Trump is nuts and a danger to the world

This year a panel of psychiatrists broke a professional standard and decided that they had to warn the public that Donald Trump is nuts enough to make him a danger to the country.  Before he was elected,  an Oxford doctor pointed out that Trump scored worse than Hitler on a test for psychopathology.  The Washington Post reviews three books that study the dangers of Trump's insanity:  "Now, some psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals are shedding long-held norms to argue that Trump’s condition presents risks to the nation and the world."

 The major symptom is Trump's obsessive need to destroy other people's accomplishments.  His mode of operation is not to excel at anything he does,  but to dominate by disparaging and destroying anything achieved by others.  His entire campaign was based upon that practice.  The motto   Make America Great Again was based upon the contention that the United States, which had successfully climbed out of The Great Recession had lost its status as strong economy and a bastion pf democracy and freedom.  America had, in fact, retained its leadership until Trump became president, and he led a slump into puny-minded malice and destruction of any claim America has to intellectual leadership and moral competence.

Trump has proven himself to be an inveterate liar.  Little he says is backed up by facts.  For him facts, especially those based on scientific proof,  don't exist.   He uses lies to destroy.  He began his political run by circulating the lie the Obama was not born in America, a lie contrived by racists.  Obama is a a favorite target of his malice.  He extended it when he claimed that Obama wire-tapped Trump Towers,  Even though it has been denied after investigations by his own administration, he repeats it because his only motive is to damage those things that stand in his way or dim the reputations of those who have achieved positive things.  And he sees Obama as an enemy who he would like to take out, if he could. His lies about Obama reveal a man motivated by malice.  They consist of the defamations that are defined as slander and libel.  He practices total dishonesty and malice in violation of the basic decency that our democracy tries to hold as its purpose.  

Trump is the epitome of a vandal.  He is like the child who breaks into someone's house and destroys anything he can find so that other people cannot enjoy their lives.  He is driven by raging resentment.   Where his insane rage is most dangerous is in the effect it has on foreign policy.  His push toward nuclear war with North Korea and Iran is the primitive rage of a petulant child or mental deficient at finding he is not the center of the universe.  People like Trump are usually under custodial care so that they cannot harm themselves or other people.   in Trump's case, his daily rages become headlines in the news along with hurricanes Harvey,  Irma, and Maria, and the Mexico City earthquakes.  That all destroy human lives and parts of the planet.  


Trump's threats against the Iran nuclear agreement define the ignorance and dishonesty that makes up a large part of his character.  As one who represents himself as the world's premier deal-maker,  he has denounced the Iran agreement as horrendous.  Most people who realize the dangers of nuclear weapons in potentially destroying the earth and the living things on it.  So, while the agreement with Iran only delays their development of a nuclear weapon,  it is an achievement which opens up diplomacy as a way of meeting the challenge of nuclear threats.  

But what Trump and the other critics of the deal fail to acknowledge is that the agreement is not just between the U.S. and Iran.  The treaty also includes the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, Germany and the European Union.  The U.S took the lead in negotiating the agreement and succeeded in getting Russia and China to participate in the negotiations and in carrying out the terms of the agreement.  Their inclusion is a amor diplomatic achievement and forms the basis for further nuclear controls.  If Trump were to withdraw from the deal, he would demonstrate to the rest of the world that the U.S. is untrustworthy and incapable of sustaining leadership in addressing the control of armaments.  Iran, as it has threatened, would resume its development of nuclear weapons, and we'd be back to where we were before negotiations.  Trump''s idea is to threaten countries like North Korea and Iran with the very kind of open warfare that the negotiations are intended to avoid.

The Iran nuclear agreement was never claimed to be a solution.  It was created to remove an immediate threat so that more comprehensive negotiations could address the nuclear problem in general.  The Iran agreement was a first step by the big players in the matter of nuclear control.  Trump is vandalizing the one step the world has taken to resume work on the only solution we have for avoiding nuclear war.

He is mentally incapable of engaging in constructive work with the people, congress, or other nations.  But he has the backing and complicity of the Republican Party, and it cannot escape blame for the deterioration of peaceful relationships.  Countries like Russia are always looking for ways to extend power and exercise dominance,  and it has been agreements based upon mutual survival that have kept eat power-hungry in check.  

Trump is a merely a vandal run amok.  And the GOP shares that power obsession and is willing to risk the nation rather than serve it to hold power.  With Trump and the GOP, the leadership we once exercised has been abandoned.  For people who revere the work that the U.S. has pursued for civil rights and the peace to be free,  the U.S. has failed.  Now were have to look to other countries for intellectual and moral leadership.

One of the recent books on Trump's mental state makes the case that the people who have made the Trump craziness possible are the insane ones.  And if one reads the political dialogue on the Internet,  one cannot escape the fact that many people have lost the ability to discern facts and exercise reason.  

The fact is that the nation is divided between those trying to cling to some decency and reason and those who have given up sanity to the lust for totalitarian power.  The rest of the world regards us as dangerous as North Korea.  When we declare allegiance to Trump's flag, we renounce all that America has stood for.  That is insanity.