The process of removing Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate can’t exactly be said to have worked well, but it worked. And now it’s time for Americans to turn the same self-regulatory instincts to Biden’s 78-year-old former rival. Trump’s campaign is already falling apart – most recently with the shameful attempt to use a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery as an electioneering platform. But there are deeper reasons to inspect Trump’s political credibility now. Because cognitively speaking, Trump is beginning to make Biden look like Oscar Wilde.
Events move so fast, the news cycle is so accelerated, that the most telling signs of Trump’s decline pass without commentary. It might be illuminating to dwell a little on one of them. About two weeks ago, Trump seemed to denigrate the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for military valour in combat. Speaking at his New Jersey golf club, he was praising Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the late Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, when he recalled how he once gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Miriam, I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, it’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that’s soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal.”
The liberal press, now comfortably primed to respond with moral outrage to every outrageous thing Trump says, pounced. Here he was, once again, spewing contempt for the military. However, few, if any, people pointed out that it is not the “Congressional Medal of Honor” but the “Medal of Honor”. Had Biden made that mistake, an outcry would have ensued. And Trump’s patterns of thinking here indicate a cognitive decline in the way he apprehends and makes sense of reality that goes beyond mere propriety or morality. It is, of course, wholly deficient in empathy to justify the lesser value of the Medal of Honor by citing the fact that the soldiers who receive it have “been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead”. But it is not simply, as people have suggested, that Trump, who despises “losers”, considers a “loser” anyone who has been wounded in battle, or taken prisoner in combat.
It is that, first, he does not seem to recognise the moral significance of bodies and minds in pain. And, second, he is not aware of the importance, social and moral, of pretending he does recognise another’s pain even if he doesn’t. Then there is the language itself. It suddenly swerves into the incoherent. Trump says that “everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor that’s soldiers”. (He could also mean: “everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor – that’s soldiers.”) The words verge on nonsense. Either he is saying that every soldier gets the Medal of Honor, which is absurdly untrue. Or he is saying that only soldiers get the Medal of Honor, but that every soldier gets it – which is similarly absurd – but with a twist. If Biden had spoken in such a way a year ago, he would have been pushed aside all the sooner.
Trump’s extreme rhetoric is still routinely dismissed as him “just being Trump” – the usual hyperbole and bluster. Yet it is hardly mere bluster or hyperbole for Trump to claim, as he has recently, that “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be.” Perhaps the most alarming part of that sentence is the disturbingly disconnected “whatever it may be”. And it is not merely vulgar for Trump to republish a post claiming that Kamala Harris has achieved political success thanks to dispensing oral sex. The claim is not just appalling; it is crazy to make it in public. That post appeared with several others: a photo of Harris in an orange prison jumpsuit, a photo of Barack Obama with a caption asking Trump supporters if they wanted Obama to be tried before a military tribunal, and photos of Trump with AI-created lions. Most people do not lack inhibition to this degree. But Trump’s repetition of such lunacy has made it routine. Call it the banality of madness. Trump’s assertion, made in deadly earnest in an interview last Tuesday with Dr Phil McGraw, that God had spared him from being assassinated in order to save America, and possibly the world, barely raised an eyebrow.
Incredibly, in America, where just about everything goes – Trump, for example – there is a tacit prohibition against discussing Trump’s obvious mental incapacity in public. The taboo was imposed in February 2017, just over a year after Trump’s inauguration. That was when the New York Times published a short letter, signed by “33 psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers”. Noting Trump’s “inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions”, and his pattern of distorting reality to suit his own “psychological state”, the letter reasoned that “[i]n a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed”. The signatories concluded that Trump’s “speech and actions make him incapable of serving safely as president”. Trump’s continuing refusal to accept his defeat in the 2020 election makes the letter prescient.
