Negative responses and condemnation continue to rain down on President Donald Trump after his crude insults against “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski Thursday in two of his often acerbic tweets on Twitter.
“It is really not normal that the president of the United States and the commander-in-chief would be tweeting about somebody’s face,” says longtime Republican strategist Liz Mair. “It does not conform to the normals that we expect and we treat as pretty set in stone in this country. It is also strange.”
“Strange” is one of the milder terms that has even brought condemnation and concern from more than three dozen Republicans in Congress.
“This has to stop,” says Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. “We all have a job — three branches of government and media. We won’t have to get along, but we must show respect and humility.”
“We make a big deal that Harry Truman told off a newspaper critic for writing a bad receive of his daughter’s music concert,” says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley at Rice University. “How G-rated is that compared to what Donald Trump has done?
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, White House communications chief for George W. Bush, says “as someone who once proudly called myself a Republican, the party will be permanent associated with misogyny if leaders don’t step up and demand a retraction.”
Republicans who have raised issues about Trump in the past, and came under fire from the GOP leadership for doing so, are now saying “I told you so.”
Personally, that a pretty demoralizing feeling,” Mair told The Washington Post. “A lot of people hoped that things would be different once he got into the office, but the guy’s been on this earth for seven decades. You can’t really change his behavior after all that.”
Increasing numbers, including psychiatrists, are raising questions about Trump’s mental state and his capacity to be President.
Mental health professionals say Trump suffers from “malignant narcissism.”
Writes psychologist John Gartner, the founder of “Duty to Warn,” and who taught in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for 28 years:
His narcissism is evident in his “grandiose sense of self-importance … without commensurate achievements.” From viewing cable news, he knows “more about ISIS than the generals” and believes that among all human beings on the planet, “I alone can fix it.” His “repeated lying,” “disregard for and violation of the rights of others” (Trump University fraud and multiple sexual assault allegations) and “lack of remorse” meet the clinical criteria for anti-social personality. His bizarre conspiracy theories, false sense of victimization, and demonization of the press, minorities and anyone who opposes him are textbook paranoia. Like most sadists, Trump has been a bully since childhood, and his thousands of vicious tweets make him perhaps the most prolific cyber bully in history.
In a conference of psychiatrists at Yale University earlier this year, Gartner warned that Trump suffers “a dangerous mental illness” and is not fit to lead the United States.
“We have an ethical responsibility to warn the public about Donald Trump’s dangerous mental illness,” he told the conference.
Dr. Brandy Lee, assistant clinical professor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry, said “some prominent psychiatrists have noted Trump’s mental health is the elephant in the room. I think the public is really starting to catch on and widely talk about this now.”
“I’ve worked with some of the most dangerous people our society produces, directing mental health programs in prisons,” says James Gilligan, a psychiatrist and professor at New York University.
How dangerous is Trump? Gilligan adds:
I’ve worked with murderers and rapists. I can recognise dangerousness from a mile away. You don’t have to be an expert on dangerousness or spend fifty years studying it like I have in order to know how dangerous this man is.
“I am very concerned about what this once again reveals about the president of the United States. It’s strange,” says Brzezinski. “It does worry me about the country.”
Adds her co-host, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, who is also engaged to Brzezinski: “We had so many people saying, ‘Hey, hope you’re okay’. . . We’re okay. The country is not.”
Wrote both in an Op-Ed for The Washington Post Friday:
President Trump launched personal attacks against us Thursday, but our concerns about his unmoored behavior go far beyond the personal. America’s leaders and allies are asking themselves yet again whether this man is fit to be president. We have our doubts, but we are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, “Morning Joe.”
Trump called Scarborough “Psycho Joe” in his tweets. In the article Friday, he said the White House threatened a negative tabloid story from the National Enquirer until they made nice with Trump and asked him to get the paper’s publisher and friend, David Packer to kill the story.
Reported J. Freedom du Lac and Jenna Johnson:
“This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked,” they wrote. “We ignored their desperate pleas.”
“That’s blackmail,” said “Morning Joe” team member Donnie Deutsch.
They also reported:
In their op-ed, the MSNBC hosts fact-checked the president’s Thursday tweets, writing that they contained “a flurry of falsehoods.”
Mr. Trump claims that we asked to join him at Mar-a-Lago three nights in a row. That is false. He also claimed that he refused to see us. That is laughable.
The president-elect invited us both to dinner on Dec. 30. Joe attended because Mika did not want to go. After listening to the president-elect talk about his foreign policy plans, Joe was asked by a disappointed Mr. Trump the next day if Mika could also visit Mar-a-Lago that night. She reluctantly agreed to go. After we arrived, the president-elect pulled us into his family’s living quarters with his wife, Melania, where we had a pleasant conversation. We politely declined his repeated invitations to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and we were back in our car within 15 minutes.
“It was amazing how many lies he packed into two tweets,” Brzezinski said Friday.
