The U.S. military has a long-standing Personnel Reliability Program to assess and screen out mentally and emotionally unstable officers and enlisted men from its nuclear units. But as former Navy intelligence officer Malcolm Nance says at the onset of #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump, our current commander-in-chief flunks the test. Private Trump would never be allowed near an atomic warhead. President Trump has his fat fingers on the button.
Director Dan Partland’s #Unfit documents the professional assessment of what two-thirds of Americans strongly suspect—Trump is nuts, not eccentrically but malevolently crazy. Many of the nation’s preeminent psychiatrists have weighed into the discussion about the president’s mental health. Partland interviews John Gartner (Johns Hopkins), Lance Dodes (Boston Psychoanalytic Society), Justin Frank (George Washington University), Suzanne Lachmann (Psychology Today) and others. They all draw the same conclusions. According to them, Trump suffers from:
• Malignant narcissism. He tends to start his rambling monologues with lines such as “I am the greatest…” or “I know more about…” And hey Evangelical Christians, how about his claim to be “the Chosen One”?
• Paranoia. He hasn’t stumbled across many conspiracy theories that he hasn’t been willing to share. Maybe he’s Q?
• Sociopathic sadism. Lacking any apparent empathy or appreciation for anyone but himself (and maybe his children?), his supposedly successful career is actually a trail of unpaid bills and fraud (Trump University? The Trump Foundation?). And he has no shame about it. Moreover, he seems to enjoy the thought of inflicting pain or humiliation through a monotonous stream of catcalls both live and twittered.
The president’s crew of interns tell Fox News that critical psychiatrists are violating the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” dating from the 1964 election. At that time, a group of sloppy-thinking headshrinkers accused GOP candidate Barry Goldwater of mental instability. As explained in #Unfit, the Freudians who made those assertions, which included repressed homosexuality and poor potty training, were wildly speculating as they tried to probe the unconscious of a man none of them had ever met. The diagnosis of Trump by today’s post-Freudians is based on observable public behavior. Moreover, they add, psychiatrists have a professional obligation to warn victims of potential danger. In Trump’s case, the victims could include the entire world.
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