Who Will Stand Up To Hatred And Bigotry-- Trump? Bernie?

We've covered her quite a bit before but in case you've forgotten, Brandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale, best known for the bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Friday she penned an OpEd for the New York Daily News, Trump’s mental condition seems to be getting worse: He should subject himself to a rigorous assessment now. She wrote that in the two years since she organized the conference at Yale "about how mental health professionals could warn the public ethically and effectively" about what Trump is, their "predictions have borne out to be true: Donald Trump in the office of the presidency has proven more dangerous than people suspected, has grown more dangerous by the day, and, without proper treatment, is becoming increasingly uncontainable."

She points to many easy to recognize symptoms of his increasing mental impairment-- the more frequent and more vitriolic tweets, the vicious and violent rallies, the crackpot conspiracy theories that show him unable to tolerate reality but "most markedly," she wrote, "he has of late been growing less and less coherent. His two-hour Conservative Political Action Conference speech revealed many rambling sentences, tangential thoughts, repetitions and word-finding difficulties. There was also the 'Tim Apple' episode a few weeks ago, and then his calling Venezuela a company, confusing his grandfather’s birthplace with his father’s, mispronouncing 'oranges' for 'origins,' and stating, out of the blue, 'I’m very normal.' These are signs of cognitive decline, the source of which we cannot know without examining him, but there is no question he needs an evaluation... If an employee showed the kind of impulsivity, erratic thinking and belligerent behavior that the president does, the employer would likely have demanded testing right away before the employee could resume work. In the United States, the people are the president’s employers. An unprecedented Washington conference on fit leadership revealed that even non-mental health professionals agree that the president needs urgent mental health intervention. So the choice now seems clear: the president needs to submit to a proper, independent evaluation of fitness, or if not, he can always resign."



Yesterday I watched him at Sheldon Adelson's Kapo Convention in Las Vegas (video up top). Right after he introduced a slew of far right Republicans from Georgia, South Carolina, Bakersfield, North Dakota-- not exactly Jewish-friendly places but very Israel-friendly (see the difference and why here), he launched into a typical cheap shot, slandering Ilhan Omar (D-MN), soon after Patrick Carlineo, one of his supporters, was arrested by the FBI and charged with threatening to kill Congresswoman Omar. The Trumpist told authorities that he's a patriot who loves Trump, and "that he hates radical Muslims in our government." Trump always refers to Rep. Omar as a "radical Muslim," which isn't true. Carlineo told them that he had told Omar's office that "If our forefathers were still alive, they'd put a bullet in her head." [You can contribute to Ilhan's reelection campaign here.]

Trump spreads hatred and rancor whenever he goes and whenever he speaks. Bernie, an American Jew from Brooklyn-- we grew up a few blocks from each other and went to the same elementary school (PS 197) and high school (James Madison)-- has a different way of approaching people. Please, please, please watch this video. "Love Will Conquer Hate: Bernie Visits Islamic Center in California." That's the likely choice we'll be making in 2020. I can't tell you strongly enough how important this short video is: