If Trump is Nuts, Then So Are We

This is Bill Moyers interviewing one of the authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President, which will be published in October. An unprecedented event like this shows what a mess we’re in. The basic thesis is that Trump’s mental instabilities and disconnection from reality make him so dangerous that we must remove him from office immediately. But reading this interview I can’t help thinking that Trump succeeds because of the traits these experts write about. He can’t see beyond his own interests. He lies constantly because he’s so fragile that he has to tailor reality so that it won’t hurt his feelings. He’ll blame anyone but himself, throw anyone under the bus to avoid trouble or admission of guilt. All of this, though, makes him more relatable to many of his supporters, not less, because the cruelty of our economy has made them feel the same things and act the same way, or want to act the same way, that he does.

I'm not saying he won just because people who've been screwed-over economically made a rational decision. He won for lots of reasons, including racial animus, restrictive voting laws, and a lackluster campaign by Hillary Clinton. I'm saying we've become so enamored and uncritical of capitalist narratives of bootstrapping that we've internalized an economic system as a form of morality, and part of this morality is an individualism so extreme that it borders on mental illness. This author - the one interviewed by Moyers - says, “the only reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self.” In how many ways does our economy tell us that this is how we should think? So yes, bring on the diagnosis of Trump. But let’s also talk about how his disease and our elevation of it are symptoms of a much bigger one. He’s both the rot in our system and proof of much bigger rot.

He’s also proof of another scary irony: The only cure for rot this deep is massive systemic change, change that supports and renovates rather than destroys, but many voters – maybe most voters – are completely unpersuaded by this argument because 1) it’s too focused on systems and not focused enough on individuals, and 2) its approach to systems isn’t to destroy them. A huge number of voters want an individual person who will “get things done,” and they want to see government dismantled. Medicare for All, anti-trust law, emissions regulations and construction codes and zoning laws that respond to climate change – all these things are reasonable solutions that we need, and they’re also faceless and shore up systems many see as abject failures that we should abandon, so they don’t win elections. For reasons too deep for us to change, elections always end up being about individuals and our individual feelings about them. We've allowed our moral universe to be squeezed so that we can only talk and think in terms of individuals, at the expense of big-picture perspectives necessary for problem-solving, which is very bad news for renovating our institutions.

The author of this book says that Donald Trump’s disease is “solipsistic reality,” an inability to think beyond his own immediate sphere of perception. But our culture and our economy are built on senses of individualism that Trump is the extreme but totally logical extension of: he’s their (our) reductio ad absurdum. Let’s by all means get him out of the White House. But then what? One of the biggest threats to modern democracy seems to be this: while we, the electorate, have the ability to choose the person who presides over the huge and hugely powerful American government, we don't have the ability to value the qualities of mind that person must possess to understand, much less steer, such a government. At this particular moment in history, when we look into the mirror that is the presidency we don't want to see someone who understands things that we don't; we want to see someone who has the same grievances we do. The longer we stay here, the graver the danger.