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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