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.

Night at Camp David is a 1965 novel about the danger of a President of the United States going insane.    

In a November 30, 2018 review of the book, Tom McCarthy, national affairs correspondent for the British newspaper, The Guardian, wrote of President Donald Trump: 

“The current president has seen crowds where none exist, deployed troops to answer no threat, attacked national institutions – the military, the justice department, the judiciary, the vote, the rule of law, the press – tried to prosecute his political enemies, elevated bigots, oppressed minorities, praised despots while insulting global allies and wreaked diplomatic havoc from North Korea to Canada.

“He stays up half the night watching TV and tweeting about it, then wakes up early to tweet some more, in what must be the most remarkable public diary of insecurity, petty vindictiveness, duplicity and scattershot focus by a major head of state in history.”

And the nightmare isn’t over.

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

• Pardoned about 1,500 of his followers who violently tried to overturn the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election in the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress. Move than 250 of those pardoned had been convicted of assaulting police.
• Signed 26 executive orders reversing climate change initiatives, eliminating DEI programs, changing the federal designation for the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” and initiating a federal hiring freeze.
• Fired the inspectors general—who are charged with protecting the government from waste and corruption—from more than a dozen federal agencies.
• Following Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, the Department of Defense deleted content that included the achievements of nonwhites—such as Navajo code talkers, black Tuskegee Airmen, Medal of Honor winners and women veterans.
• Fired Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices.

Donald Trump

• Withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO). 
• Withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
• Fired the non-partisan board members at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His toadies illegally renamed it the Trump-Kennedy Center and appointed him as its chairman—just as Joseph Stalin made himself arbiter of what was permissible for artists in the Soviet Union.
• When artists and audiences—outraged by the takeover—boycotted the Center, an embarrassed Trump ordered its closure, claiming a two-year repair renovation was necessary
• Purged about a half-dozen executive assistant directors at the FBI. These were some of the bureau’s top managers overseeing criminal, national security and cyber investigations. Their “crime”: Investigating Trump’s inciting the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and illegally holding highly sensitive national security documents after leaving office.
• Ordered the Justice Department to indict his critics such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

• Declared “a national emergency” targeting migrants—legal and illegal.
• Tried to cancel birthright citizenship—enshrined within the United States Constitution— for U.S.-born children.
• Demanded a military parade for his 79th birthday, poorly disguised as a salute to the 250th anniversary of the United States Army.
• Pardoned favored political allies and loyalists. Among these: Seventy-seven people associated with the Trump fake electors plot to overturn the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, including Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and former chief of staff Mark Meadows. 
• Angrily fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics following a weak jobs report, triggering fears about his extortionate tariff policy. 
• Demanded that the media refer to the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” and banned the Associated Press from the White House for refusing to do so.
• Ordered the closure of all Federal Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility offices.
• Demanded that Canada become the 51st state and aggressively raised tariffs on Canadian goods.
• Shut down the Federal Government on October 1, when Democrats refused to agree to his gutting Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), causing 10-15 million Americans to lose health insurance coverage.
• Among those not getting paid: Air traffic controllers for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Owing to many controllers’ refusing to work, the FAA reduced air traffic by 10% at many airports.
• Shut off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for the poor to pressure Democrats to support his gutting of healthcare programs.

• Issued executive orders revoking the security clearance of Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Krebs’ “crime”: Preventing  lies spread by Russians—and Americans—on social media platforms from swaying the 2020 Presidential election to Trump.
• Flooded the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago with federalized National Guard troops against state governors’ wishes during immigration crackdowns and civil unrest.
• Flooded Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, with 3,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who terrorized (and in two cases murdered) both American citizens and illegal aliens. 
• Threatened Harvard University with the loss of billions of dollars in federal funding, claiming that 2023 student protests about Gaza violated the civil rights of Jewish students.
• Threatened Greenland—an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark—with invasion unless it agreed to acquisition by the United States. Since Denmark is a member of NATO, such an invasion would pit the United States against its own alliance.