John McLaughlin, former CIA director, jumped on the wagon a few of us jumped on earlier. Even during the campaign, I said the candidate, Trump, has a personality disorder. People way above my pay grade began calling it that way, too, incl a few top psychiatrists willing to expose themselves. It took Chris Matthews for friggin’ ever to finally realize Trump is abnormal. We feel for those so afflicted but we don’t make them President. Still, most commentators seem to try to normalize Trump, asking totally dumb questions like, Why did he do that, say that, etc.? He does it b/c he has a personality disorder.
What made me realize that McLaughlin had tumbled to the truth about Trump is when he said that Trump doesn’t learn. That is one of the characteristics of a personality disorder, something I pointed out months ago on this blog. They use the same strategies over and over, no matter how inappropriate and counterproductive. After 115 days or so, is there anyone who can’t see this?
Amazing.
The inability to learn, i.e. to change course, is why his staff is useless to him. He MUST do what he does. He’ll decompensate if he doesn’t and there are early signs now of just that. His interview with Lester Holt showed signs of it in his blatant contradiction of not only his staff’s statements but his own statements. Notice neither Ivanka nor Jared are visible. They are probably too busy scraping up the last of the winnings from dear old Dad’s corrupt presidency and getting their paperwork in order for their move to Russia.
Anyway, the reason people discount warnings from observers like McLaughlin, the most highly qualified imaginable outside the medical field, is the same reason it is so difficult to get funding for mental health: people do not understand mental disorders.
Later today from Jenifer Rubin column:
“Former White House adviser Peter Wehner remarks, “The problem for Republicans is that given who Trump is — given that his problems are temperamental and characterological and therefore won’t be cured — I think it’s quite likely that at some point many of them will be forced to break with him; that his actions will be so transgressive, so problematic, so embarrassing and so unpopular that it’ll become in their self-interest to distance themselves from a president who clearly is not a well man.”