https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/09/22/is-trump-mentally-ill-or-is-america-psychiatrists-weigh-in/
Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America? Psychiatrists weigh in.
Review of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" by Bandy X. Lee (ed.), "Twilight of American Sanity" by Allen Frances, and "Fantasyland" by Kurt Andersen.
By Carlos Lozada |September 22


THE DANGEROUS CASE OF DONALD TRUMP: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
By Bandy X. Lee (ed.). Thomas Dunne Books. 360 pp. $27.99

TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITY: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump
By Allen Frances. William Morrow. 326 pp. $27.99

FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History
By Kurt Andersen. Random House. 462 pp. $30

Gone are the days when euphemisms about President Trump’s mental health insulated the man like so many padded walls. Erratic. Unpredictable. Unstable. Unmoored. Temperamentally unfit. This was what politicians and commentators said when they wished to question Trump’s state of mind but feared the consequences of a more colloquial assessment. Yet the deeper we plunge into this presidency, the more willing people become to call it like they see and hear it.

“I think he’s crazy,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. (“I’m worried,” she replied.) CNN’s Don Lemon, flabbergasted after a Trump speech last month, concluded that “he’s unhinged. .?.?. There was no sanity there.” Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” to succeed as president.

Now, some psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals are shedding long-held norms to argue that Trump’s condition presents risks to the nation and the world. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” features more than two dozen essays breaking down the president’s perceived traits, which the contributors find consistent with symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy and other maladies. “Collectively with our coauthors, we warn that anyone as mentally unstable as Mr. Trump simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency,” Judith Lewis Herman of Harvard Medical School and Bandy X. Lee of the Yale School of Medicine write in the book’s prologue.

If so, what should we make of the nation that entrusted him with precisely such powers? In his new book, “Twilight of American Sanity,” psychiatrist Allen Frances asserts that Trump is not mentally ill — we are. “Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society,” he writes. “We can’t expect to change Trump, but we must work to undo the societal delusions that created him.” And those delusions, Kurt Andersen contends in “Fantasyland,” have been around for a long time. “People tend to regard the Trump moment — this post-truth, alternative facts moment — as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon,” he writes. “In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history.”

I feel a touch of relief and surprise, every morning when I wake up.

Maybe because the word has too many syllables and is hard to spell and pronounce. It is a GRE, rather than an SAT, word.

But yes, it describes him perfectly and clarifies so well why I have always found him absolutely terrifying. He LITERALLY does not think that anything or anyone outside of him exists except as "phantoms" that are only here for his pleasure or utility. He sees himself not as the center of the universe, but as THE UNIVERSE. He probably plays "I Am The Cosmos" every night on his iPhone and weeps when he ponders all of its implications.

There is no end to the crazy evil that someone can do to you when they look at you, and the whole world, that way. No end.

But yes, people should be talking about this. This isn't a mere case of "Narcissistic Personality Disorder". Here is a guy who, if he had the means and opportunity, would gladly, without a second thought, nuke us all off the planet tomorrow if it might teach us all a lesson about not loving him enough.