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”.

Donald Trump’s Republicans, Jacob Zuma’s ANC and Pope Francis’ Catholic Church

The people and groups named appear to be a disparate bunch – a renegade Republican President of the United States, a renegade ‘Freedom Fighter turned plunderer of his people and a leader of one of the largest religious organizations. Yet there are many similarities that need to be looked at closely by anyone seeking to understand what is going wrong with our world.

Donald Trump is a president who is proud of his inability to understand details of situations and the nuances that have enabled the world to function effectively until recently. In his world, everything revolves around him. Even truth is what he says it is. He has captured the populist imagination of a group of people very much like him. They see everything in black and white. They do not understand the other sides to each story, and they do not want to understand them. Trump appears to be happy to lead his nation into a bigoted ignorance, maneuvering his way through the facts, blaming others for what is going wrong, ignoring what is clearly failing, in the blind belief in his own incomparable abilities to bluster and blackmail every opponent, including people who would like to help him to achieve the best for his people, into submitting to his will. It is already clear that this President has taken the international standing of his country several large steps backward. He is willing to hand over dominance over, and influence in, the Asia Pacific region to China, by backing out of trade treaties and negotiations which, in his ignorance of the wider context, he describes in his usual exaggerated and uncompromising terms as ‘the worst ever’. He is willing to alienate his country’s closest allies in Europe by his oafish words and his false claims, that ‘they must pay their share of the NATO budget, they must increase expenditure on the military’, disregarding the fact that a large part of expenditure by, for example, Germany, on elements that are not strictly military are designed to avoid the situation that could easily turn those situations into pressing military problems. Roman Herzog, the then-incoming German President, recognized that the way to peace did not necessarily involve artillery and fighter jets when he told the German nation that ‘we must take steps to resolve the problems of Africa in Africa, because, if we do not, they will become European problems.’ Trump, notoriously ignorant in matters of history, does not understand that view. In his eyes, military might is THE way to exercise influence in the world. His background as a student at a military college goes a long way to explain that shortcoming, yet other military men, such as President Jack Kennedy and Senator John McCain, did not suffer from such a defective understanding. They understood that prosperous friends will generally not be willing to sacrifice that prosperity in order to gain a military superiority, a situation which, at best, will be temporary, enduring only until the opponents, fearing the threats contained in a military build-up and working to match that military capability. They knew that a two-times overkill capability, coupled with an active support of friendly countries, and countries that might become friendly, is more than enough to maintain a status in which a potential enemy could recognize that a military adventure would be a sure loss. They knew that diplomacy, not unfounded bombast, was the only way to maintain a peaceful world. They were also able to recognize that courting the association of manifest enemies, to the detriment of proven friends, was to place their country on a slippery slope to global catastrophe.

The fact that the Republican Party has, for so long, tolerated the buffoonish antics of Donald Trump is a question that must raise the suspicions among Party supporters about the leaders of the Party, who are responsible for holding the excesses of the leading Party members in check and forming the opinions of the Party rank and file. It appears that those leaders are not willing to speak out against the most divisive and destructive man in American politics since the McCarthy era.

Strangely enough, the rule of Jacob Zuma in South Africa bears remarkable parallels to the rule of Donald Trump in the United States. Like Trump, he had no hesitation in lying outright to suit his purpose. He had no sense of shame in dividing the nation to achieve his nefarious ends. He had no sense of the damage he was doing to the nation and to those who identified themselves with him, needing only to achieve his personal objectives. Like Trump, Zuma had no understanding of history, or of how the flow of it resulted in the present and will result in the future. Like Trump, he had only the barest understanding of the interrelationship of events, of how pushing here has the potential to bring about a huge distortion there, and he has no feeling of personal responsibility for the outcome of his maneuvering, beyond the desire to achieve something for himself. Like Trump, he relies on native cunning and animal instinct, not on understanding and careful evaluation. Like Trump, he surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men, people who are always reluctant to stand up to the perceived excesses of their chief in the interests of their personal benefit. Like Trump, he was always willing to throw those ‘dear friends and trusted confidants’ under the bus when the time came, and, like Trump, he was unable to comprehend that those people would be just as willing to throw him under the bus when that became expedient in the preservation of their own safety and comfort.

