He is not a lunatic. And he is not a master of strategy.
The explanation for his behavior is surprisingly simple.
Those who still can dredge up a weary reaction have joined in common experience the same bitter aftertaste. You cannot spit it out. You sure as hell will not swallow it.
Donald Trump has attacked John McCain months after the war hero had been laid to rest.
I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president I had to approve. I don’t care about this. I didn’t get a thank you. That’s OK. We sent him on the way, but I wasn’t a fan of John McCain.
Expecting thanks from a deceased Senator might strike the casual observer as unreasonable.
To be fair, it is likely, although not certain, that my president was disappointed that some fantasy went unfulfilled, an expectation of fawning gratitude from the grateful sons and daughters of John McCain, rather than the Senator himself. The fact that his widow did not interrupt her time of mourning to give Mr. Trump the warm embrace he deserved must have been especially irksome.
To be fair, the lack of an attitude of gratitude from the grieving family was not Mr. Trump’s only complaint.
When he finally had the chance to do it, he voted against Repeal-and-Replace.
It was true that John McCain voted against what Republicans called Repeal-and-Replace. But congressional opponents of Obamacare had never been able to come up with the Replace part of Repeal-and-Replace. The was no Repeal-and-Replace. There was only Repeal. What Senator McCain, and a few other Republicans, eventually voted against was repeal of the only healthcare available to many American families.
But the primary, primal, rage against the ghost of John McCain seems to run much deeper. It comes from this:
John McCain received the fake and phony dossier. And John McCain got it, he got it. And what did he do? He didn’t call me. He turned it over to the FBI, hoping to put me in jeopardy.
That collection of materials did indeed arrive unsolicited into the office of Senator John McCain, to the surprise of everyone who saw it. John McCain had a clear legal obligation to turn such evidence over to the FBI, whether he believed it to be valid or not. He was under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to become an accessory after the fact by instead calling Donald Trump for instructions.
Mr. Trump later denied having attacked John McCain except in response to questions, a clear falsehood. He was asked no such questions until after his first public attack. It appears that he was, instead, provoked by a Fox News interview in which Kenneth Starr criticized the late Senator.
This is not an aberration, of course. It is part of a long term pattern.
He attacks at the slightest criticism. He has attacked, after they criticized him, the Gold Star parents of a war hero who died in combat saving his fellow soldiers. He attacked a war widow after she described his obtuse contact with her as she grieved.
He seems to lack the ability to truly empathize.
He sprinkles falsehoods like pixie dust. He lies about his lies, when video tells a different story. He lies about things so inconsequential, the lies themselves overshadow whatever small thing is being lied about. The size of crowds. Statistical data. The sequence of documented events.
More serious, he expects and demands loyalty beyond the law. And that is why he attacked John McCain. He expected a United States Senator to withhold important information from federal authorities.
This performance seems to follow improvised planning at best. When he is not at his best, reckless actions are the result of atavistic impulse. He acts without information when it feels right to him. It feels right to him when it satisfies an immediate emotional need.
Television news devotes time to political experts who speculate about presidential strategy. John King of CNN repeats the perennial question:
Is it his reflex in who he is, or does he see some strategic value?
Professional behavior experts have devoted countless hours analyzing from a distance. There is a degree of professional caution involved.
In 1964, a publication contacted thousands of psychiatric specialists and found a small proportion who were willing to tell them that the conservative Republican candidate that year was a madman. They didn’t use that word, of course. More clinical phraseology seemed more authoritative. The candidate, Barry Goldwater, later sued and the publication went the way of all flesh. Goldwater was not after monetary damages. I think he collected about a dollar.
He did achieve a more important goal. Half a century later, what is called the “Goldwater rule” survives. It is now a serious violation of professional ethics to diagnose a person a psychiatric caregiver has not met in a clinical setting.
So analysis of Mr. Trump is couched in delicate terms. An advocacy group called Brave New Films assembled a group of professionals to warn the world of the danger posed by putting a psychopath in a powerful position. They generally describe a hypothetical individual whose description happens to fit our president with exactitude.
Dr. Ben Michaelis has a Doctorate of Psychology at New York University:
There’s this model in mental health called the Diathesis-Stress model. Diathesis is a pre-existing condition and stresses are environmental factors. And you put a pre-existing condition in a stressful environment, and it blossoms. It comes out. It’s more likely to come out.
So if you have a pre-existing personality disorder and you are in a stressful position like … I don’t know … the presidency, that is a lot more likely to emerge.
Dr. Joel White, of the Center for Psychoanalytic Training & Research at Columbia University tells us of another such fictitious individual:
If you have somebody who tends towards what we call “malignant narcissism” and “excessive grandiosity” and such, when he’s put in an office where you are the most powerful man in the world, those character traits, rather than being adaptive, get exacerbated. And that the power of the presidency itself can actually aggravate his tendency to grandiosity.
A less clinical diagnosis is that Mr. Trump’s actions are simply self-centered, distasteful, and pose a danger to our country and beyond.
Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters is a former Fox News contributor. His speculation about President Trump is not clinical. He describes a sort of fearful jealousy.
John McCain was, and in our hearts remains, the man Trump could never be. And Trump knows it. It’s a classic case of male fears of inadequacy.
When it comes right down to it, he describes Mr. Trump in terms that those of us without medical or psychiatric training can easily understand. It is probably not covered by the Goldwater rule.
…a physical coward with a big mouth.
That does have the virtue of simplicity.
The Goldwater rule protects public figures from psychiatric malpractice. There is a flip side. A lunatic is not responsible for his own actions. That sort of moral amnesty ought to be assigned with some caution. That is why, in criminal law, insanity is considered an affirmative defense. The burden of proof is on the accused.
In the late 18th century, forerunners of modern Psychiatry were called “alienists.” The idea was that a psychiatric disorder separated an afflicted individual from his true nature. He was alienated from himself.
Unless Mr. Trump, by some miracle, is clinically diagnosed after actual examination, we should be unwilling to grant him that sort of absolution. I do not see President Trump as alienated from himself. I think his actions really are an accurate reflection of the man inside.
There is a simpler, more accurate diagnosis, one composed of a single word. It accounts for the lying, the impulsiveness, the continuing bad behavior, the tantrums, the self-centered disregard for the views of others. A single word explains the ease with which foreign dictators can extract important concessions with undeserved praise and a pat on the back.
It even accounts for what Colonel Peters describes:
…a physical coward with a big mouth.
It precludes the Goldwater rule, which forbids diagnosis at a distance. You and I, in fact every layperson, has the expertise to apply it.
It is a characteristic we have been taught since early childhood to recognize. We were warned about it from infancy by watchful parents. We can spot it from a distance, almost any distance.
My President, our Commander-in-Chief, the leader of the free world, the one individual who could end civilization in an afternoon…
… is a brat.
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Of course he was always a brat. A spoiled brat, at that. It is the foundation of a narcissistic authoritarian personality. Oops. That may be too clinical.
As physical maturity outgrows emotional, ethical, and intellectual maturity, the vulgar term for the lower orifice would also suffice as an accurate character descriptor.
Well phrased, Dave. Excellent terminology.