How dangerous is Donald Trump?

Is he a danger to himself or others? To the country and to the world?

I’m very careful when writing about this subject. The media, like the country, is splintering off into left and right visions of the world, each side pushing the other to extremes.

The middle who dominated the country for so long and provided something close to consensus is shrinking.

We are left with fear and hysteria to fend for ourselves. I needed to do better than that during this election, especially when I decided to write about it.

I’m not getting on that train.

I don’t care to contribute to dogma, left or right, or to fear and hysteria. But Donald Trump’s overall mental health is an important subject which is only now being seriously considered.

Donald Trump frightens people.

In a democracy, that is dangerous in itself. He has successfully promoted the idea of opponents being enemies and locking them up. One of the core tenets of a democracy is that opponents are not enemies, but partners in a system that offers safety to both.

To threaten political opponents with imprisonment is the hallmark of every fascist or Communist state in history. How curious that Trump’s supporters give the same cheer as Stalin’s puppets during the great show trials and purges.

Trump appears to delight in frightening people. Psychiatrists across the country report an epidemic of Trump-related anxiety disorders. They call it the “Trump Effect.”

As someone who is mentally ill, I  hope I’m the last person to see mental illness as a disqualifying problem for a president or anyone else. About half of all Americans have some form of mental illness.

I should say that in my mind, my 30 years of treatment for severe generalized anxiety would keep me from seeking any kind of elective office even though I haven’t needed treatment for a decade. Still, I would disqualify myself.

It’s ironic to me that some of the sanest people I know are crazy, and some of the most dangerous are considered quite sane.

But psychiatric illness alone in a president is not what frightens psychiatrists about President Trump.

As he is dragged kicking, lying, and whining from office, the question he leaves all of us with is this: Is the president dangerous by reason of mental illness?

His erratic, delusional, enraged, petty post-election denial and behavior raises issues of grave concern for a person so powerful. He has the power to destroy most of the earth.

The U.S. law gives great weight to civil liberties and much latitude for a wide range of behaviors.  It is important to separate mental symptoms oll poor judgment or opinions and points of view that differ from one’s own from dangerous behavior.

When the Constitution was written, there was little understanding of what we now call mental illness.

When the law permits or requires that people be detained against their will for psychiatric reasons, they must demonstrate that they are a danger to themselves or others.

Some mental health professionals have begun to argue that Donald Trump has from the beginning of his presidency show signs of being dangerous to Americans and to almost everyone in the world.

Half the country is worried about his sanity, the other half believes that even raising this issue is part of a conspiracy to defy and remove him from office.

We have a President who revels in being the toughest of the tough, the one who will break any rule, disregard any law, brush off checks and balances, custom or tradition.

He is an attention addict, there is never enough for him. He can never be mistaken, he can never lose. Never bet against me, he tells supporters. The odds are never against him.

He doesn’t need to tell the truth or be civil or courteous. That seems dangerous to many people.

Frightening people, shocking them and giving the cultural elite and the political left a perpetual finger seems sometimes to be his purpose and his mission. He is forever seeking vengeance, but no one can be quite sure for what. Stalin did the same thing.

And this troubled and damaged man is one of the most powerful men in the world. In an interview on Fox News, then-Vice President Dick Cheney said “He (the president) could launch a kind of devastating attack the world’s never seen. He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts.”

Dr. Diane Jhueck is a practicing therapist who specializes in performing mental health evaluations and detentions on individuals who present a danger to the self or others.

She has worked at the United Nations and is the founder of the People’s AIDS Project.

She is one of the 37 psychiatrists and mental health experts who gathered at Yale University two years ago to diagnose Donald Trump and share with the country and the world their assessments of his mental health.

Dr. Jhueck was chosen to write one  of the chapters on Trump in a book by Yale’s Dr. Bandy Lee titled “The Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump.” In the book, Dr. Juech has contributed a chapter called A Clinical Case For the Dangerousness of Donald Trump.

Her tone is professional, thoughtful, and reasoned.

And yes, she believes Donald Trump to be dangerous, as does his niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, (Too Much And Never Enough), who believes him to be one of the most dangerous men in the world.

The question for me is not whether Donald Trump is dangerous, but how dangerous. The truth is our safety and our hope.

It’s one thing to undermine traditions and democratic practices – that’s scary enough – but it’s quite another to think about him endangering the whole world and our the country’s governing institutions, by force if necessary.

Just how dangerous is President Trump? Dangerous enough, it would seem. But probably not as dangerous as many people fear, or as he pretends to be.

Dr. Jhueck is both restrained and credible in her analysis of Donald Trump. Her case study is not a political screed, but a case for seeing the President in a clear and different way.

This is why so many psychiatrists decided to ignore conventional ethical standards banning mental health experts from diagnosing someone they haven’t treated and why they wrote their book.

