Nixon had so little approval he would have been impeached. To get rid of a sitting President before his term is up, you pretty much need a supermajority of opinion against him. Otherwise you just have the British system where the Prime Minister serves at the pleasure of Parliament. No President who didn't have Congress on his side would be safe. This seems like a recipe for ratcheting up the tribal warfare.

"It's just peachy for our President to promulgate unfounded conspiracy theories and demonstrate his replacing fantasy with reality, but God forbid a qualified mental health professional should raise a concern about this without conducting an in-person assessment."

Perhaps Trump's madness is contagious, so any professional who gets close enough to examine him will become mad themselves, and thus be unqualified to render a professional opinion!

:rolleyes:

And why is it that "anyone paying attention could have predicted how Trump would act"?

Could it be because Trump cannot help himself?

He imagines COVID is going away because he wants it to be gone. It isn't and these attempts to ignore it will backfire as numbers of cases start rising.

He'll blame that on more testing and he'll continue to believe his fantasy, the disease is going away.

He'll claim it was the governors' doing and they didn't follow Trump's guidelines.

Having two contradictory beliefs at the same time is common for Trump.

Trump is ending Fauci and Birx from being in press conferences reminding the public Trump's version of reality is a fantasy.

This ^

Are you quoting someone?

Because you don’t need a diagnosis to observe someone and make predictions about their behavior.

Maybe, but it’s an irrelevant factor. Doesn’t matter if he can or can’t help himself, what matters is what he actually does.

Again, the internal mental state that leads to his actions doesn’t matter. What matters are the actions he takes. We can guess that he will be bad at managing a pandemic because we’ve seen him being bad at managing everything else, going back to his businesses. If he can’t keep a friggin’ casino open, I mean jeez, what can he do? Who he is and what he does is far more important to us as voters than why he does it.

And common for many of us as well. It isn’t a sign of mental illness, though.

Yes, when mental disorders are this obvious, labels are unnecessary. (By the way, nothing is easier to diagnose at a distance than mental disorders. Disorders of the body usually require hands-on diagnostics.)

It's a question of degree. Most people may exhibit small signs of narcissism occasionally. Trump exhibits them all, and he does so all the time. They have been posted in this thread several times already.

How is this relevant to professionals weighing in using their professional credentials?

No, that he cannot help himself is because of his diagnosis.

:rolleyes:

The American Psychiatric Association disagrees with you.

The APA is claiming that the Yale docs need to keep their mouths shut, not that they're wrong.

Trump still thinks he's on reality TV:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...DNDT4V2XYAOQQE [several items down]

Hmmmmmm.....wanna take any bets?

No one in particular. I was channeling the generic Trump apologist's attitude.

Highlighting the way they and their Chosen One eschew, decry and ignore science when inconvenient and uncomfortable, but then demand that only the most rigorous science be employed by the Emperor's detractors.

They have made it clear that "remote diagnosis" is not a valid form of psychiatry.

At this juncture I don't care a whit about knowing what mental factors go into his actions. About *why* his "a-brain" short-circuits and misfires the way it does. His actions and their consequences all by themselves tell us all we need to know. He's not just unfit. He's dangerously so.

A body of political scientists rated him as the worst President a couple years back. Worse by far than Nixon, who had to scarper outta town because he was gonna be convicted in his impeachment trial. And who himself HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPEACHED. And since then the evidence of his malignant unfitness and criminality has only piled on.

To hell with arguing *why* Trump is *****. The fact that he *is* ***** is enough to know. We can leave the "why" 'til after he's sent packing.

Maybe the Dean of Harvard should vet all future presidential candidates before lay people are allowed to hear about them?

Doc Lee weighs in again.
Also, there's this:
https://www.salon.com/2020/05/15/yal...porters-nasty/

This author makes a strong case that the expansion of the Goldwater rule was promoted by one APA official largely out of fear that an angry Trump would cut federal funds for psychiatry -- and his own particular institution.
.....
https://www.madinamerica.com/2020/04...y-time-crisis/

Oh jesus . . .

A mental capacity evaluation is a very specific thing -the ability to make decisions for oneself.

"Dangerousness" in mental health, specifically refers to "risk of causing harm to self or others." It's the assessment of whether or not such risk of harm should result in involuntary commitment.

None of that is what Dr. Lee is doing here.

I'm not surprised to find one individual pushing their agenda. The guy who insisted Trump didn't have a mental illness because it gave mental illness a bad name was another one.

Interesting articles - especially the one about the APA and Liebermann, the lab-coat guy: Muzzled by Psychiatry in a Time of Crisis (Mad in America, April 25, 2020)

A lot of people will go down in history as the ones who enabled and helped Trump kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. It is astonishing to see an article from April 25 say, "With over 50,000 Americans already dead from the coronavirus pandemic." Now it's already 88,507.

Do you have any hesitation about proclaiming how a board-certified Yale professor of psychiatry should practice psychiatry?

None whatsoever when my “proclamation” is limited to: follow the standards of practice and ethical code of your profession.

"Nobody's allowed to say that the obviously lunatic and dangerous man in the White House is a dangerous lunatic. Especially not people who specialise in dangerous lunatics, they're not allowed to say it most of all"


This is brilliant.



