Trump obsessed with Biden like he just escaped 'bad relationship' with him: psychologist

Psychotherapist and lawyer Nick Carmody couldn't help but notice some unique pieces of Donald Trump's policy address on the economy to air grievances about President Joe Biden not being his opponent.

Carmody described it as being similar to a "bad relationship."

Taking to X on Thursday, Carmody responded to a question from neoconservative Bill Kristol about Trump's obsession with Biden.

"Maybe psychologists can explain the degree of Trump's strange identification with or co-dependency on Biden. In fighting Biden, Trump seems to have come to identify with him, so that's how he now takes Biden's failure as somehow a premonition of his own failure. Interesting if weird," Kristol observed after watching Trump's address.

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While no psychologist can definitively diagnose someone off of television, Carmody believes that what he sees is Trump's "obsessive inability to let go of Biden... and the criticism surrounding Biden not running."

"First, anyone who’s been in a bad relationship where years of resentment builds up has experienced the phenomenon where the current action/statement the other person is criticizing you for isn’t really about the current action/behavior," he said. "It’s just that the current action/behavior presents an opportunity to channel/focus that built up resentment/contempt for you."

It's akin to a person feeling frustrated and wanting to hurt someone else as a result.

"If you step right (in the non-political sense), you’re criticized for not stepping left," he continued. "And if you had stepped left, you would have been criticized for not stepping right. It’s not about which direction you step, it’s about exploiting the opportunity to criticize/attack you."

At the same time, the Republican Party went all-in on the criticism of Biden's age, with many in the party calling him a barely sentient "Weekend at Bernie's"-style puppet.

With Biden out of the race, he noted, now questions about being too old turned to the 78-year-old Trump.

The other issue, he said, is "Trump’s Cluster B personality disorders cause him to create alternate realities when actual reality threatens him, or violates his pathologically distorted concept of 'fairness."

Trump has been allowed to operate this way his whole life "because his resources have protected from experiencing consequences for his pathological behavior," argued Carmody , who added that others have "enabled his pathological thinking/actions."

Essentially, the psychologist believes that Biden leaving the race and changing the situation "destabilized" Trump and he's not handling it well.

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