Ok…and then…
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DR. KENNETH PAUL ROSENBERG AND NORMAN ORNSTEIN | OPINION CONTRIBUTORS
One of us is a psychiatrist, the other a political scientist. We have watched the fiasco since the election with mounting trepidation, from two very different perspectives. But we have a common bond: For more than a decade, each of us has worked to advocate for people with serious mental illness to get treatment. We are coming together now to advocate for immediate intervention for our president.
Since President Donald Trump’s election, the psychiatric community has debated calling out his illness(es). The American Psychiatric Association says we should remain silent out of fear that we would violate the Goldwater Rule — an APA rule adopted largely to prevent the partisan misuse of psychiatric diagnoses to unduly influence an election. But it is clear what many psychiatrists know privately, and a few have said publicly. The threat to our democracy is too great to remain silent.
Not just tantrums or selfishness
It may be no surprise that Trump railed against a 2020 election process that promised a major increase in turnout through early voting and voting by mail. He and many Republicans have advocated for ways to suppress votes, and suggested repeatedly that when everybody votes, Republicans lose. Remember, Trump had said before the 2016 election that if he lost, it was rigged; if he won, it was fair.
It also may be no surprise that Trump denied the outcome of the 2020 election in the days that followed it, despite the fact that President-elect Joe Biden’s margins in battlegrounds Michigan and Pennsylvania were larger than Trump’s four years ago and he flipped Arizona and Georgia to the Democratic column. And it is true that there is neither a legal nor constitutional requirement for a presidential candidate to concede when he has lost.
But Trump’s behavior since is antithetical to every norm we have in a democracy that values as much as anything the legitimacy of elections and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power after voters have spoken.
Trump supporter Tara Immen of Happy Valley, Ariz., protests at the Maricopa County Elections Department in Phoenix on Nov. 18, 2020.
ROSS D. FRANKLIN, AP
Signs of personality or mood disorder
To any first-year psychiatric resident, Trump’s sleepless nights filled with ranting tweets suggest irrational exuberance and lack of control, possibly a sign of a mood disorder called hypomania. His life-long history of disregard for others and deceit, if correct as reported, are characteristic of a personality disorder on the narcissistic and even sociopathic spectrum.
To be sure, definitive psychiatric diagnoses cannot be made without an in-person examination And certainly, psychiatric diagnoses themselves don’t make someone unfit to be president. But President Trump’s particular history and actions create a high index of suspicion for destructive mental processes which are putting the country and its safety and security in jeopardy.
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DR. KENNETH PAUL ROSENBERG AND NORMAN ORNSTEIN | OPINION CONTRIBUTORS
One of us is a psychiatrist, the other a political scientist. We have watched the fiasco since the election with mounting trepidation, from two very different perspectives. But we have a common bond: For more than a decade, each of us has worked to advocate for people with serious mental illness to get treatment. We are coming together now to advocate for immediate intervention for our president.
Boy, they won’t have to miss a beat with Pres Joe! But, I guess, dementia wouldn’t be considered a “serious mental illness”, so carry on…
Trump supporter dead in suspected suicide days after being arrested at Capitol riot
QAnon believer who plotted to kill Nancy Pelosi came to D.C. ready for war
“I predict that within the next 12 days, many in our country will die,” wrote Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., who had threatened to kill Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), according to federal court records.
Republicans are dead as a party if they go through with this , in 2022 they will lose 50 seats in the house and at least 6 in the senate.
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Free Speech !
"I missed the Brighton Bomb (IRA) by 20 minutes ! "
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Free Speech
" And Roar we Will ! "
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FBI arrests New York ‘Proud Boy’ plotting second attack on the Capitol
Excellent!
I think somebody needs to tell this judge that there was NO voter fraud - he needs to get with the mainstream narrative.
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And while there at it the CEO of Gab needs reeducation, skinning alive, or wiping out (to use every day left wing parlance).
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Utterly seditious that anyone would dream of trying to impeach Joe ‘come on man’ Biden
I mean uncle Joe is the most morally upstanding individual in US politics today
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