Among the outrages President Donald Trump has committed since returning to power on January 20:

• Launched an unprovoked attack on Iran on February 28, believing that in six weeks he could force its Islamic rulers to abandon their plans to develop nuclear weapons.   
• When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz—through which about 20%-25% of the world’s oil flows—Trump threatened:  “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”  
• He backed off—at least temporarily—only after legal experts and organizations such as Amnesty International warned that attacking civilian infrastructure would constitute war crimes under international law.

Trump’s vindictiveness, his narcissism, his compulsive aggression, his complaints that his “enemies” in government and the press are trying to destroy him, have caused many to ask: Could the President of the United States be suffering from mental illness?

One who has dared to answer this question is John D. Gartner, a practicing psychotherapist. 

John D. Gartner

Gartner graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, received his Ph.D in clinical psychology from the University of Massachusetts, and served as a part-time assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years.

During an interview by U.S. News & World Report (published on January 27, 2017), Gartner said: “Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

Gartner said that Trump suffers from “malignant narcissism,” whose symptoms include:

• anti-social behavior
• sadism
• aggressiveness
• paranoia
• grandiosity. 

“We’ve seen enough public behavior by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably,” says Gartner, who admits he has not personally examined Trump.  

Another psychiatrist who’s determined that Trump is “mentally compromised” is Bandy X. Lee, an assistant clinical psychiatry professor at the Yale School of Medicine. 

And she offered her reasons for doing so as the editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. 

“It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to notice that our president is mentally compromised,” she and colleague Judith Lewis Herman asserted in the book’s prologue.

According to Dr. Craig Malkin, a Lecturer in Psychology for Harvard Medical School and a licensed psychologist, Trump is a pathological narcissist:

“Pathological narcissism begins,” Malkin writes, “when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray and even hurt those closest to them.

“When they can’t let go of their need to be admired or recognized, they have to bend or invent a reality in which they remain special despite all messages to the contrary. In point of fact, they become dangerously psychotic. It’s just not always obvious until it’s too late.”

Lance Dodes, a retired psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, believes that Trump is a sociopath: 

“The failure of normal empathy is central to sociopathy, which is marked by an absence of guilt, intentional manipulation and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification.”

* * * * * * * * * *

Americans have long believed that they—and especially their leaders—are an “exceptional” people. As a result, they consider themselves immune from the threats of corruption and dictatorship that have plagued other nations.

Millions of Americans—including many Trump supporters—have been shaken by the revelations of the Epstein Files, which chronicle the sexual depravities of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Even more disturbing has been the knowledge that he and Donald Trump maintained a friendship for 15 to 17 years.

The Files so far released are replete with names of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, Woody Allen, George Stephanopoulos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

This has added to the shock and revulsion felt by millions of Americans. Yet they might have been less shocked had they read Gore Vidal’s 1959 essay, “The Twelve Caesars.” 

Gore Vidal

Mark Coggins from San Francisco, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Vidal’s essay is an ode to The Twelve Caesars, a classic work of ancient biography by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus—known as Suetonius.

Suetonius, a Roman citizen and historian, chronicled the lives of the first twelve Caesars of imperial Rome: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.

Vidal sought to show the relevance of Suetonius’ work to present-day America: “It would be wrong, however, to dismiss, as so many commentators have, the wide variety of Caesarean sensuality as simply the viciousness of twelve abnormal men. They were, after all, a fairly representative lot.

“They differed from us – and their contemporaries – only in the fact of power, which made it possible for each to act out his most recondite sexual fantasies. This is the psychological fascination of Suetonius. What will men so placed do? The answer, apparently, is anything and everything.”

Thus the lesson taught by the celebrities—including Trump—who glommed onto Jeffrey Epstein: They differed from ordinary citizens only in the power they held over themselves—and others. And, reveling in that power, they felt free to indulge the most depraved fantasies, sexual and otherwise.