The Whole Country Is Now Suffering From Trump Derangement Syndrome-- And The Cure Is Bernie Sanders

Trump woke up today, New Year's Day, tweeting a book plug his Hungarian neo-Nazi former advisor Sebastian Gorka, followed a few minutes later by another crazy all-caps tweet claiming "2019 WILL BE A FANTASTIC YEAR FOR THOSE NOT SUFFERING FROM TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. JUST CALM DOWN AND ENJOY THE RIDE, GREAT THINGS ARE HAPPENING FOR OUR COUNTRY!" The day before, New Year's Eve, he spent the day in his bedroom-- claiming, untruthfully he was in the Oval Office-- watching Fox, pitying himself, eating fast food, drinking diet coke and tweeting more than a dozen times in a stream of consciousness display of mental illness.

We're all suffering because Trump is deranged; and that's Trump Derangement Syndrome. This morning New York Magazine published a rather stunning essay by Eric Levitz, The President Is Mentally Unwell-- and Everyone Around Him Knows It. "Until recently," he began, "the debate over our president’s mental health has focused on questions of psychological pathology: Do Donald Trump’s flamboyant narcissism, hedonism, and self-delusions add up to a malignant personality-- or a malignant personality disorder? Scores of psychiatric professionals say the latter. Some of their peers-- and a large number of laymen-- have insisted that the matter can only be settled by a psychiatrist who has personally, privately evaluated the president. That argument has always struck me as nuts. There is no diagnostic blood test or brain scan for narcissistic personality disorder; there’s just a list of observable traits... If a middle-school boy displayed Donald Trump’s level of impulse control in the classroom, there is little question that he would be considered psychologically unhealthy."

Regardless, in recent weeks, concerns about the commander-in-chief’s cognition have turned to the more mundane, and objectively determinable, question of neurological decline. The president’s slurred speech when announcing his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital; the exceptional incoherence of his most recent interview with the New York Times; and increasingly erratic (and Freudian) tweets all brought our president’s frontal lobe to the forefront of public discourse.

And then Michael Wolff started telling us what he’d learned while hanging around the West Wing last year. Having won the administration’s trust (possibly with the aid of these horrendous, anti-anti-Trump think pieces) the reporter was given extraordinary access to the president’s closest advisers. On Thursday in the Hollywood Reporter, he added a few new details to the emerging portrait of our president’s mental state:

Everybody [in the White House] was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories-- now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions-- he just couldn’t stop saying something.

...Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all-- 100 percent-- came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

The unanimous assessment of those in Trump’s immediate vicinity is shared by clinicians viewing him from afar. On Wednesday, in response to Trump’s tweet about the size and potency of his nuclear button, 100 mental-health professionals signed their names to a statement reading, “We believe that he is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his belligerent nuclear threats … We urge that those around him, and our elected representatives in general, take urgent steps to restrain his behavior and head off the potential nuclear catastrophe that endangers not only Korea and the United States but all of humankind.”

On Wednesday, Politico revealed that one of the statement’s signatories recently briefed more than a dozen members of Congress last December (all Democrats, save one unnamed Republican senator), on the (grim) state of Trump’s mental health. Around that same time, Ford Vox, a physician who specializes in brain-injury medicine, provided the following diagnosis of Trump’s condition, in a Stat news column calling for the president to undergo neurological testing:

Language is closely tied with cognition, and the president’s speech patterns are increasingly repetitive, fragmented, devoid of content, and restricted in vocabulary. Trump’s overuse of superlatives like tremendous, fantastic, and incredible are not merely elements of personal style. These filler words reflect reduced verbal fluency … “You call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, how many people do you have? And it’s pretty amazing how many people they have.”

The president made that remark in response to a question about the ideal corporate tax rate, demonstrating the degree to which his thinking drifts … If I were to make a differential diagnosis based on what I have observed, it would include mild cognitive impairment, also known as mild neurocognitive disorder or predementia … The key distinguishing characteristic between mild cognitive impairment and dementia is whether the decline is starting to interfere with essential daily functioning. In a billionaire typically surrounded by assistants, who is now the president surrounded by more assistants, whether Trump can perform his necessary daily tasks on his own may be difficult to assess.

Wolff’s reporting establishes that Trump’s decline is very much interfering with his daily functioning-- and thus, that his cognitive impairment is likely progressing toward dementia. Meanwhile, Vox’s claim that the president’s disjointed, superlative-suffused rhetorical style is no deliberate affectation-- but rather, a product of cognitive decline-- is readily apparent to anyone who watches decades-old interviews of Trump, in which he displays an equanimity, coherence, and (relative) eloquence wholly alien to his current persona.



For most of his presidency, the conversation about Trump’s mental well-being, and consequent capacity to perform the duties of his office, has been characterized by a willed naïvety. The president’s signs of senility aren’t subtle. His narcissistic self-regard is not mildly delusional; his impulse control is more than a little bit lacking. In October, a Republican senator likened the White House to an adult day-care center; said that he knew “for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him”; and insisted that, in private, most of his GOP colleagues shared this assessment. Wolff’s reporting suggests that virtually everyone in Trump’s inner circle has witnessed signs of his mental decline, and believes him to be unfit for office.

