I am sick and tired, literally and figuratively, of journalists who I respect and admire expressing puzzlement and incredulity over Trump’s erratic and bizarre behavior as if he is some sort of mystery They try to figure him out as if he is an alien from another galaxy. He is a human being and the tenets of abnormal psychology apply to him as much as they do to anybody else.
I have been a fan of Rachel Maddow for years. However there is one thing about her that drives me around the bend.
Some journalists “got it” a long time ago. Salon is to be credited with having more than its share of them: Chauncey DeVega was the first to publish interviews with mental health professionals followed by Igor Dersch. Heather “Digby” Parton, Amanda Marcotte, and other Salon writers also “got it” that in order to understand Trump you have to have a grasp of abnormal psychology.
On MSNBC Lawrence O’Donnell “got it” very early as did Joe and Mika and somewhat later Joy Reid.
Republicans George Conway III, Rick Wilson, and Steve Schmidt all get it.
There are many more journalists who are evaluating Trump as he always should have been viewed all along: as a human being who happens to be stricken with a rare and dangerous combination of mental disorders. (I use the word stricken because suffering doesn’t apply to him. He doesn’t suffer. He makes other’s suffer.)
Trump manifests obvious symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and what used to be called sociopathy (but now is labeled antisocial personality) but he also demonstrates characteristics of other serious psychiatric disorders including paranoid beliefs, pathological lying, and megalomania.
Trump, as I wrote not long ago, is the poster child for the DARK TRIAD. (IMAGE RIGHT)
The most annoyingly obtuse journalist to me when it comes to not addressing Trump’s psychopathology as a major, if not the major force which explains his abnormal behavior is Rachel Maddow. She still seems to be scratching her head and wondering why Trump acts the way he does. Rachel always has legal experts on her show as she admits she knows little about the law. However, I do not think she has ever had a mental health expert on. (Let me know if you can find an example of when she has.)
Deja Vu
All this seemed familiar to me. It should have. I wrote about the same thing on August 27, 2019:
This is what I wrote last summer:
Last night I watched Rachel Maddow and once again she avoided getting into any depth about Trump’s psychopathology. She expressed puzzlement about why his behavior is so erratic yet she won’t have any experts on to enlighten her the way she does when there are legal issues to discuss.
On the other hand her colleague, who is on in the next hour on MSNBC, was the first host on the network to have mental health professionals on his show. He had Dr. John Gartner, founder of the Duty to Warn group (full disclosure, I was an early member) and Dr. Lance Dodes on the show. He had Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” on his show. Dodes was interviewed by O’Donnell again last week. To her credit Joy Reid also had Dodes on over the weekend.
Online Salon’s Chauncey DeVega covers Trump’s psychopathology in depth interviewing the best known mental health professionals speaking out about Trump including most recently psychoanalyst Justin Frank.
The unfiltered blunt Rick Wilson doesn’t use psychiatric terms in today’s NY Daily News article “The great crackup: Trump is coming even more undone” but he does end with this:
….Trump’s performance left people both inside and out of the political class wondering about the president’s sanity and fitness for office.
Most states have some form of involuntary commitment law for people who are a danger to themselves and others. In my home state of Florida, it’s called the Baker Act, and I’ve seen it applied to run of the mill folks up to state legislators. It only takes a competent family member and one other adult to get the ball rolling on Baker Acting someone. So I’m thinking about Trump’s next visit to Mar-A-Lago.
Maddow is but one example of what Brian Stelter writes about in The hardest Trump story for the press to cover: His fitness for the job.
Stelter writes:
- Are members of the news media tiptoeing around obvious questions about Trump's instability? What do the daily lies, distortions and contradictions add up to?
- This is a story that's playing out every day on our TV screens and Twitter feeds. We can all see it happening, but it's a very hard and very sensitive story to cover.
- That's the challenge for national news outlets. All of these stories are covered in the moment, individually, by reporters who use words like erratic, volatile and unstable to describe Trump. But rarely are the words and actions covered in their totality.
- There is an understandable aversion to diagnosing a person — any person — based on what's only visible on television and Twitter.
- Quoting a Wall Street Journal article: "But," she said, "I don't need a diagnosis to know that the symptoms are pretty worrying."
Stelter ends with:
There are legitimate ethical questions about having this conversation. Journalists in newsrooms like The AP and CNN are trained to tread very carefully when entering the realm of speculation. The goal is to gather facts, not advance a political agenda.
But there are ways to cover the fact pattern around Trump and his actions that are reportorial, not political, in nature. Some writers and TV anchors are already doing it. By all means, let's debate the ethics. But the press shouldn't tiptoe around this story anymore.