Psychiatrists say Trump is mentally ill
June 30, 2017 2:08 pm | by DOUG THOMPSON - Opinion
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/node/66910Negative responses and condemnation continue to rain down on President Donald Trump after his crude insults against “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski Thursday in two of his often acerbic tweets on Twitter.
“It is really not normal that the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief would be tweeting about somebody’s face,” says longtime Republican strategist Liz Mair. “It does not conform to the normals that we expect and we treat as pretty set in stone in this country. It is also strange.”
“Strange” is one of the milder terms that has even brought condemnation and concern from more than three dozen Republicans in Congress.
“This has to stop,” says Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. “We all have a job — three branches of government and media. We won’t have to get along, but we must show respect and humility.”
“We make a big deal that Harry Truman told off a newspaper critic for writing a bad receive of his daughter’s music concert,” says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley at Rice University. “How G-rated is that compared to what Donald Trump has done?
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, White House communications chief for George W. Bush, says “as someone who once proudly called myself a Republican, the party will be permanent associated with misogyny if leaders don’t step up and demand a retraction.”
Republicans who have raised issues about Trump in the past, and came under fire from the GOP leadership for doing so, are now saying “I told you so.”
Personally, that a pretty demoralizing feeling,” Mair told The Washington Post. “A lot of people hoped that things would be different once he got into the office, but the guy’s been on this earth for seven decades. You can’t really change his behavior after all that.”
Increasing numbers, including psychiatrists, are raising questions about Trump’s mental state and his capacity to be President.
Mental health professionals say Trump suffers from “malignant narcissism.”
Writes psychologist John Gartner, the founder of “Duty to Warn,” and who taught in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for 28 years:
His narcissism is evident in his “grandiose sense of self-importance … without commensurate achievements.” From viewing cable news, he knows “more about ISIS than the generals” and believes that among all human beings on the planet, “I alone can fix it.” His “repeated lying,” “disregard for and violation of the rights of others” (Trump University fraud and multiple sexual assault allegations) and “lack of remorse” meet the clinical criteria for anti-social personality. His bizarre conspiracy theories, false sense of victimization, and demonization of the press, minorities and anyone who opposes him are textbook paranoia. Like most sadists, Trump has been a bully since childhood, and his thousands of vicious tweets make him perhaps the most prolific cyber bully in history.
In a conference of psychiatrists at Yale University earlier this year, Gartner warned that Trump suffers “a dangerous mental illness” and is not fit to lead the United States.
“We have an ethical responsibility to warn the public about Donald Trump’s dangerous mental illness,” he told the conference.
Dr. Brandy Lee, assistant clinical professor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry, said “some prominent psychiatrists have noted Trump’s mental health is the elephant in the room. I think the public is really starting to catch on and widely talk about this now.”
“I’ve worked with some of the most dangerous people our society produces, directing mental health programs in prisons,” says James Gilligan, a psychiatrist and professor at New York University.
How dangerous is Trump? Gilligan adds:
I’ve worked with murderers and rapists. I can recognise dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert on dangerousness or spend fifty years studying it like I have in order to know how dangerous this man is.
“I am very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. It’s strange,” says Brzezinski. “It does worry me about the country.”
Adds her co-host, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, who is also engaged to Brzezinski: “We had so many people saying, ‘Hey, hope you’re okay’. . . We’re okay. The country is not.”
Wrote both in an Op-Ed for The Washington Post Friday:
President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, “Morning Joe.”
Trump called Scarborough “Psycho Joe” in his tweets. In the article Friday, he said the White House threatened a negative tabloid story from the National Enquirer until they made nice with Trump and asked him to get the paper’s publisher and friend, David Packer to kill the story.
Reported J. Freedom du Lac and Jenna Johnson:
“This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked,” they wrote. “We ignored their desperate pleas.”
“That’s blackmail,” said “Morning Joe” team member Donnie Deutsch.
They also reported:
In their op-ed, the MSNBC hosts fact-checked the president’s Thursday tweets, writing that they contained “a flurry of falsehoods.”
Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.
The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family’s living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.
“It was amazing how many lies he packed into two tweets,” Brzezinski said Friday.
Of Trump’s claim that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a facelift,” she and Scarborough wrote in their op-ed: “That is also a lie.”
Bottom line?
Donald Trump is a crazy egomaniac. Even worse, he has the authority to order dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone or anything that displeases his warped mind,
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