Mad monarch

“History is replete with instances of kings and queens who brought misery upon their people with their cruelty, poor governance skills or/and lack of sense for reality.” – Mad Kings and Queens

Today, this country has the closest thing in its history to a mad monarch who has brought misery upon its people through cruelty, bad governance, and a distorted sense of reality.

How did we get to this point with Donald Trump and how did Donald Trump get to be what and who he is?

The point of the American Revolution and the nation the Founders created and framed through a Constitution was to ensure that this country, unique among the nations of the world, would never endure the arbitrary rule of mad monarchs. Now here we are.

The nation suffers and dies because of the worst pandemic in a century, one that could have been cut short long ago with good governance, a clear sense of reality, and empathy rather than cruelty and indifference. Other countries have been able to beat down Covid-19. Trump refuses to do the things that have to be done to achieve that.

The reason is self-serving, as usual. Trump thinks enacting the proven measures to fight Covid-19 will sink the economy and that will doom his reelection. If that were true, an ethical president would still do the right thing regardless of the personal political cost. The tragedy is that the idea of a tradeoff between health and economy is a fallacy. It is just another example of the president’s lousy logic, and people will be sacrificed for nothing. No matter how hard Trump pushes to open everything, the economy will not recover amid a ranging pandemic. People just don’t want to die for a beer and a burger.

True, this pandemic has shown that if there were such a measure as national intelligence, this country, where plenty of people have protested belligerently against policies to protect their own lives and that of others, would not rate very high. But the paltry attendance at Tulsa’s super-spreader of a Trump pep rally showed that even among hard-core Trump fans, not many are that dumb.

A warped sense of reality is a president who was elected on a racist platform and refuses to acknowledge the reality of racism and instead defends the worst parts of our history, the symbols of the treasonous Confederacy that sought to perpetuate slavery by dividing the country. In lieu of dousing the flames, he constantly adds fuel.

In a bow to racists, his strongest supporters, he even refuses to say that black lives matter, equates that unassailable phrase with hate speech, will not even take that small first step toward healing all the damage  he has done to race relations. Instead, he and Vice President Pence will only say “all lives matter.”

Elementary logic tells us that if black lives are lives and all lives matter then black lives matter. So why not just say it? This administration has never been big on logic. But the main reason is that black lives matters has become the mantra for the new movement for racial justice, and for the president to endorse that would be the wrong message to send to the many racists in his base.

How did we arrive at this disastrous juncture in which the United States is being force-marched toward death and disaster madly by a man who exhibits all the signs of serious psychopathology?

You don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing, as Bob Dylan famously sang.  And you do not have to be a psychiatrist to spot a sick mind when you see it, either. But, as it happens, a raft of psychiatrists and psychologists share the view that President Trump is a clinically disturbed person.

That opinion is also held by Mary Trump, the president’s niece and herself a psychologist who has a decades-long, intimate knowledge of Trump and the family dynamics that made and marked him. Arguably the best analyst of Trump’s psyche, Mary Trump, in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough,” calls Donald Trump “the most dangerous man in the world.”

Mary Trump is right. Most people who suffer from psychopathology are a danger only to themselves. But not Trump. As Mary Trump tells it, Donald Trump grew up in a toxic family environment. And, as the saying goes, damaged people damage people.

What makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world is, first, the awesome power vested in him as the chief executive of the world’s last superpower, and second, the pernicious nature of his psychopathologies.

Malignant narcissism. Empathy deficit disorder. Sadism. Delusions of several kinds, like those that make him confuse reality with his own desires (this virus will magically disappear) and delusions of grandeur, as when he imagines he is a good candidate for the Nobel Prize or Mount Rushmore. Compulsive lying coupled with a total absence of guilt about it. And, more than a touch of paranoia, which accounts for his perennial posturing as the victim of the conspiracies and the perfidy of others, a projection of his own behavior and character.

Unlike many mad men, Donald Trump is more a danger to other people than to himself. He has a well-developed instinct of self-preservation. He won’t wear a mask amid the Coronavirus pandemic; a mask protects the other more than the self. He doesn’t think twice of organizing mass indoor rallies that put many people at risk of catching Covid-19, but he makes sure those who come in contact with him are tested constantly.

But the most disturbing thing about Donald Trump is not that he is more than half mad; it is that he is a criminal. The impeachment inquiry established that, and John Bolton and others have shown that perverting the course of justice is, for Trump, a way of life. But that’s trodden ground, proven to all but the willfully blind. Here, in conclusion I want to focus on Trump crimes that are broader and more serious even than his serial violations of the law and the Constitution. I want to focus on crime defined as something reprehensible, foolish, or disgraceful.” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition).

Resurrecting raw racism, which never had gone away but had been suppressed for a long time by sheer shame and societal shunning of racists, perhaps Trump’s worst crime, is something reprehensible and disgraceful. He has normalized bigotry.

Trump’s other moral crime is borne of cruelty. It is systematically unleashing the full measure of his wrath on the most vulnerable—immigrant families, people with health insurance for the first time in their lives, terrified to lose it especially now, those who would be hungrier but for food stamps. This is a crime worthy of burning in hell, if such a place existed.

In understanding Trump, the concepts of psychopathology and criminality go a long way. But there is another concept that modern social scientists and secular humanists like yours truly avoid but might be the most accurate of all: Evil.