The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” ( DSM) is a publication of the American Psychiatric Association and serves as the official standard for the diagnosis of mental disorders. Among the classic mental disorders catalogued is the “Neurotic Personality Disorder” (NPD), characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a diminished morality and empathy with the feelings of others. It is additionally characterized by enduring and inflexible maladaptive patterns of behavior and cognition.[ Sound familiar?]
The clinical definition of “Neurotic Personality Disorder,” in the official DSM, to our perception, amounts to a veritable portrait of the current President, notwithstanding which, he has been enabled to continue to occupy the most august and powerful office on the planet. The damage consequent to his infirmity has been the cause of observably dangerous results. We offer the following as a representative list:
(1) During the COVID-19 pandemic, advising the public to ingest laundry detergent and a veterinary substance for the prevention of worms in horses as cures, while publicly and energetically denigrating the efforts of the nation’s experts and Health Agencies. Such toxic behaviour was also inclusive of the derogation of expert life-saving prophylactic recommendations. Such singularly irrational behavior tragically resulted in tens of thousands of preventable deaths.
(2) Arbitrarily and insanely removing top-secret government files and refusing, despite a subpoena, to return them; instead, storing them in cardboard boxes located in the toilet (!) of his highly accessible Mar-A-Largo resort. The resultant damage to the Nation may indeed remain unknown, but resulted in a material leak in intelligence and conceivably the deadly revelation of American government agents.
(3) Egoistic and irrational refusal to accept the multi-certified result of his electoral defeat by Joseph Biden, the insanely reactive promotion of a violent and bloody insurrection against the Nation’s Capitol Building, and thereafter, when elected, public pardon of the incited criminal insurrectionists, as a perverse reward for their seditious insurrection in his name. This phenomenon is an irrefutable expression of traditionally diagnosable conduct.
(4) Sadistically and shamelessly mimicking, on public television, the painful and embarrassing symptoms of a news reporter, visibly undergoing the shaky symptoms of cerebral palsy. Trump’s publicly performed burlesque is not an acceptable concomitant of human normalcy.
(5) Publicly associating with the notorious underage sex merchant Jeffry Epstein and frequenting his disreputable performance studio. This conduct is grossly inappropriate for a (married) President of the United States,
(6) Maintaining a personal life, exemplified by gold bathrooms, lavish gifts, and bribes from unsavory donors, accumulating untold wealth through the perverse abuse of the American presidency (including a 43 million dollar jumbo jetliner, as an obvious bribe from a Middle East autocracy), inappropriate misuse of the Oval Office as a shopping mart for Trump’s unabshed retail sale of items such as sneakers, baseball hats, vodka, inscribed Bibles, bourbon, steaks, and other mercantile goods; can the reader conceivably picture Abraham Lincoln hawking sneakers from the Nation’s Capitol? This is irrefutable, “cuckoo nest” behavior!
(7) While running for the Presidency of our Democratic Republic, he publicly announced his intention to be “Dictator. (???)
(8) Ignorantly proclaiming his authority by the imposition of enormous tariffs, thus destroying the Nation’s traditional trading relationships, with the metastisized consequence of raising consumer prices; despite his elective victory based upon his snake-oil representation that, if elected, he would immediately lower them (as well as to end the Gaza and Ukraine Wars in his first week as President, Are these the manifest statements cand actions of a rational individual?
(8) The insanely hubristic statement of intention to unilaterally make the sovereign Nation of Canada, the 51St State, take over Denmark’s Greenland and change the geographically historic name of The Panama Canal to the “American Canal.”
Do these delusional statements of hubristic intention signify any acceptable degree of sanity? We think not.
(9) Donald Trump’s shameless and pathological reprise of stereotypical Gestapo tactics, by causing the rounding up of peaceful foreign residents, by his well-funded, dystopically masked private army (ICE), cruelly manhandling and deporting them to foreign torture prisons, without a glimmer of due process, as well as heartlessly separating families. Such programmatic behavior is far from acceptable American standards and empirically symptomatic of an inhumane personality disorder.
(10) There is a notable plethora of diagnosable symptoms of diagnosable Neurotic Personality Disorder in Trump’s bizarre befriending and reverent admiration of the Nation’s autocratic enemies, his boast that he can “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it,” his flourishing use of a wide, black, velvet-tip, emphatic marker to hubristicly promulgate, “Presidential Orders,” regarding matters, constitutionally relegated to Congress, his public declarations and acts of totalitarian “retribution” against political adversaries, his declared war on education, including the perverse extortion of institutions of higher education, his irrational reduction of Federal Civil Service, without Congressional action, and his derogation of the media.
(11) It is clinically relevant that Donald J. Trump is a determinative, singular tenant of an irrationally conceived, reductivist bubble from which he evaluates the entire inventory of interactive human experience in the exclusive terms of a “winner” or “loser.” It is a disgnosably toxic illustration that, in his disoriented perception that each participant in an empirical experience results in a winner and ” loser, “as rationally contrasted with parties dealing for their mutual benefit. It is additionally and consistently telling that Donald Trump disgracefully refers to all soldiers and sailors, particularly those who have lost their lives in battle, are “losers” or “suckers.” At Arlington, he amusingly inquired, viewing the enormity of military gravesites, “What was in it for them?”
(12`) Perhaps the most egregious and spectacular of his toxic symptoms of clinical abnormality is his serial mendacity and his schizophrenic promotion of “alternate facts” and delusional conspiratorial ideations.
America is responsibly and appropriately required to discern and act upon the evident mental disarray of Trump’s cognitive facilities and to lo conclude that Article 25 of the Constitution, authorizing the removal of a President on grounds of (mental) disability, is relevantly appropriate.
-p.
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