Of Trump’s claim that Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a facelift,” she and Scarborough wrote in their op-ed: “That is also a lie.”
Bottom line?
Donald Trump is a crazy egomaniac. Even worse, he has the authority to order dropping a nuclear bomb on anyone or anything that displeases his warped mind,
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Copyright © 2017 Capitol Hill Blue
I posted on Facebook and elsewhere on the day this maniac got ‘elected’ that he is mentally unstable: with sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies. Six months later people are beginning to realise it. Wake up America and get ride of him before he does any further damage. I cannot believe the ignorance of the people who continue to support him. Why?? I don’t care if you are Republican or Democrat (or neither) – this goes beyond ideological boundaries.
Trump frequently develops derogative titles for those who oppose him in some way. Maybe it is time for him to experience similar negative attacks. People could start referring to him as the Demented Donald or Man-boy Trump or possibly the Peed on President, How about the Nabob Nut? Can anyone think of other appropriate derogatory terms for him. He certainly supplies plenty of material to do so.
Well…………DUH! He’s shown that he is CRAZY from the very start of the campaign, yet this is the issue where you decide to call him on his behavior?! I keep waking up to his lunacy on a daily basis – the aberrant behavior that would have disqualified him in ever participating in the election if we did “due diligence” and required that anyone running for any office have a mental exam.
America needs to rid itself of this person. Public pressure on the politicians is required. Get to it citizens!
i do not believe any of you are as sane or more sane than trump. nor is it appropriate for any psychiatrist, to misuse the media for their soap box. the diversity of realities today, is a sad commentary about this whole insane world today.
No one has perfect mental health but there *are* qualitative differences between people’s ability to function in a non-disturbed way, DT is not simply “different” or an example of psycho-behavioral diversity.
To all you liberal Democratic Psychiatrists, “You Need Your Head Examined”.
How do you know all the psychiatrists are liberal? Are you privy to some esoteric information the rest of us do not have? I think you’re full of it and are just spouting off because you’re a partisan republican. Stinks to be you, oh narrow minded one.
Trump seems to overcompensate for attractive women, leaving me to believe he has underlying homosexual tendencies, he admiration for Putin and Flynn are good examples. The degradation of women and childish attacks on their face shows me, deep down, he hates women, no matter how attractive and has to constantly convince himself he is straight. He will never respect women, because he prefers men.
There are literally dozens of different reasons why a man might display misogynistic behavior, assuming it’s always some kind of latent homosexuality is an ignorant and overused accusation/insinuation which needs to be ended.
remove him and institutionalize him
Be careful of what you wish for, arbitrary institutionalization especially for political reasons is a slippery slope.
Diagnosis without complete, in person, examination of the patient is negligent, and considered malpractice. But let’s not let a little thing like that rain on our parade…(;-P
At the same time overidealizing professional practices which exist in part for reasons of legality and practicality is not the end-all be-all; patterns of behavior when displayed publicly, consistently and chronically *can* form part of a psychiatric profile (in fact there are arguably limitations to relying on what someone says about themselves and how they act for 30-45 minutes once a week while in a session since many people are masterful at presenting themselves in certain deliberate ways).
So the talking heads aren’t used to getting back the trash they dish out? President Trump isn’t crazy, he just gives back more than he receives and the snowflakes aren’t used to that sort of stuff from people they attack. Love it!
It’s not just the talking heads (I don’t care personally for 99% of the media in this country) but DT’s behavior is consistently vulgar, petty, overpersonalized and vindictive (the very fact that as POTUS he focuses on personal disputes on Twitter rather than learning the details of the massive healthcare reform he’s championing reveals deficits about his judgment, I don’t see how you can say otherwise).
He’s not so much mentally ill as he’s never had to ever give a shit how he presents himself to others. At 71 years old he’s not going to change or tone it down per his handlers, and they actually encourage this behavior because his base eats it up.
“In your guts, You know He’s Nuts” should be the new slogan for Trump. Hell- it worked for Goldwater back in 1964!!!
Your argument seems based on a strange premise–the idea that someone who’s never had to present themselves to others can’t be mentally ill? If anything that would lead to a greater likelihood of a mental disorder in my opinion (although more in the realm of a personality disorder than something like bipolar or schizophrenia).
The Secretary of Defense has to turn his key as well to send the bombs. And he’s not going to. It is never up to one man for precisely this reason.
Are you sure of that?
Anecdotally, a chap was in a missile silo with those vaunted ‘two keys’, and noticed that both key switches were just ordinary electrical contacts in ordinary rack-mount chassis panels, held in with ordinary cross-head screws. One enterprising missileer with a screwdriver, a bit of wire, and a couple clip leads could have easily defeated that “two-person” requirement. Yeah. We’re not so sure. J.
It does indeed make one wonder who holds the keys to our lives!!! After watching ‘Dr Strangelove” the other night, I’m not even sure I trust the Military with the final key decision.
what a crock