Photo by Kyle Ryan

The mainstream media have examined the governance of Donald Trump over the first term and the hundred days of the second term, using the familiar techniques of bureaucratic politics and the use of mostly anonymous sources. In this way, the media have examined the politics, policies, and fulsome propaganda of the Trump’s presidency. But the media for the most part have foresworn or underplayed the central question of Trump’s presidency: Is Donald Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States and, even more worrying, the commander-in-chief of the most powerful and expensive military forces in the world? We know the answer to that question and it couldn’t be more worrisome.

The first term produced several books on Trump’s dangerously disordered presidency, including a trenchant one by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump (“Too Much and Never Enough”) that diagnosed Donald Trump’s threat to domestic and international security. There was sufficient polling by 2018 to indicate that most Americans agreed that Trump was unfit to be president. The mental health experts who contributed to these works fortunately ignored the so-called ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association (the Goldwater Rule), which prohibited psychiatrists from diagnosing a public figure they had not personally encountered. But the erratic behavior of Trump during the 2015-2016 campaign and the first two years of his first term prompted a reassessment and a challenging principle: the duty to warn. Now it is seven years later, and Trump’s actions and statements have created the highest level of domestic and international anxiety since the end of World War II.

Trump’s malignant narcissism has certainly worsened—his claims that he knows more than anyone else and that only he can fix our problems marked the first term; “I run the country and the world” typifies the second term. His demonization of his perceived enemies as a result of two congressional impeachments and numerous court cases has become far more........

© CounterPunch