As a practical matter, liberals have devoted inordinate attention to the 25th Amendment, a provision of the Constitution that allows for the president to be removed from office for being physically or mentally “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” (as opposed to being found guilty of impeachable offenses). While superficially attractive, the “25th Amendment solution” doesn’t actually get us past the hurdle that’s blocking impeachment: Congressional Republicans do not want to remove Trump from office. A committed Congress would have no trouble finding a credible pretense for impeaching this president; they just don’t want to. And the 25th Amendment would require two-thirds of Congress to vote to remove Trump on grounds of fitness-- after a majority of his handpicked Cabinet members publicly express their desire to do the same. Considering the current political climate, it’s delusional to believe that this is a plausible scenario.

And yet, progressives’ fixation on the 25th Amendment is far less deluded than the rationalizations that keep Republicans from invoking it. By all accounts, most GOP Congress members recognize that Donald Trump is a pathological narcissist with early stage dementia and only peripheral contact with reality-- and they have, nonetheless, decided to let him retain unilateral command of the largest nuclear arsenal on planet Earth because it would be politically and personally inconvenient to remove his finger from the button.

You don’t need a degree in psychiatry to call that crazy.

Suppose Trump manages to survive into 2020 as president and that he goes up against Bernie. Bernie New Years message today gives you th impression there will be two very separate debates raging in the country-- one about policy and one about Trump's unfitness for office. Bernie made it clear in his message this morning that "fighting Trump is not enough. The truth is that despite relatively low unemployment, tens of millions of Americans struggle daily to keep their heads above water economically as the middle class continues to shrink. While the rich get richer, 40 million live in poverty, millions of workers are forced to work two or three jobs to pay the bills, 30 million have no health insurance, one in five cannot afford their prescription drugs, almost half of older workers have nothing saved for retirement, young people cannot afford college or leave school deeply in debt, affordable housing is increasingly scarce, and many seniors cut back on basic needs as they live on inadequate Social Security checks." He then laid out a platform that sounds very much like the planks any progressive Democrat would want to run for office on:

Our job, therefore, is not only to oppose Trump but to bring forth a progressive and popular agenda that speaks to the real needs of working people. We must tell Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial-complex, the National Rifle Association and the other powerful special interests that we will not continue to allow their greed to destroy this country and our planet.

Politics in a democracy should not be complicated. Government must work for all of the people, not just the wealthy and the powerful. As a new House and Senate convene next week, it is imperative that the American people stand up and demand real solutions to the major economic, social, racial and environmental crises that we face. In the richest country in the history of the world, here are some (far from all) of the issues that I will be focusing on this year. What do you think? How can we best work together?

Protect American democracy: Repeal Citizens United, move to public funding of elections and end voter suppression and gerrymandering. Our goal must be to establish a political system that has the highest voter turnout in the world and is governed by the democratic principle of one person-- one vote.

Take on the billionaire class: End oligarchy and the growth of massive income and wealth inequality by demanding that the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes. We must rescind Trump's tax breaks for billionaires and close corporate tax loopholes.

Increase Wages: Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, establish pay equity for women and revitalize the trade union movement. In the United States, if you work 40 hours a week, you should not live in poverty.

Make health care a right: Guarantee health care for everyone through a Medicare for All program. We cannot continue a dysfunctional healthcare system which costs us about twice as much per capita as any other major country, and leaves 30 million uninsured.

Transform our energy system: Combat the global crisis of climate change which is already causing massive damage to our planet. In the process we can create millions of good paying jobs as we transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

Rebuild America: Pass a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. In the United States we must not continue to have roads, bridges, water systems, rail transport, and airports in disrepair.

Jobs for All: There is an enormous amount of work to be done throughout our country-- from building affordable housing and schools to caring for our children and the elderly. 75 years ago, FDR talked about the need to guarantee every able-bodied person in this country a good job as a fundamental right. That was true in 1944. It is true today.

Quality Education: Make public colleges and universities tuition free, lower student debt, adequately fund public education and move to universal childcare. Not so many years ago, the United States had the best education system in the world. We much regain that status again.

Retirement Security: Expand Social Security so that every American can retire with dignity and everyone with a disability can live with security. Too many of our elderly, disabled and veterans are living on inadequate incomes. We must do better for those who built this country.

Women's rights: It is a woman, not the government, who should control her own body. We must oppose all efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade, protect Planned Parenthood and oppose restrictive state laws on abortion.

Justice for All: End mass incarceration and pass serious criminal justice reform. We must no longer spend $80 billion a year locking up more people than any other country. We must invest in education and jobs, not jails and incarceration.

Comprehensive immigration reform: It is absurd and inhumane that millions of hardworking people, many of whom have lived in this country for decades, are fearful of deportation. We must provide legal status to those who are in the DACA program, and a path to citizenship for the undocumented.

Social Justice: End discrimination based on race, gender, religion, place of birth or sexual orientation. Trump cannot be allowed to succeed by dividing us up. We must stand together as one people.

A new foreign policy: Let us create a foreign policy based on peace, democracy and human rights. At a time when we spend more on the military than the next ten countries combined, we need to take a serious look at reforming the bloated and wasteful $716 billion annual Pentagon budget.

Do you want to help? If I may, let me suggest that this is a good way to start off 2019. Especially if you have kids or ever plan to have kids. We can't let what happened in 2016 happen again in 2020. Right?