Above: I didn’t want to put an image of Trump looking crazy here. Instead these are cut-outs from a picture of his finger pointing at his head and saying he has the biggest brain and another of his thumbs..

I started the morning looking at RawStory as I usually do and I read this article: Harvard psychiatrist fears Trump’s mental state has crossed into dangerous ‘new terrain’ which sumarized the NY Times guest essay by Thomas Edsell “The Roots of Trump’s Rage” (subscription)

The essay begins:

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captures the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argues that the presidential contest now pits

A 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power

against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas notes, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”

Klaas asks:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

The media, Klaas argues, has adopted a policy in covering Trump of: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”

In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he calls the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”

This approach, according to Klaas,

has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.

Looking over the eight-and-a-half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there were no warning signs.

I was inspired to post the following comment:

Trump WAS a very stable grandious psychopathic narcissist, NOW he’s a very unstable one. If you do a web search, say on Google, for “Trump mentally ill” you will find a huge variety of articles with some going back to 2017. You will find one naysayer, Allen Francis, who takes credit for writing the diagnostic manual’s creteria for narcissistic personality disorder. His opinion was amplified by Trump supporters even though the vast majority of mental health professionals who went public answered the question in the affirmative and many expressed alarm.

Along with Francis another gift to Trump was presented by the then president of the American Psychiatric Association who invoked the Goldwater Rule in their code of ethics which said their members couldn’t make a public diagnosis of anyone unless they both assessed them in person and had their permission. This was hotly debated with but was a distraction from the salient issue which was whether or not there was ample evidence for mental health professionals to diagnose (or assess as Bandy Lee, the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” did without making a formal diagnosis) to determine that because of his personality he was dangerous. The vast majority of those qualified to assess Trump’s mental condition were correct in 2017.

If you Google Trump mentally ill today this is what you find. (Click the two images to enlarge them.)

If you add my name to the Google search this is what you see:

Click above to enlarge image.

Today his underlying psychopathology is still there but he is clearly unstable and shows signs of having a delusional disorder.

I am weary of writing about this. I am tired of making illustrations showing Trump’s face. For this blog I was considering pasting his face on the case note form I found online but decided just to add his name with his finger. All I’d have to have done is this Google Image search for Trump looking crazy, selected one, and pasted his face on the blank form.

Addendum:

Just amusing myself here. I am sick and tired of all the images of Trump pointing to his forehead when he tells his worshipping crowds that he has the biggest brain. For my own entertainment I made this out of a few of the many pictures.

There’s another gesture we used as kids to indicate someone was crazy. It also involved an index finger to the head only that finger was rotating. It is called the Cuckoo sign. In North America, making a circling motion of the index finger at the ear or side of the head signifies that the person “has a screw loose,” i.e. is speaking nonsense or is crazy. (Reference)

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