Trump’s enablers are 'colluding with his insanity': assessment

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a dinner with the leaders of the C5+1Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, in the East Room of the White House (REUTERS)

Irish Times writer Fintan O’Tool says there are gentle ways to deal with madness. Dealing with the all-powerful malignance of Trump’s madness, however, is something different.

“How do you deal with a madman? For a long time, the answer was to beat him and chain him up in the dungeon. But in the more enlightened 18th century, pioneers of psychiatry sought kinder solutions. One of them was what was called ‘pious fraud,’” said O’Tool.

This is the practice of using little white lies, to trick a person out of a delusion, such as when an old-timey therapist would help a patient suffering from delusions of being executed by staging a mock “trial” at which the man was found innocent and told he was free to go.

But pious fraud works with harmless victims of delusion, not a madman with the actual power to raze everything the world holds dear. The United States, for example, is ruled by a man who believes he can effectively run a place like Iran with missiles.

“The danger of entering part way into the hallucination in the hope of bringing the madman back to reality is that it may work the other way round: the madman might just suck you into ‘the alternative logic of the delusion,’” warned O’Toole. “He doesn’t get cured and you end up colluding with the insanity.”

Trump is not mentally ill, said O’Toole, but he is completely mad.

“When the only thing that can stop you is your own warped mind in which you appear as the greatest person who has lived, you are mad,” confirmed O’Toole, adding that if you surround a narcissist “with sycophants who keep telling him that he is indeed omnipotent then he is going to believe them.”

And Trump totally believes it.

“Trump, with that weird honesty of his, told the New York Times in January how he regarded himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of ‘my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” O’Toole recalls.

Sanity, said O’Toole, “consists in the constant calibration of our inner impulses to the limitations imposed by external reality. When there are no constraints, there is no longer any reality.”

And this will only get worse as Trump “throws off the last shreds of inhibition.”

“Megalomania feeds on itself. Trump is a Napoleon with a Napoleon complex – the holder of immense real-world power who is also under the illusion that this power is unlimited,” said O’Toole. “The more he destroys, the more he believes in his capacity to remake the ruins into whatever image of it comes into his head. We know (because he has repeatedly told us) that the image in his head is of a world in which everything is demolished and rebuilt with the Trump brand emblazoned on its topless towers.”

“The only form of leadership that has a chance of preventing large parts of the world being turned into Gaza writ large is unequivocal support for truth-telling. Going along with the logic of murderous delusion has already proved a disastrous failure,” O’Toole added. “That way more madness lies.”

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