Photo by Matt Johnson | CC BY 2.0
The mainstream media is concerned with the politics, policies, and propaganda of President Donald Trump, but underplays the central question of his presidency: Is Donald Trump psychologically fit to be president of the United States and commander-in-chief? Over the past twelve months, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have produced two books (“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” and “Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump”) to warn that our dangerously disordered president is a threat to domestic and international security. According to an article in Newsweek in March 2018, most Americans agree that Donald Trump is unfit to be president.
The mental health experts who have produced these books have had to ignore the ethical principle of the American Psychiatric Association known as the “Goldwater Rule,” which prohibited psychiatrists from diagnosing a public figure they had not personally interviewed. The erratic behavior of Donald Trump as a candidate in 2015-2016 and as president in 2017-2018 has led to a challenging ethical principle known as the “duty to warn” because of the danger he has created. In every area of American policy, Trump’s actions and statements have created the highest level of domestic and international anxiety since the end of World War II.
For the past several years, we have witnessed what psychiatrists have referred to as Trump’s malignant narcissism,…