The response to the letter was more than passing strange. Other mental health professionals rose to denounce the letter and its signatories. One was Allen Frances, the prestigious chairman of the task force that wrote the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV”, considered psychiatry’s diagnostic bible. Frances had two problems with the letter. The first was, he said, that Trump was too successful to be mentally ill – a bizarre argument that sounded like one Trump would make himself. “Mr Trump,” Frances intoned, “causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy.” Therefore Trump could not possibly be mentally ill, Frances concluded, apparently unaware of erratic politicians in world history who have achieved success in the exact terms defined by their insanity. Frances added, with an apparently unintentional touch of humour, that pronouncing Trump mentally ill was an insult to the mentally ill.
Reacting to the negative backlash, the NY Times then published an article about the controversy by Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist. Friedman referred to what is known in American psychiatry as the Goldwater rule. This was the American Psychiatric Association (APA)’s official prohibition against mental health professionals making a public diagnosis of a politician’s mental health. That edict itself was a response to mental health professionals participating, in 1964, in a public survey and judging the then Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater, mentally unfit to be president. Siding with the APA, Friedman finished by declaring that clinically judging Trump to be mentally ill would let him “off the moral hook”. And from that point on, liberal attacks on Trump were unfailingly moral, a tactic that soon degenerated into a grossly ineffectual torrent of moral hubris, virtue-mongering and sanctimony.
There are, of course, sound reasons to resist declaring Trump mentally unsound. At this late moment in American civilisation, the concept of mental illness is nearly impossible to clarify. When I wrote, in 2017, about the dust-up over whether Trump should be publicly diagnosed, my very own therapist at the time paused in the middle of one of our sessions to scold me for doing so. The weapon of psychological stigma can be used, like impeachment, against any rival or adversary. In 2011, a psychologist named Drew Westen enraged people by publishing, again in the Times, a lengthy essay arguing, in effect, that Obama did not have the “character” to be president (a “deep-seated aversion to conflict”; “tic-like gestures of compromise”).
It could be that the debate over whether it’s acceptable to call Trump mentally unfit to be president is at the heart of the weird debate over who is more weird, the Democrats or the Republicans. America is becoming unrecognisable, so fast, in so many ways, to so many different types of people, that the words “weird” and “sick” are being anxiously domesticated into neutral terms of description. Yet, in the end, the unclarity is all the more reason to be vigilant about truly aberrant figures slipping into leadership of the country under the cover of a revolution of norms. Trump is truly aberrant. Everyone knows it, his supporters as much as his detractors. No one talks like this man. No one abuses other people like this man. No one misrepresents reality like this man. And he is not lying. He is describing what he perceives, which is not what is actually there.
Biden’s relational skills, his empathy, his moral perception of reality were never the issue. He had been, by all appearances and accounts, a mentally stable man all his life. That is why his cognitive decline became so apparent, once his entourage stopped shielding him. It is harder to discern Trump’s cognitive decline, because his behaviour, ironically, serves the same purpose as Biden’s entourage, obscuring the decline it is a symptom of. But anyone watching him abruptly change subjects in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, anyone who listened to that speech and watched him disappear into the rabbit hole of his own mind, can see that he is even further along in his deterioration than Biden.
The liberal media cried wolf in 2016, and now they are afraid to ring the alarm bells when it is vital to ring them. After 6 January and the spectacle of watching the effects of Trump’s “personal myth of greatness” being challenged, now is the time to apply the same scrutiny of Trump’s mental condition that was applied to Biden – the appearance of throwing stones from glass houses be damned. Having been criticised for questioning Trump’s sanity in 2017, and despite the daily evidence that Trump’s faculties are degenerating, the ferociously partisan liberal press wishes to present itself as dignified and above the fray. Yet what was good for the octogenarian gander with declining faculties but an intact moral centre should be equally good for the septuagenarian gander with declining faculties and a pathologically absent moral centre. The great blessing in life, and the great curse, is that people can get used to just about anything. That inborn tendency is now, with regard to Trump’s unstable mind, a curse.
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