulty recognizing people. In an interview some years ago, Fred Trump's son, the future POTUS, said he wasn't at all scared that the disease might be the last thing he inherited from his father. "Do I accept it? Yeah," he told the reporter who asked the question. "Look, I'm very much a fatalist." Although Alzheimer's Disease and many other forms of pre-senile dementia are not usually hereditary, the mental well being of the President of the United States is of great concern; especially this president, who has become a poster-child for a whole host of bizarre behaviors. In his own way, '45 is reminiscent of Hamlet.

One might recall that in Hamlet, the most brilliant play in the English language, Polonius, father of Laertes and Ophelia, and the gasbag Lord Chamberlain of Hamlet's uncle, King Claudius' court. In act II, Scene 2, the pompous, conniving old fool (Polonius) informs his boss that the noble Hamlet is crazy:

Since brevity is the soul of wit

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

Mad call I it, for, to define true madness,

What is ’t but to be nothing else but mad?

But let that go.

Translated into a more modern rendering, Polonius says:

Since the essence of wisdom is not talking too much,

I’ll get right to the point here.

Your son is crazy.

“Crazy” I’m calling it, since how can you say

What craziness is except to say that it’s craziness?

But that’s another story.

Unlike Polonius, Dr. Lee and her colleagues are neither gasbags nor conniving fools. And unlike the question of Hamlet's sanity, 45's madness is not "another story." It is absolutely central to the health and safety of a nation . . . if not of an entire planet.

261 days down, 1,093 to go.