The group decided it was their duty to warn.

I do wonder if their views of Trump’s mental health had been widely reported, he may not have been elected in the first place. His followers have made a point of ignoring or rejecting science, there’s no reason to think they would believe a bunch of shrinks.

– Trump,  says Dr. Jhueck, has normalized previously outrageous behaviors, negatively impacting everyone from leaders of other nations to our own children.

-He has repeatedly declared himself “the greatest,” or “tremendous,” or “knowing more than anyone,” and numerous other statements consistent with a narcissistic personality disorder, with regard to an “expectation of being viewed as superior without any commensurate achievements.”

-He exhibits denial of any feedback that does not affirm his self-image and psychopathic tendencies, which affords him very limited ability to learn and effectively adjust to the requirements of the office of president. Rather, he consistently displays a revenge-oriented response to any such feedback.

-Holding this office feeds Trump’s grandiosity and claws at the fragile sense of self underneath it. He knows he isn’t up to it, say the shrinks, and it terrifies him. His hiding place is bluster and distraction.

Trump’s patterns of behavior, says Dr. Jhueck, while in the role of President of the United States, have a potentially dire impact on every individual living not only in this nation but across the entire globe.

The earth itself is in peril, she writes, both from the urgent issues that are not being addressed while an unstable man sits in the Oval Office and by the new urgencies he creates.

She concluded in her case study: “Mr. Trump is and has demonstrated himself to be a danger to others – not just one person or a few, but possibly to all others.”

Dr. Jhueck has studied Trump a long time, well before he took office.

He changed substantively in his level of dangerousness, she says,  when he became the leader of the free world. A showy tabloid fixture in New York, he was almost never taken seriously, something he seems to have never gotten over.

He has shaken the global political structure to the extent that the U.S. presidency is rapidly losing that standing.

His narcissistic traits (revealing themselves in blatant lying, impulsive and compulsive decision making against national interests), and his immature responses to relationships have created a leadership gap that other dangerous and ambitious politicians may well seek to fill.

“Yet,” she says, “it is impossible for him, through the lens of his mental dysfunction, to evaluate his actual presentation and impact.”

Trump has managed to turn his followers against any institution, person, expert, or research that might disagree with him or criticism him – opposition parties, the media, scientists, immigrants.

He preaches paranoia, grievance, and mistrust. To challenge him is to be banned and removed, and then ridiculed and insulted.

That is surely dangerous to any democracy.

No criticism of him is considered valid or truthful by the vast majority of his followers.  In a democracy, that is the very opposite of the Founder’s wishes – they wanted the president to be held accountable and in check. They feared a Trump.

Seven out of ten Republicans now believe the presidential election was stolen from him by massive voting fraud even though there is no credible evidence to support the charge. People listen to the things presidents say.

In a democracy, that is almost as dangerous as the threat of military intervention in political procedures (which Trump has tried to do more than once).

When the credibility of elections is brought into doubt, the whole system and traditions of democratic life are in danger.

Which means all of us are in danger.

Will every election be like this from now on because he opened the door?

His almost sociopathic refusal to treat the pandemic as an emergency is another example of critical and urgent danger. His narcissism and self-interest are actually killing large numbers of people.

Since the election, the President has said or done nothing to indicate he is even aware of the pandemic breaking records for sickness, death, and critical medical shortages.

It’s hard for me to imagine a response to a severe national crisis that is more dangerous than that.

Speaking for myself, I don’t see Donald Trump managing a military coup of any kind.

He is a bully and a coward, he is a verbal warrior and TV character, not a  real one.

I think the dangers, as Dr. Jhueck has outlined them, are more subtle and less obvious. But still very real. She is heroic in my eyes for defying the poobahs of psychiatry to try to warn us.

It is quite clear by now that if Trump could have stolen the presidential election, he would have. He sure tried and is still trying. He will fail. He’s great at sounding like a despot, he is awkward and bumbling at being one.

From my somewhat remote perch, it seems that the civic structure that has held America together for centuries is stressed and challenged. But it also has held together.

To me, the real story of the Trump era is that we survived him. And we defeated him, just the way it should be done: at the ballot box.

We have also learned in the process to take our democracy more seriously, to fight for our freedom and for a gentler and kinder country. To value the truth and the importance of facts.

We have all become much more aware of the need to consider and manage and take responsibility for the vast new digital culture which Trump understood how to use for evil.

The opposition is far behind understanding social media, it was absolutely made for someone like Donald Trump.

Trump has taught us that we need to pay attention, to stay engaged, and remember that a democracy is only as good as people insist that it be.

After all, he was defeated, and by many millions of votes.

More than 75 million people rejected his ideas and his cruelty and the danger he presented.

That ain’t Nuthin.