Off His Rocker - A Psycho-Social Analysis Of President Donald J Trump

Bob Muzelle was disconsolate as he watched the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, a 'Celebration of Victory', the President called it - heroic triumph over oppression in Venezuela and Iran, the removal of brutal dictator, and the liberation of the common people.  'A victory for democracy' the President said, 'and a victory for America'. 

 

How like him, thought Bob - arrogant fool, war-mongering adventurist, small-minded emperor - to launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country.  Yes, one with flaws like any other, but one simply playing out its own particular geopolitical vision, one based on profound religious principles, historical legacy, and cultural integrity. The attack was one more sign of a mentally unhinged man, a fantasy despot, an insane inmate of a garbled, distorted world. 

There are two schools of thought within the progressive community - one is that the man is evil in the manner of Adolph Hitler, a once in a generation a ghoulish twist of human nature that produces someone not only without morality, but a devilish disregard for the very idea of good. 

Hitler's camps were nothing compared to the gulags and gas chambers envisaged by a man bound and determined to destroy every last vestige of communitarian good, to send aspiring, morally legal immigrants back across the border in cattle cars to a certain death; to round up people of color and the other-gendered and intern them in reservations in the far north. 

The other school of thought is that the President is mentally deranged, and that his insanity, fueled by arrogant, unchecked ambition, gets worse by the day.  There is a significant body of literature defending this thesis, and each and every one of his initiatives have been analyzed, disaggregated, parsed, and reviewed through a psychiatric lens, and the results are revealing. 

Perhaps the most widely circulated is an article written by Prof. Ellington Porter, Dean Emeritus at Harvard medical school, Nobel Prize nominee, and distinguished author of a series or articles on the President in The American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. The article, excerpted below, referring to the President's attack on gender fluidity, details what Prof. Porter describes as classic sexual displacement disorder:

Sexual displacement disorder - an aggressively corrosive mental aberration that has its root causes in Freudian imbalance (ego, id, and superego disassembled, rearranged, and misaligned in chaotic disorder) whereby the patient can no longer adjust to changing sexual paradigms and assumes, rather arrogates to himself, the moral authority to destroy them to satisfy his own puerile frustrations. Stemming from sexual arousal rooted in mother-love and sexual animus derived from overweening male dominance, the disorder is most manifest in those with the power to realize the distorted vision caused by it. 

 

'No wonder', said Bob to a colleague at his non-profit, Scientists for Social Responsibility, a group dedicated to among other things, the promotion of a more congenial and relevant sexual paradigm. There was no such thing as 'sexual immutability', the discarded idea that biology determines outcome and that sexuality naturally occurs along a spectrum.  

No matter who did what to whom, it was kosher in psycho-sexual terms.  The President in the throes of his sexual displacement disorder was attempting to upset the applecart and return sexual ethos to antediluvian times.  

'I knew it', said Bob. 

'Aggressive transference disorder', was the way another psychiatric expert described the President's national and international machismo.  Both his assault on the bureaucracy and his punishing blows to Iran were deep-seated psychological distortions.

Kettle drums, tympani, oboes, and trumpets all following their own score  and producing a cacophony of atonal aggression.  The man's mind (referring to the President) must be truly addled at moments of destructive decisions.  'Raze them, destroy them, turn them into rubble, detritus, bits and pieces of meaningless brick and mortar', he said referring to Elon Musk's dismantling of the government bureaucracy. 'Assemble phalanxes of bulldozers, deploy wrecking balls and charges of explosives, leave nothing standing'.  

Nothing could be more expressive of aggressive transference disorder than this, a perfect example of childish behavior rooted in forced sexual abstinence and censorious inhibition of sexual desire.  The sexually frustrated child becomes the destroyer.  He, in his savagery, wants to repay his parents, particularly his father, for such denial of natural biological urges.  This wanton adult destruction is seen again and again in boys never allowed to be men. 

 

 

All this was particularly interesting because the Trump team had called the inveterate, inalterable hatred of him Trump Derangement Syndrome, for there was really no better term to describe the febrile, inchoate, unhinged attacks on the President.  Those for whom each and every move made by the President was wrong, destructive, anti-democratic, and hateful; and who had no policy direction other than that, were indeed demented.

