The Duty to Warn march had begun at New York Law School where the experts demanded that Trump be removed from office based on their inability to understand the 25th Amendment. And then the mental health experts marched to the beat of Fraenkels drum in what they insisted was a funereal and dignified procession.
"Please wear professional attire or dark clothing," the mental health experts were instructed. "There will be a slow drum beat, DANGER tape, and flashing warning lights.
The paperwork urged, Bring a drum if you have one and, come as your solemn, concerned self.
If only the organizers had put a fraction of their obsessive delusions into actually trying to justify the claim on their shiny blue banner that, Trump is psychologically unfit to lead this country.
There were no drums when Bandy X. Lee, the organizer of Yales Duty to Warn conference showed up on Capitol Hill to brief Dem politicians about Trumps mental illness that she diagnosed over Twitter. Lee, a self-proclaimed expert on the prison system, apparently isnt even currently licensed to practice.
But on Twitter, Bandy X. Lee explained that she had been "licensed on two continents," has "excellent credentials," a "flawless ethics history" and speaks "four languages. On Vox, Lee claimed that Trumps recognition of Jerusalem was a pathological example of him resorting to violence. Then she blamed him for an increase in schoolyard bullying. Appearing on MSNBC, she warned that Trump could be the end of humankind.
All this craziness didnt stop Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Jamie Raskin from inviting her for briefings.
Around the same time that Fraenkel was beating his drum in Manhattan, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump was released by Macmillan. The book contained unsolicited accusations and diagnoses from 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts. It was edited by Bandy X. Lee.
Contributors included Tony Schwartz, a former New York Times reporter who had worked on the Art of the Deal with Trump. His mental health qualifications are unclear. Also included is Gail Sheehy, a former New York Magazine writer, who had written a Hillary biography. The epilogue features Noam Chomsky, whom Lee describes as a linguist and philosopher-historian. Not to mention leftist genocide denier.
What makes Tony, Gail and Noam, mental health experts? In a movement that diagnoses the President of the United States over Twitter and then insists he be removed from office, that doesnt really matter. And its why none of the media accounts have even bothered to note that some of Lees mental health experts are actually members of the media with no apparent mental health credentials.
In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz diagnoses Trump with a risky sense of self-worth. Gail Sheehy accuses him of narcissism and paranoia and a trust deficit.
In a book already dedicated to violating the professional ethics of the Goldwater Rule, Lee manages to include amateur armchair diagnoses by writers who are even more unqualified than her to make them.
But its not as if the professionals are any better.
Bandy X. Lee boasted, In the book we have as authors Phil Zimbardo, Judith Herman, and Robert Jay Lifton, who are notable not only for their contributions to mental health but for their amazing ethical record. These are living legends who have also stood on the right side of history.
Lifton is a leading psychohistorian who accuses President Trump of "malignant normality" and urges other "psychological professionals" to confront "the malignant normality of Trump and his administration." He appears to define malignant normality as behavior he disapproves of for political reasons, but that isnt actually a form of mental illness. That undermines the whole theme of the book.
And its in the books foreword.
Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword accuse Trump of being a present hedonist. And this is based on Zimbardos time perspective theory. Zimbardo is both the inventor of the theory and the guy writing about it. Rosemary doesnt seem to have a degree, but as part of her Hawaiian heritage, she was trained in the Hawaiian psychology based on forgiveness known as hooponopono.
Hooponopono was derived from appeasing the Hawaiian gods. The Hawaiian gods must hate Trump.
Zimbardo and Sword claim that Trump qualifies as among the most extreme present hedonists we have ever witnessed comes from the plethora of written and recorded material on him, including all his interviews, hundreds of hours of video, and his own tweets.
So theres a practitioner of the Hawaiian art of hooponopono diagnosing Trump over Twitter. And her colleague, a living legend, is accusing him of a condition that appears to emerge from his own theory.
Everyone in the book agrees that Trump is bad. They just cant agree on a diagnosis.
Michael Tansey claims its a delusional disorder. Laurence Dodes blames sociopathy. Craig Malkin argues its narcissism. David Reiss pushes for dementia and cognitive impairment. Steve Wruble claims he has daddy issues. That is, he claims that both he and Trump have daddy issues.
Thomas Singer believes Trump mirrors our collective attention deficit disorder, our sociopathy and we must recognize our own pathology. Not only is Trump crazy, but were crazy for electing him.
Everyone except Singer is probably nuts.
Donald Trump is so visibly psychologically impaired that it is obvious even to a layman that something is wrong with him, John D. Gartner insists. But nobody can diagnose him because Trumps is a genuinely complex case. Even though many writers have tried to analyze and diagnose Trump, and have gotten pieces of the elephant right. What is missing is the whole elephant.
Whats the whole pink elephant? According to Gartner, possibly, malignant narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, the bipolar spectrum, hypomania and also maybe, pure evil.
What are his medical sources for these claims?
"Insight into this question comes from, of all sources, Joe Scarborough, host of the popular MSNBC show Morning Joe," he writes. Then he mentions, "David Brooks is not a mental health professional, but he astutely commented on what appeared to him to be Trumps increasing hypomania."
Hooponopono looks a whole lot better than a shrink who watches MSNBC and reads the New York Times and then tries to diagnose a man he never met based on media rants. And that is what all these diagnoses are reducible to. They originate from the media and then the media reports on them.
Do we even need psychiatrists to diagnose Trump over Twitter and television?
We dont have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trumps observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years, Gail Sheehy insists.
Thats quite a turnabout in what was supposed to be a book by psychiatrists and mental health experts proving their case. Instead Sheehy, who isnt a psychiatrist, insists that we dont actually need psychiatrists because weve seen Trump on television.
But does that mean Sheehys readers can start remotely diagnosing her?
James Gilligan insists, If psychiatrists with decades of experience doing research on violent offenders do not confirm the validity of the conclusion that many nonpsychiatrists have reached, that Trump is extremely dangerousindeed, by far the most dangerous of any president in our lifetimesthen we are not behaving with appropriate professional restraint and discipline. Rather, we are being either incompetent or irresponsible. And so psychiatrists must back up lefty biases against Trump.
Its not medical science, but leftist politics, thats calling the shots here.
Many of the essays dont even attempt to diagnose Trump. Instead they self-diagnose the political trauma that Trump inflicted on them. Jennifer Contarino Panning even invents a Trump Anxiety Disorder. The strangest essay belongs to Steve Wruble who attacks his Orthodox Jewish father for supporting Trump in an essay, titled appropriately enough, Daddy Issues.
He moans that when he told his father that Trump was unconsciously sabotaging his chances of winning the election his father dismissively replied that a Hillary win would be bad for Israel.
"Despite giving my father what I felt was my intellectual gold, he only commented on what was important to him," Wruble whines. "Donald and I are expert at putting our fathers on pedestals while at the same time trying to knock them off in order to make room for us to have our time being seen as special."
Steve Wrubles essay is in its own way the most honest of the bunch. Because its not really about Trump. Its what Wruble and the other mental health professionals and amateurs project onto Trump.
Wruble blames Trump for the conflicts with his father. And identifies with him. These arent essays, theyre Rorschach inkblots. The Duty to Warn movement tells us nothing about Trump and everything about the sort of people who take to the streets beating a drum against him.
Trump isnt crazy. But his accusers often dont seem too sane.
Noam Chomsky concludes the book by suggesting that Trump would perpetrate some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act. The epilogue of a book accusing Trump of mental illness ends with a crazy conspiracy theory by one of the accusers.