American Psychopaths: Psychopathy in the White House

Mental illness & government

It is estimated that 50 percent of all American presidents have suffered mental illness. Based on biographical sources 1776 to 1974, for instance, Lincoln suffered from severe depression that was often disabling, Roosevelt from bipolar disorder, and Nixon from depression and alcohol abuse. These psychological factors heavily influenced their social relationships and decision making (Dr. Guy Winch, study 2006).

Psychopathy

The first president in modern American history to suffer from psychopathy is Donald J. Trump. Mr. Trump is unable to tell the difference between reality and fictions he generates in his mind. His absence of reality testing impacts all that he touches. He alone, for example, decided to bomb Iran during a cease fire. The first bombs were dropped on a girl’s primary school, which decimated it and killed over 150 children, and wounded 100 others. The bombing was based on old CIA data that indicated the school was a military installation. No apologies, only denial.

Next, he imagined reasons for killing Iranian citizens and told these to the American people. Reasons included: Iran threatened the U.S. with missiles, not true; they needed regime change; perhaps, but international law and strategy were totally disregarded; Iran was enriching uranium to make nuclear bombs, which in fact, had already been eliminated by Israel, and finally, Iran was controlling the movement of ships transporting oil in the Strait of Hormuz, which they had done for years. However, President Trump, chief psychopath, made an issue out of it, declared war, and sent oil prices skyrocketing. The world economy is suffering from his machinations.

Trump also threatened to eliminate Iranian civilization, roughly 92 million people. He and Hegseth think nothing of bombing Iran back to the stone age, perhaps when they were known as a Persian civilization.

President Trump’s psychopathy is also evidenced by his lack of feelings for others. It doesn’t matter to him, or his staff, that they have killed innocent civilians and children; that they fabricated reasons to go to war with Iran; that they increased inflation for everyday folks, hurting their ability to afford gas and food. Bombing children and innocent persons is just more collateral damage in a messy war with fuzzy outcomes.

Trump’s psychopathy is complicated by the fact that he also presents early symptoms of dementia, which is characterized by his inability to handle ambiguity, forge complex sentences, interchanges or dialogue. He must act out his behavior to defend against his mental incapacities, which includes lack of short term memory. He would, according to his mental state, bomb the same school twice over two weeks and forget it was ever a target. He just moves on from issue to issue, event to event and person to person.

Recall his war on drugs in Venezuela and Colombia. The drugs, according to Trump, were killing American kids on U.S. streets. The actual drug that is killing so many is fentanyl, which is commercially produced in Asia and Syria—-not Latin America. Trump only got the continent and type of drug wrong. Trump’s accusations were then embraced by Secretary of Defense Hegseth, who ordered bombing fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela which supposedly carried drugs. No evidence was ever offered. When a couple of people on one of the boats survived the blast, and clung on to the boat for life, they were murdered by the U.S. military. Who needs witnesses when you’re manufacturing deep fake stories without evidence.

President Trump picks fights with everyone. He says the Pope is hopeless, NATO representatives and world leaders are pathetic, and everyone but Trump is worthless. He responds as a tyrant, but this response actually deflects away from his dementia. Underlying his dementia is an intrinsic paranoia that classifies individuals as friend or enemy to protect him from others. Anyone who disagrees with him is his enemy. He is incapable of learning from situations or others which often surface differences. Differences threaten him. Complexity threatens him. That is why he blurts out simplistic emotional blather in response to complex problems over social media at all hours of the day and night.

The psychopathy contagion

Psychopathy can be contagious. Trump has been running a kind of Jonestown for government officials. Jonestown was home to members of a cult who were told by their leader Jim Jones to drink a kind of Kool Aid, which poisoned them.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Levitt, as you can imagine, has drunk the Kool Aid. She says that President Trump’s negotiating abilities are the best by far; and anyone who cannot see the President’s long game with Iran is either stupid or ignorant.

Trump promulgates psychopathic contagion in three ways:

1. He hires and promotes people who reflect his incompetence, callousness and manipulative attitudes. The Republican Party supports his nominations. None of his appointments are qualified for their jobs: Kristi Noem, the cowgirl who shoots and kills her dog for disobedience and claims that ‘real Americans’ would understand her behavior; Pete Hegseth—former TV personality, white Christian nationalist, wife abuser and former alcoholic who likes to play Rambo; Kash Patel as FBI Director, who has no prior experience in police work. Kash is now suing Atlantic Magazine for reporting his booze habits. Patel also likes to use a government-registered FBI jet to visit his girlfriend in Pennsylvania and Nashville, Tennessee. He recently visited her at a wrestling match where she sang; Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce, who is all in on government funding of equity deals in chips, and rare earth brokered by his investment company, and tariffs—which have never worked to develop the American economy; and last for purposes herein, Stephen Miller, former Speech Writer for Trump who is now White House Deputy Chief of Staff. Mr. Miller is a far-right, white nationalist and anti-immigration fanatic. He is an avid supporter of ICE. He’s all for shredding the U.S. constitution and Bill of Rights to rid the land of immigrants. They are all guilty of trespassing, crimes and rapes until proven innocent.
2. Trump demands that all hires genuflect to him. This applies to members of the press as well. Question him seriously about events or decisions and you find yourself attacked and out. Hundreds of respected journalists are now banding together to oppose Trump. Hires must demonstrate submissiveness or be replaced. This includes Supreme Court justices, Alito and Thomas who made decisions that he didn’t like; and Federal Reserve Governor, Lisa Cook, and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The legality of the situation or his claims don’t matter, only his machinations matter. Reality comes in a distant second to his mental states.
3. Trump’s reality is often disturbed by matters of science, data, and policy. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, was hired to keep reality and science at bay. RFK is responsible for public health and medical research, reporting directly to Trump. He likes to embrace false claims: vaccines in infancy cause autism, vaccines for children in public schools should be a private decision regardless of disease. He tells millions of Americans that drinking raw milk and eating red meat will make them healthier and prolong their life, in spite of scientific evidence to the contrary. The turnover of qualified professionals at HHS has been astounding.

Trump’s psychopathy has also resonated internationally. He has befriended Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. To demonstrate his affinity for Netanyahu, he has overlooked charges of genocide and war crimes issued against Netanyahu by the International Court of Justice. Instead, he personally sent Bibi’s government over $50 billion for weapons and war. No congressional approval required. Trump and Bibi share the same denial of reality—and psychopathy—as Bibi claims, for example, that Israel’s army is the most moral army in the world. This in spite of over 50 years of recorded evidence to the contrary.

What to do:

Based on his mental state, President Trump should be impeached for psychopathy and dementia under amendment twenty-five of the U.S. Constitution. Short of this, call your representatives and say that Trump is unfit mentally for office.

Better yet, work in the upcoming midterm elections to elect Democrats running against Republicans, even if you don’t agree with all that Democrats offer. Our sanity as a nation and world depend on it.