‘This happens', wrote Arnold Israel, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology at Brandeis, 'in not a few cases.  Ironically the offhanded political swipe at the President's hectoring accusers - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is not too far off the mark.  The virulent, passionate hatred experienced by many in today's political climate can have far-reaching psychological effects'. 

The progression from concern, to extreme agitation, to downright, unsupported hatred in the political advocate parallels certain classic psychological disorders - a kind of early schizophrenic response triggered by exogenous, environmental forces but resonating from deep within the psyche of the disturbed individual. 

Was the professor implying that there was something of group hysteria in Trump hatred?  A certain psychotic personality that many progressives shared; and sensing this commonality grouped together in a kind of psycho-traumatic cabal?

So when Trump read some of the academic hyperbole centered around his mental competence, he had to laugh. First, for the last four years the country had been led by a true mental incompetent, a brain-addled, synapse-less moron; then a banshee who couldn't make sense out of 'See Dick run' was put up to run against him; then TDS, and the frosting on the cake, screeds from tenured academic has-beens.  What a joke. 

Nevertheless Bob and most of his colleagues, took the accusations seriously.  He, having dismissed religion long ago in pursuit of a secular utopia, could not possibly subscribe to the evil scenario. There was no such thing in the world and at best, a la Aquinas, only an absence of good, and certainly no immanent innate diabolical evil. The Hitlers, Stalins, and Pol Pots were no sweethearts, but certainly not visitations of the Devil. 

No, Trump was cracked, mentally aberrant, subject to more psychological ills than could fill a textbook. What these esteemed professors had written was spot on.  The man was crazy. 

'Reversal of fortune', wrote Hayden Marks of Duke, Trump Derangement Syndrome turned on its head to describe the man himself. 

A nutcase, a fruitcake, brain addled idiot...Pardon my French which many would say uncalled for given the academic aerie from which I speak; but irony has a way of calling the shots, and there is no more deranged man on the planet than Donald J Trump. 

 

From there, Marks went on to list. policy by policy, program by program, fiat by fiat, the disordered, mentally deranged mind of the President. 

Former President Richard Nixon perpetuated The Madman Theory of foreign policy.  He wanted the Soviets to think that he was mad enough pull the trigger for no reason at all, a bout of indigestion, a bad night's sleep, an argument with his wife. 

Nixon, of course, was not in the least bit crazy, and he was one of the most calculatingly devious presidents of all time; but he knew the value of the possibility. Nor is Donald Trump crazy, just unconfined by any of the usual prevaricating nonsense of internationalists.  When asked what would be his response to Iran's firing missiles in retaliation to his airstrikes, he said 'I'm going to bomb the shit out of them', and the mullahs had to take him seriously. A scorched earth assault was not beyond him. 

There were some of Bob's progressive colleagues who believed both theories - that Trump was evil and he was nuts - all the more reason to hate the man.  So fevered were their delusions, so rabid was their incoherent, unfounded hatred, so absolutely venomous were their attacks, that they couldn't see straight let alone think straight. 

The final statement on the matter was Arnold Israel's piece on 'The Irony Of Madness', a disquisition on the turn of the screw.  Trump critics, for all their fevered hatred, for all their deranged righteousness, were the madmen, and the President, as sane as a judge, had the last laugh. 

'These harpies', wrote Israel, 'these wicked sisters, this cabal of madness has ironically redefined political loss of marbles'. 

Nowhere in the annals of forensic psychology in the pages of group hysteria, has such a clear expression of demented, unhinged mania been noted.  The irony, of course, is that these critics in their madness have ascribed their very insanity on the President who is as sane, strategic, and schooled in Clausewitz and Machiavelli as any President in history'

 

The Pennsylvania Avenue parade finished up with a flourish.  The band's oom-pah-pa trailed off, the baton twirlers became but faint silhouettes in the distance, and the street was again quiet.  Bob turned and walked away.  Was he becoming mad?