President Donald Trump’s clinical psychologist niece explained to her comedian friend on Tuesday who ordinary Americans can defeat her uncle.
“One of the challenges has always been getting people to recognize the difference between spectacle and governance,” observed Erich McElroy for Mary Trump’s Substack “The Good In Us.” “Donald seems completely focused on creating distractions while institutions quietly deteriorate underneath him.”
The younger Trump replied that this has been the Republican politician’s strategy from Day One. He does this, she argued, to avoid being held responsible for his corruption.
“Donald creates chaos because chaos prevents accountability,” Mary Trump explained. “If everyone is reacting to the latest outrageous statement or manufactured controversy, they are not paying attention to the dismantling of institutions, the erosion of democratic norms, or the extraordinary corruption taking place in plain sight.”
She added, “That is why it is so important to remain focused. Every day there is another scandal, another outrage, another attempt to normalize behavior that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to it.” If Trump’s abuses of power begin to seem normal, she opined, “democracy becomes much easier to dismantle.”
McElroy told Trump that the situation is so exhausting, the inducing of weariness feels deliberate — and she agreed that it is indeed part of a strategy.
“People become overwhelmed,” Trump said. “They stop paying attention because it feels impossible to keep up. That is exactly what authoritarians want. They rely on people becoming exhausted, cynical, and disengaged.”
Yet she did offer a solution.
“The antidote is community, persistence, and continuing to tell the truth no matter how overwhelming the moment feels,” Trump said. “That is why independent media matters so much right now. We need places where facts still matter and where people are willing to speak honestly about what is happening instead of pretending everything is normal. Nothing about this moment is normal.”
Earlier in the same interview, Mary Trump broke down the Trumps’ overall character by analyzing a recent controversy in Albania. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump have aroused mass protests due to overwhelming opposition to an exclusive luxury resort they plan to build on an island and coast that are currently open to the public and home to endangered wildlife.
“Of course they believe they deserve a private island,” Mary Trump said. “Of course they believe they should be allowed to destroy an ecosystem if it benefits them financially. Entitlement is the defining characteristic of every member of that family.”
She concluded, “The only encouraging part of that story is that people are pushing back against it.”
McElroy then pointed out how Ivanka and Jared claim they discovered the island while walking barefoot across it, even though later reports revealed that large parts of Sazan Island have unexploded land mines.
“That certainly would make for an interesting walk,” the younger Trump joked.
Since her uncle’s rise to power, Mary Trump has been outspokenly critical of him, drawing from both her career as a clinical psychologist and her numerous firsthand experiences with the entire Trump clan (including the president himself) to explain his behavior. In her firsthand account “Too Much and Not Enough,” she described him as warped in his childhood by his mother’s debilitating illnesses, which caused her to be distant and needy, and his father’s consistently sadistic, vulgar, dishonest and domineering behavior. She described the Trump in that book as “my malignantly dysfunctional family.”
More recently, the younger Trump raised alarm that her uncle appears to be showing symptoms of the same cognitive decline that ultimately manifested in his father’s Alzheimer’s disease, which eventually took his life.
“Obviously what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines,” Trump explained in February. “We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over. But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.”
She added, “So it's great that the majority of the American people are starting to wake up to this. But I have to say, it's a long time coming.”
Mary Trump is not alone among mental health care professionals in believing Trump is experiencing decline. Speaking to AlterNet in May about a letter signed by dozens of mental health and other health care experts, psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham — formerly of Tufts University and one of the chief signatories of a public letter to Congress raising the alarm about Trump’s well-being — detailed Trump’s seeming debilitations.
“There has been a frightening progression of symptoms,” Abraham told AlterNet. “These include grandiosity without moral safeguards, paranoia, impulsivity, vindictiveness, easy misperception of being harmed, moments of omnipotence, uncontrolled rage, and sole control over the use of nuclear weapons in a time of war. As a psychiatrist reviewing these, I can only say Yikes!”