President Donald Trump's behavior is, regardless of what one thinks of his political views, "ominous," at least according to one expert.
"Donald Trump is a 'puppet' to psychopathic traits that are likely to become even more dangerous if Republicans suffer a bruising defeat in next month’s midterm elections, a leading clinical psychologist has warned," reported The Daily Beast's Farrah Tomazin on Wednesday. "Dr. Vincent Greenwood, director of the Washington Center for Cognitive Therapy, also believes the president’s danger is underestimated and warrants invoking the 25th Amendment."
Tomazin added, "Speaking to the Daily Beast, he said Trump exhibits clinical psychopathy, characterized by three particularly destructive traits: impulsivity, remorselessness and an intense drive to dominate." He quoted Greenwood, who has an extensive history conducting psychological evaluations and studying Trump, as adding that "these traits are ominous—every one of them."
He continued, “The clinical psychopath is just unable to grapple with any thorny or difficult issue. They’re radically disinhibited and very impulsive, which is not a good fit for a commander in chief. Perhaps the most central and most problematic trait is remorselessness. Psychopaths just don’t have the guardrails that a normal functioning conscience provides. They just don’t experience guilt or shame. There’s just no feeling of discomfort at all at the suffering of others, and they deflect all responsibility for any damage they may inflict. So I think those are all grounds for certainly considering the 25th Amendment.”
Greenwood has even written a book, "Puppet on a String: Trump Is Ruled by an Ominous Psychological Condition," that breaks down his arguments about the president's seeming psychopathy.
While it is controversial to diagnose a public figure that one has not personally evaluated on a clinical basis, there are still many physical and mental health experts who have come forward to raise alarms about Trump's fitness to serve. In May 36 top medical experts, physical and mental, signed an open letter to Congress warning that Trump is displaying traits which indicate that his continued occupancy of the presidency is an existential threat to both America and humanity as a whole. Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, the letter's chief author Dr. Henry Abraham, formerly Tufts University psychiatry professor, elaborated on why he is so concerned.
"I like to use the metaphor here of a man in a supermarket," Abraham told AlterNet. "He's getting in line in a supermarket, and he has a basket full of food, and he smashes it into the woman in front of him, because she has more food than he does and it's going to take a long time and he's in a rush — and what's she doing buying so much food, and get out of the way, and she's a terrible person, and I'm really in a rush and I'm far more important than she is. And he pushes it, and he really shoves her with the shopping cart. Now, if you saw that, you would say — well, you'd probably call the police, because it's really a bizarre kind of thing. But that's the whole point. It's a bizarre kind of thing. It's crazy. It's a red flag."
He continued, "Now, those kinds of red flags are obvious to you because you're in the supermarket and people usually don't behave that way. And to a clinician, it's obviously a red flag. In fact, we can begin to think about various psychiatric disorders which might explain that behavior. And that's the interesting challenge here, because we really can't make a diagnosis without looking at all the facts and, of course, having the patient in some form cooperate with the examination. So we can't come away with a diagnosis, but we can come away with, 'Geez, this is a symptom which is a red flag to us, and we should pursue it and we should note it and we should not forget about it.'"
Abraham concluded, "And that's the situation that nearly all of us in the medical profession are in with respect to Donald Trump. We see red flags, we know what causes those red flags, but we don't know the specific proximate cause of the red flag."
