‘Doesn’t Even Recall What Happened Yesterday’!

PSYCHOLOGIST DAN McADAMS ON  DONALD TRUMP . . . 

by Selvam Canagaratna

“We forget because we must / And not because we will.”

– Matthew Arnold, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems (1852)

Many of the United States and the world’s leading mental health experts have concluded that Donald Trump is mentally unwell, pathological, dangerous and perhaps even a sociopath or a psychopath, writes Chauncey DeVega, Salon’s staff writer on politics.   

This conclusion, he notes, was reached after more than four years of observing Trump’s public behaviour. Other mental health professionals, most notably the President’s niece, Mary Trump, who is a psychologist, as well as Dr. Justin Frank (author of Trump on the Couch) have reached the same conclusion after expertly observing Trump’s behaviour for years or decades. 

After being hospitalized several weeks ago for COVID treatment, during which he was administered an experimental cocktail of drugs, Trump has behaved in an even more erratic and aberrant manner. 

Donald Trump’s mind and mental health are like the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. These last days before Election Day are a countdown for a man who, if he is defeated, will experience a meltdown that spreads his poison all over the world.

As documented by The Washington Post, Trump has lied more than 20,000 times while President. In these last few weeks, his lies have become more frequent and outrageous. 

Trump now claims he has somehow defeated the coronavirus pandemic

. In reality, the United States is falling deeper into a season of death. The virus is spreading largely unchecked, with more than 227,000 people dead in total and upwards of 70,000 new cases each day.

During his second and final presidential debate with Joe Biden, Trump sounded remarkably callous and cruel in his discussions of the death and suffering caused by his negligence and incompetence during the pandemic.

Because fueling his ego, grandiosity and malignant narcissism are more important than the lives of others, Trump continues to host rallies where his followers gather unmasked by the thousands. Public health experts have now directly tied Trump’s events to the spread of the virus and resulting illnesses and deaths. Trumpism literally is a death cult; his followers are human biological weapons.

Last week, in Omaha, Nebraska, Trump again showed that he does not care about the health and safety of his followers. Many of Trump’s supporters were left behind after a rally at an airfield in freezing temperatures when the buses they were promised did not appear. Many people were forced to walk several miles from the rally site back to their vehicles, and dozens of them required medical attention.  

But for all of Donald Trump’s evident mental pathologies, could it be that he is even more dangerous than previously understood? That’s the contention of Dan McAdams, who is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University. He is the author of almost 300 articles and chapters as well as seven books, including The Art and Science of Personality Development and The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By.

McAdams’ work has been featured in leading media outlets such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN and elsewhere. His most recent book is The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning.

In it he warns that Donald Trump’s greatest threat is caused by the fact that he exists only in the present moment, a man without a future or a past who lacks any sense of a life narrative, story or ethics beyond winning at all costs. This aspect of Donald Trump is the greatest threat to the country and the world.

McAdams also cautions that Donald Trump is a unique and strange person who defies any singular category of mental diagnosis, and shares his concern that leaders like Donald Trump inevitably bring ruin and destruction to the countries they lead. 

For the first time here in America we have a full-blooded authoritarian leader. This has happened in other countries at other times, most notably the 1930s in Italy and Germany, of course. But for Americans this was all news. I’ve spent several years trying to understand Donald Trump using the standard vocabulary, nomenclature, ideas and theories from psychological science to make sense of him and his life. But they have only proved somewhat helpful in that quest.

I end up just being flummoxed by the strangeness of the man. I believe that he does not neatly fit the categories. He’s not the typical malignant narcissist. He’s unbelievably disagreeable, but in ways that nobody would ever fathom. There are so many things about Donald Trump that are peculiar. My book is entitled The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump. I cannot help but to emphasize the strangeness of Donald Trump — it is as if he is a type of one-off when it comes to human nature.

Even at this point, there are many millions of Americans who are still in shock that Trump even became President. The 50% or so of the American populace who are strongly opposed to Donald Trump never got over election night 2016. It was a traumatic experience. It was an event that people have flashbacks over. People are in therapy about what happened that night.

Many people keep hoping against hope that somehow it is all going to go away — that Trump’s time in office is this weird anomaly that happened to American culture and somehow we are going to go back to some type of pre-Trump normal. I do not believe things will be the same again in this country. What many Americans will never get over is the feeling that this is not the country they thought they lived in before Trump was elected.

There is this repeated cycle of hope and despair with America and the Age of Trump. People are hopeful that some scandal, or his crimes against democracy and the country, will stop him. But that never happens. If anything, impeachment and every revelation of his wrongdoing has made him stronger. What does that cycle of ups and downs, hope and disappointment, do to people?

Going back to the 1970s, Donald Trump wins when he wears people out. Trump’s modus operandi has always been to be more persistent, to hang in there and to run out the clock. As President he tried to win by outlasting everyone else. He did this in the real estate market. He did this to his creditors in the 1990s.

Trump has shown unlimited energy to promote himself. I do not believe that there is anyone else on the planet with that much self-promoting energy.

Every day, Donald Trump he is fighting what he considers to be a battle of survival, and then he either wins or loses. Trump has been like that his whole life. Trump wakes up the next day and starts all over again with that behaviour. Trump does not even remember what happened yesterday. Other human beings remember what happened on Monday when it is Tuesday. As human beings we develop long-term narratives about how our lives work. But not Mr. Trump. For him it is new every day.

It is not a cognitive deficit. Trump has always behaved that way. He’s always had this tremendous ability to just forget about the past and to deal with the present moment. That is part of what makes Trump so powerful in the minds of his supporters. He’s not hiding anything. He’s not thinking about yesterday. He’s not worried about two weeks from now. He looks at the crowd, and he’s 100% all there in the moment.  

Outside observers often think, “Oh my God, there is something behind all of that performance and behavior!” The answer is no. Trump is always what we see. He is Donald Trump playing “Donald Trump” all the time.

Donald Trump is totally authentic as he fakes his way through the role. Trump is a perfectly authentic fake. There is nothing behind the mask. Trump has boundless energy because he does not have to worry about yesterday or tomorrow.

What does Trump’s living in the “forever present” with no thought for the future or the past do to a country in terms of truth, reality and decision-making more generally?

It dooms a democracy. It dooms a culture and the broader development and health of a culture. Democracy and society depend on people taking some sort of long-term view. If there is no long-term vision or understanding of reality, then what works for such a person like Donald Trump is whatever he or she needs at that moment to win the fight.

For example, on a given Monday Trump will say, “Nancy Pelosi is the worst person on the planet.” On Wednesday, it is a totally different fight. He does not have any memory of Monday and thus he will then say, “Well, you know what, Nancy and I were getting along today.” And on Friday, Donald Trump is in another place. It is all moment to moment.

Other people do not live that way. It is not sustainable. To survive long-term a people, a nation, cannot have leaders who behave like Donald Trump.