There was thick, black smoke coming out of my car the other day. My mate, a mechanic said "You want to get that looked at." I put him straight, of course, there's no way he could possibly have worked that out.


Here, have a metaphor.

Exactly. The experts may not comment. And if anyone does say that maybe Trump is unstable, and losing contact with reality, one can reply that if it's obvious, then medical expert opinions are not needed.

Deny until it gets far worse than this, then claim that nobody could have known earlier.

From the link: I like the white coat effect, right out of a commercial. Which makes one wonder, which Merchants of Doubt are at play here: No wonder xjx388 continues to harp on this faux excuse not to look at Trump from a professional POV. Not that he's being paid or anything like that. But clearly the Merchants of Doubt campaign provides fuel for denying the obvious.

Look what Lieberman puts on his own web page:

https://www.jeffreyliebermanmd.com/media

It's rounds and rounds of Sunday talk shows et al with him spewing his position in classic Merchants of Doubt format.

Quite telling.

There is a history. This article addressed Lieberman soon after the false alarm HI experienced that a nuke-armed missile was incoming:

HuffPo Part XVI. “THIS IS NOT A DRILL”: Response to Jeffrey Lieberman

Lieberman accuses Lee of being like a Nazi, this article starts with death camp survivor, Elie Wiesel, quote about not sitting by.

The Biden thread was bogged down (hopefully that is ending) with complaints about the character of his accuser so I'm going to let you all read the parts of the article that point out Lieberman's own serious ethical problems with how he treated schizophrenics.

Suffice it to say I am reminded of the scientists who denied global warming, evolution, the harm from second hand smoke (the original Merchants of Doubt), Reyes Syndrome's connection to aspirin and so on. The point is, there always seem to be these rogue doctors and scientists who take up a fringe position and get lots of attention and often funding for it from the science deniers.

This guy Lieberman has an agenda besides some dedication to the ethics of the APA. This explains that his 'power' or influence in the APA is not what it seems. I thought it was being loved, admired and influential in the APA but that's not it at all. It was/is a conscious concerted effort to discredit Lee. Unless Lieberman is a one-man sycophant on a crusade for Trump, there is more behind this. And I don't think my suspicion belongs in the CT forum.

The article suggests maybe he is a Trumper: I dunno, is he vying for a position in the Trump administration? Did someone hire him to go on all those talk shows?


The article's authors support the Goldwater Rule, within limits:

This one's for you xjx388 and your continual harping that you wanted to see the research:

There's plenty more in the article including discussion of a scientific meta-analysis that concludes: And this addresses my gripe at the beginning of this thread about Dr Frances and his "I wrote the book" and Trump isn't mentally ill because he's successful and the other arguments Dr Frances made:
This article was written long before Trump's failure in a real crisis. It was written after Trump failed to respond to a false alarm that there were incoming nukes. GW didn't stop reading the goat story to kids when told of the first tower being hit. His staff pulled him out after the second tower was hit. At that time I thought and still think Bush really did have a deer in the headlights look because he didn't know what to do.

Well when there was an alarm of incoming nukes in HI, Trump was golfing and kept golfing surpassing even the stupidity of GW. At least Bush had decent people around him that acted. Not Trump. Trump had only sycophants around him, afraid to express any independent thought in Trump's presence.


[SG- second thread vindication ;) ]

Crap, did you miss this from your link:
And this guy is making pronouncements about ethics?

No, didn't miss it. Given all the grief people are getting for dissing Reade in the Biden thread, I wanted to steer clear of what could then be claimed I was attacking something other than his belonging to the Merchants of Doubt crowd.

But I'm glad you saw it and brought it up :)

Nah, he's not nuts.

He's either nuts or one of the most pathetic excuses for a human being I've ever seen.

Isn't it possible he is both?

That's more of, that's just nuts. :rolleyes: He is definitely both.


I've been meaning to post something else in this thread. Do you recall that twice (at least) when Trump has been asked by a reporter, 'Are there any words you want to say to the country at this time?' or something to that effect, Trump has gotten angry at the reporters?

He's incapable of feeling any empathy. He can barely get the words out when someone gives him a script to read that includes a message of empathy for lives lost. He manages on days like Memorial Day, to speak general words of empathy, again, in a speech written for him that he knows he has to read.

But it's clear he is utterly absent of the emotion of empathy.

Sure, but if someone is mentally ill you have to cut them some slack (but not have them be president, for god's sake!). They aren't entirely in control of themselves. If Trump isn't mentally ill (which I think he is) then he's even a sorrier excuse for a human being because he is in control of what he says and does.

I totally agree with this. He has no empathy. He cannot put himself in anyone else's shoes. He cannot feel how they feel or see through their eyes. It's all about him. He's also not immoral; he's amoral. He only judges things on how they affect him.

Yes, earlier, he managed to sometimes* work this out, but now he can't keep the mask up.

Sometimes not - see the pussy grabbing quote. He told a story that he thought made him seem good rather than a creep.

Those are sociopathic traits as well. Found this on Google:
Remind you of anyone? :(

Yeah.....the name is on the tip of my tongue....

Sociopaths can be violent, but most aren't. I think Trump falls into this category. He is a narcissistic sociopathic.

Sound familiar:

Sound familiar?

You know where I'm going with this by now.....