Former President Donald Trump is facing a personal mental health crisis that is directly affecting America, argued Salon's Chauncey DeVega in conversation with experts.
This comes as the former president faces down a test like he has never before had to endure: four criminal trials centering on his own behavior and conduct, that could land him in prison. To which he has already reacted by lashing out at prosecutors, judges, witnesses, and blaming a vast conspiracy against him.
"Trump has shown a wide range of pathological behavior over the past seven years or so," wrote DeVega. "He has an unhealthy fascination with violence. He lacks impulse control and empathy. He revels in cruelty. He compulsively lies and exhibits traits of malignant narcissism. He is a confirmed sexual predator and misogynist. He has a tenuous relationship to reality, and increasingly retreats into victimology and a persecution complex." Indeed, DeVega continued, Trump even considers himself "almost literally superhuman and often behaves like a cult leader."
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Psychiatrist Dr. Marc Goldston offered DeVega his own take on what's going on in Trump's mind.
"One of the things Trump cannot tolerate is feeling powerless or helpless, which triggers something called 'impotent rage,'" said Goldston. "That is the rage of powerlessness, and the more powerless and how imperiled he feels, the greater his rage." As these feelings worsen in Trump with the indictments piling up, it compels him to "destroy Biden" just as equally, and currently he's staking his entire future on being able to be re-elected and shutting down all the investigations against him — even though as president he couldn't actually shut down the Georgia election case and, under state law, couldn't even get a governor to pardon him.
Ultimately, concluded DeVega, "Donald Trump's mental health and diseased mind are not likely to improve, given the pressures he now faces. And as goes Trump, so goes the Republican Party, the MAGA cult and the larger white right."
