Donald Trump Is Profoundly Mentally Ill
I know that I'm merely stating the obvious here, but occasionally we need to be reminded that the former president and presumptive 2024 Republican nominee is deeply disturbed.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality. If you were sent this email or are a free subscriber and would like to become a paid subscriber, you can sign up here.
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President Mishegass
Like most Americans, I spent Sunday with my family, relaxing and watching football.
Donald Trump had a very different experience this weekend.
Among other things, Trump insulted his Republican presidential rivals with names like Nikki “Birdbrain” Haley, Ron (“Dead Campaign”) DeSanctimonious, and Sloppy Chris (Christie). He attacked Democrats as “Lunatics, Marxists & Fascists.” Trump demanded a federal investigation of NBC for “Country Threatening Treason” (and said he would do just that if he is elected president in 2024); he called on House Republicans to shut down the government, said all Senate Democrats should resign because of the indictment against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, and complained once again, about the “illegal” raid on Mar-a-Lago (that was completely legal).
This came on the heels of a Friday evening rant in which Trump derided Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, as “grossly incompetent,” said that he committed treason and called for his execution.
Also, on Friday night, he demanded that Republicans shut down the government to protect him against prosecution.
And for some reason, on Saturday, Trump also felt the need to call Howard Stern “a broken weirdo.” (I assume because Stern said something negative about him).
There’s a lot to be said about these missives. Trump’s calls for violence are incredibly dangerous and mimic his language before January 6 and the aborted takeover of the Capitol that day. There’s the weirdness of labeling Democrats as both fascists AND Marxists (pick a lane, my dude). There’s the brazenness of demanding that Republicans shut down the government — and inconveniencing millions of Americans — merely to protect him. There is the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of his broadsides against the media.
In the Atlantic, Brian Klaas says the lack of attention to Trump’s unhinged rants “shows how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.”
These points are important — and I don’t mean to minimize them — but I think they oddly bury the lede. The real story here is not new or surprising, but it’s still essential.
Donald Trump is nuts.
I’m not joking around here. This is a profoundly and dangerously ill person.
Look at these posts above — it’s an unending litany of unhinged proclamations. Trump displays an unmistakable and disturbing lack of impulse control, a shocking inability to understand and appreciate not just political or democratic norms but basic societal norms, and, above all, extreme, debilitating narcissism. This is a person who is incapable of seeing beyond his own ego. He demands attention and admiration, inflates his self-importance, and constantly portrays himself as always the victim — never the victimizer and certainly not responsible, in any way, for his current predicaments. We know that Trump is devoid of empathy (a clear marker of narcissistic personality disorder), and these posts are all emblematic of his inability to appreciate the hurt and pain that his words cause — and the danger they potentially create.
Klaas argues that Trump’s behavior is purposeful. “Trump loves to hide behind the thin veneer of plausible deniability,” he writes, “but he knows exactly what he’s doing.” Honestly, I’m amazed that in 2023, after watching Trump for the past eight years, people still believe this. There is no rhyme or reason to any of this. It’s the unhinged rantings of a man who is profoundly mentally ill.
Trump cannot understand that calling General Milley a traitor and demanding his execution is entirely inappropriate and dangerous. So sure is he of the depth of Milley’s “betrayal” that it simply never occurs to Trump that his words could have dangerous, unforeseen consequences. Trump’s statements, of course, are full of easily provable lies. But for the former president, honesty and dishonesty are meaningless terms. Anyone who has dealt with narcissists understands this phenomenon. They live in a reality of their own creation. Extreme narcissists tell lies so often and so brazenly that as time goes on, they believe they are true — and for them, they become a new and unshakable reality. For those who understand the difference between fact and fiction — and are not defined by self-delusion — being around narcissists is incredibly unnerving and can often lead one to question their sanity.
I realize that nothing about these characterizations of Trump is groundbreaking. We’ve known this about him for years. But it doesn’t make them any less relevant or, frankly, terrifying. The substance of what Trump ranted about this weekend is bad enough, but what is even worse is that they show how divorced from reality Trump is and the depth of his psychosis. If someone close to any of us posted this on social media — even for a few hundred people to see, not several million — we’d quickly question their sanity. None of us would seriously consider supporting such a person for president of the United States. And yet, Trump is crushing his opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, and none of what Trump said this weekend will cause him to lose any political support. Indeed, even if Trump’s statements were splashed on front pages and cable news — and in many cases, they were — it likely wouldn’t significantly impact Trump’s standing in the polls. It’s a disquieting reminder that while the former president is profoundly mentally ill, he’s hardly the only American with a screw loose.
What’s Going On
The New York Times puts a spotlight on the potential consequences of Trump’s violent rhetoric.
Ukraine says it killed the commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Donald Trump allegedly tried to buy a gun … which would have been illegal.
Fox News tried to get a former Ukrainian President to say that Joe Biden was corrupt … it didn’t go well.
This news analysis by the New York Times’s Carl Hulse is shocking in its venom toward MAGA Republicans.
Musical Interlude
If memory serves, at the time the program aired, Ms. Cline was pregnant, and heavily girdled, because women in that “condition “ did not appear on television.