Pope Francis, on the other hand, is an organization man. The Catholic Church continues to hold onto the illusion that it is the representative of God on Earth, that it speaks the words of God and is therefor infallible in its pronunciations. It ignores at every turn the fallacy of this view, disregarding the evidence, or, at best, explaining it as a ‘human failing, excused in each case by a benevolent God. It ignores the long-held Church belief that the Earth was flat, that it was the center of the Universe, that only those baptized by itself were good enough to enter Heaven. It ignores the brutality of the Spanish Inquisition, perpetrated in the name of the Church. It ignores the constant stream of acts of inhumanity perpetrated by the representatives of the Church against children, men and women over many years. It ignores the fact that the Papacy, the very leadership of the Church, acting under the authority of God, was the subject of a competitive tender in the not-so-distant past, that favors of the Church were the subject of payments. The present tour of Ireland by the Pope has shown itself very clearly to be little more than a public relations exercise, planned to boost the flagging membership of the Church in the face of the revulsion against its actions and inactions. The Pope remains unwilling to confess the sins of which it has clearly been guilty, to make public reparation to the thousands, possibly millions of its adherents, for the gross misconduct of members of the Church. The Pope would have the members of the congregation believe that such misconduct was not known to the senior management of the Church. Such a claim is disingenuous in the extreme. At the very least, the supposedly all-knowing God which the Church claims to represent must have made the ‘indiscretions’ of the clergy known to those at the top of the Church, even if it was possible for those responsible for such a well-organized pattern of conduct to have hidden it, in the face of the policy of ‘confession and forgiveness’ exercised by the Church. It is hard to conceive of a situation in which a substantial number of senior clerics, across many countries, could have succeeded in maintaining the lie that had been exposed, over and over, by the people who had suffered at the hands of the Church.

Yet the Pope continues to uphold the fiction that the Catholic Church is the upholder of virtue and spiritual rectitude. He continues to avoid handing over to the criminal prosecution agencies every single priest and bishop suspected of sexual offences against those who entrust their spiritual guidance to the Church. He prays to God for forgiveness for the sins of the Church, yet he fails to pray to the members of the congregation for such forgiveness. Of course, it is easy to pray for forgiveness for such heinous behavior, when you, yourself, claim the right to dispense such forgiveness. If the church were a formal company, the shareholders would long since have sold their shareholding on the basis of being fed such obvious lies and disinformation by the Directors.

What are the grossly obvious similarities between these people and the organizations they represent? Some answers leap out of the facts.

None of the persons in question truly believes that they are responsible for their actions to the people they claim to represent. Every one of them has an ability to interpret the events and their actions solely in relation to themselves, twisting the facts to present a picture that they need to show themselves in the right light. They all have an ability to manipulate the views and beliefs of their constituency to their own ends. They all have enormous power, a power that could as easily be used for good as for the evil that has been their choice, and they all have a hunger for such power, to the extent that they are willing to lie and twist their story to ensure that they are able to hold onto such power, regardless of the views and advice of better people. None of them is prepared to face the world openly, to confess that what they are doing is against the interests of Humanity and of the world. None of them is willing to accept the loss of their leadership role, and the power and wealth (in their terms) that comes with it, in the interests of the greater good.

Worst of all, each of these men and the organizations they represent is willing to continue to inflict on the world the incalculable harm that they have done in the past.

Perhaps the most glaring similarity is that none of these men and their organizations have any discernible set of principles by which to measure their actions and which can truly be said to be devoid of personal interest or benefit. None of them is willing to stand up to wrong if there is any possibility that they will be harmed by such a stand.

In the words of Jo Stevens (‘Connection’ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N1XTDYD): “her dislike for Mr. Jenkins Jr. would not cause her to abandon that principle now. That was what principles were for. If one felt free to abandon them at will, it made no sense to have them at all.”

What is wrong with our world?

It seems that the crisp answer is that the people we allow to represent us do not have principles that are understood and accepted by the majority of us, and, by their example, we allow them to degrade the principles that we as people consider important for civilization to work.