It is difficult to find words to describe the president these days when even as long as a year ago I had exhausted the thesaurus trying to find precise descriptions of his alarming behavior. A writer who is trying to be taken seriously tries to avoid hyperbole. Knowing this I was always mindful when I chose my words.
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It was a challenge after Trump's two-hour CPAC so-called speech to describe it without sounding like I was having a hissy fit. However, anyone who was objective used phrases like an "unhinged rant" to describe it.
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At the time I wrote that his speech was a cornucopia for psychiatric diagnosis. I said "Trump walked out at CPAC and hugged the flag, for a second he rocked it back and forth as if he was dancing with it. I could say as it was as if he was humping it but that would be rude."
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In a logical world, the CPAC performance would have convinced the GOP enablers that Trump had finally slipped his mooring and was being tossed about in a sea of rogue waves that he was helpless to control. 25th Amendment hashtags would be trending on Twitter. Congress would be assembling a panel of eminent mental health professionals to evaluated the president's fitness to serve: his judgment, impulse control, reality testing, and other factors that might make him unable to engage in rational thinking in order to make considered decisions based on the best available evidence.
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It is hard to believe that the CPAC appearance was only two weeks ago and things have only gotten worse as Trump is behaving like someone whose psychological defenses are teetering on the edge of going off a precipice.
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Here’s another example of how psychopathology drives this president. Before the horrendous massacre in New Zealand during an interview with Breitbart published this week, Trump gave the ominous threat to anyone who opposes him. He said that he had the “tough” supporters, like cops, the military, and Bikers for Trump, and that these people will certainly get tough if things get to a “certain point.”
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Everybody has psychological defenses. They operate at varying degrees of awareness from totally unconscious, called primitive defense mechanisms among which are denial and regression, and even dissociation, to middle level but still unconscious mechanisms like projection and reaction formation (converting of unwanted or dangerous thoughts, feelings or impulses into their opposites) to those higher level ways of coping with assaults on the ego (or sense of self) like humor and fantasy. While there is no universal agreement in the world of psychology as to what should be included on a list of defense mechanisms you can find lists with as many as 31 of them.
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Donald Trump's reaction to the New Zealand terrorist attack and his insistence that it didn't represent an upsurge in white nationalist extremism across the globe is a petri dish of cells of malignant narcism growing like cancer.
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There is no clear line of delineation between evil and illness in someone like Donald Trump. He is driven by his illness which has elements of sadism and because a hallmark of malignant narcissism is the lack of any capacity for empathy he doesn't care who he hurts. His goal is always self-protection and his need is self-aggrandizement.
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If this doesn't sound to someone, even the most ardent Trump supporter, like he is someone who should be removed from office, let alone from having the ability to start a war, I don't know what will convince them.
Saturday, Mar 16, 2019 · 9:06:11 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
I am a clinical social worker, not a lawyer, but this is my general impression of the law.
There is no federal law about whether a president is sane enough to stand trial in the Senate.
The 25th is a high bar but it is also ambiguous. It has never been applied due to a psychiatric condition which renders a president unable to make rational decisions. The term incapacitated is imprecise because it has always implied that it is to be invoked when the president is unconscious.
Legal definitions of sanity vary from state to state and I don’t know the federal definition for a court trial is, but my impression is that the person must be capable of understanding the charges against them. This is something that I think the prosecutors and defense teams present evidence on with their own psychiatric experts. Again, not being a lawyer, I think the final decision is up to the judge.
As for the 25th working its way through Congress, the president’s attornies would fight this and just like in a regular court would present their expert witness. Ultimately, the decision is not left up to a judge, it is decided by a vote of the members in each house.
(Sorry for misspelling definitely on the poll. It is too late to change it.)