Is Donald Trump Mentally-Disordered?

 

To accuse a sitting American President of being mentally disordered is a serious matter, to the nation and to the world. To have a man who does not meet the normal description of ‘sane’ in control of the most powerful nation on Earth is frightening indeed.

Donald Trump is in control of a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, as well as military might that has the potential to upend world stability and destroy the fragile peace that has reigned since the end of the Second World War. Yet Donald Trump has taunted two countries, widely suspected to be on the verge of having intercontinental nuclear weapons, also in control of men whose sanity is not above suspicion, threatening annihilation of them, not once in a fit of anger, but several times. On the evidence before the world, there is no good reason to believe that Donald Trump, a man seemingly obsessed with military power and a believer in striking first and hard, will not succumb to his wilder impulses and, rather than simply tweeting his inane thoughts, convert those impulses into destruction, releasing a nuclear holocaust that the world will most likely not recover from for centuries.

Donald Trump has been shown to be a habitual liar, from his statement that he is a ‘self-made man, building a fortune of billions’ (the amount of that fortune has still to be conclusively shown, as is the means by which he built it, with oppression of small suppliers and allegations of money-laundering being rife) from a ‘small’ loan of only one million dollars now being alleged to be a start-up boost of at least twelve million, and probably more, to allegations that the crowd at his inauguration was ‘the biggest in history’ (correctly stated to be amongst the smallest of any President in the last four decades), to his continuing boast that his relations with the Chinese Premier are ‘the best enjoyed by any American President with a Chinese leader ever’ (when it is obvious to see that the Chinese leader holds the American in disdain), to his boast that he had resolved the North Korean problem (when ninety-five per cent of the rapprochement has been achieved by the South Korean leaders, working to defuse the continuing crises that Trump precipitates), to his arrogant demand that the NATO partners ‘pay their cost of the Military build-up’ (when Germany spends considerably more on preventing the development of threats by peaceful, economic means, so avoiding the huge waste of economic resources caused by the purchase of munitions, which would have been far better applied to developing the world economy), to his most recent claim that ‘we have made a lot of money, a lot’ from the imposition of tariffs on imports from China (totally ignoring the fact that the American consumers paid those tariffs, not the Chinese, and that they pay those costs several times over in the form of increased cost of those products when bought from American suppliers, who increase their prices to match the imported price). It is tempting to believe that some of the claims made by Trump result from his ignorance of economics, accounting and common sense, a belief that is possibly as frightening as that the President has lost his marbles, but the overwhelming number of Trump’s outright lies argues against such a charitable view. His tendency to exaggerate, and over-exaggerate, to the extent of total untruth, is shown by the fact that Trump is always prone to the use of superlatives. He cannot see something as ‘bad’ or ‘unacceptable’: it is always ‘the worst ever’. Nothing is ‘good’ or ‘better’: it is always ‘the greatest on record’ or ‘fantastic’.

The stand-off between Trump and Congress in passing Bills to enable the operation of government is another example of Trump’s failure to understand the workings of democracy. The simple argument goes that the majority of Members of Congress are elected to represent the majority of voters. That is what democracy, at the lowest level, means. However, Donald Trump is willing to engineer and permit and sustain a standoff between the majority vote in Congress in order to win his argument that a huge Chinese-Wall style barrier be built on the Mexican border, a wall that, in his election speeches, he assured his gullible voters would be paid for by Mexico, a factor now conveniently ignored, in the form of another lie of significant size. Trump also conveniently ignores the fact that the greatest number of illegal immigration offences by far are caught at the formal border crossings or by apprehension of people who have overstayed their visas. Neither of those causes is capable of being prevented by a $5.6 billion wall. However, Trump is willing to put the lives of eight hundred of American citizens at risk, in order to win a battle with Congress that should never have arisen, and would never have arisen had Trump not viewed his own desires as more important than those of the American voters.

There seems to be little doubt that, if Donald Trump had been the Chairman of a listed company, the shareholders would have been justified in unseating him for the simple reason that he is mentally and morally unsuited to managing the affairs of the corporation. More happened to Elon Musk for less cause. They would not permit the impulsive, often irrational, decisions to be made, often carrying huge risks for the corporation (country) and its environs, without consultation with a range of knowledgeable and qualified persons, nor would they permit the bullying tactics that have alienated so many allies to the extent that the corporation (country) has been abandoned as a reliable partner. How long will it take for the Republican Party to come to the same conclusion, and take action to protect themselves and their country from the continuing depredations of this man?

There can be little doubt that the actions and statements of Donald Trump are not those one would expect from a reasonable man, a test required by the Courts, but are they sufficiently divergent fron those reasonable man actions and statements to constitute a form of mental disorder? The test should certainly be more strict in the case of a man with the inordinate and uncontrolled power of the President of the United States. His incoherent tweets and statements, quite apart from his actions, his wild exaggerations and distortions of the truth, his seeming inability to command the support even of men and women whose beliefs are close to his own and his subsequent vicious turnarounds in his views of those people, would seem to argue at least for a form of mental instability.

To answer the question whether Donald Trump is mentally disordered, the American public, the Republican Party and the representatives of the people and the guardians of their government need to take a serious look at the claims and statements of the President, evaluate them in the light of the facts and the actions of a reasonable man, and ask themselves “Would we put this man in charge of the upbringing of our children”.