Trump’s worsening condition in plain sight

A Sun reader complains that John Gartner and Harry Segal, the two psychologists who host the “Shrinking Trump” podcast, violate professional ethics by diagnosing the former president as a malignant narcissist in the early stages of dementia. 

I featured Gartner and Segal, along with Trump critic George Conway, in a recent column. The complaint about a “diagnosis from a distance” stems from the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics; the so-called “Goldwater Rule” states that mental health professionals are to refrain from comment on public officials and, further, render no comment on anyone they have not personally examined.

But, as Gartner argues, Donald Trump is on full public display and has been for years. Based on what they’ve seen and heard, Gartner and hundreds of other professionals believe Trump has a severe personality disorder as well as signs of dementia.

And, if anyone has any doubts about whether the Republican Party’s nominee for president suffers from a severe mental disorder they need look no further for evidence: His Mar-a-Lago press conference last week was an hour of rambling incoherence, a scramble of assertions, lies and claims of grandiosity. He again exhibited obsession with the size of campaign rally crowds — his compared to Kamala Harris’ — followed, over the weekend, by more of the same in an outburst of social media posts. This time, Trump asserted that photographs of a large crowd greeting Harris at an airport in Michigan were the creations of artificial intelligence: “there was nobody there,” he wrote on Truth Social, a ridiculous claim that puts the former president in a class of right-wing weirdos who embrace and espouse conspiracy theories.

But Trump is well beyond the point of just being weird or a crude loudmouth or vulgar bigot. There’s something much more profound going on, and you do not need to be a clinician to see that. Nor should clinicians refrain from telling us what they think, based on the readily available evidence. 

There’s a baseline rule of journalism, believed to have originated with a Texas writer: “If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the window and find out which is true.” 

Seems to me a psychologist can and should do the same, especially when it comes to a person as exposed as Trump and as positioned, by the GOP’s nomination, to return to the White House. If Trump were running for the local county council, we’d just dismiss him as an eccentric or kook.

Gartner gets a little too giddy at times when speaking about Trump, and he clearly opposes his politics. But, when he sticks to a clinical assessment, his argument that Trump is unfit for the presidency is convincing. But it should be to anyone who watches and listens to him.

Trump’s popular status as the Republican Party’s choice for president has always baffled me. One reason: Most people pride themselves on being able to detect BS when they hear it, especially in a politician. That millions of BS-detecting Americans want this New York con man to be president (again) underscores the cult nature of Trump’s support. 

It’s hard to accept that so many of our fellow citizens are in a trance-like state when it comes to Trump. Yet, on some level, it’s understandable; Trump achieved a cult following like no other presidential candidate. But at this point, apparently many of those same people still refuse to see, in plain sight, his deteriorating mental condition and the potential danger it presents. That is not understandable. That is incomprehensible and irresponsible, a dereliction of civic duty. Hope rests in the millions of clear-eyed, clear-minded Americans who will finally, and again, reject Trump and send him into restful retirement.