Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captures the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”
Klaas argues that the presidential contest now pits
A 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him, and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power
against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”
“One of those two candidates,” Klaas notes, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: it’s somehow *not* the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”
Klaas asks:
What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?
How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?
The media, Klaas argues, has adopted a policy in covering Trump of: “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”
In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he calls the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”
This approach, according to Klaas,
has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “Don’t Amplify Him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.
Looking over the eight-and-a-half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there were no warning signs.
Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called “A Duty to Warn” was held at the Yale School of Medicine.
The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:
“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.
“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.
“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.
In a review of that book, “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mindset:
“I think he’s crazy,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Sen. Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence” to succeed as president.
The warnings that Donald Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.
These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.
I asked some of those who first warned about the dangers Trump poses what their views are now.
Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:
He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence, and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.
Glass continued:
If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.
In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.
In March, he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:
I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.
“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,
we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.
At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration shoplifters will be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”
Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont N.H. on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible, they’ll do anything whether legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”
Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.
On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”
Trump, the Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’ ” and then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”
A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”
In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency, but that never went into effect.
Schedule F, the reporters wrote,
would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.
Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.
I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”
Miller wrote that he has
long thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity; failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table and Trump seems rather high on those traits along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).
I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”
Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration,” adding “this behavior is also consistent with psychopathy which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”
Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.
“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”
In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”
The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”
Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:
His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal, and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.
At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,
the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama, or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.
Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to the book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which I mentioned earlier:
Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.
This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:
A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation, and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls, and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.
Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:
If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.
In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
In 2020, Pew Research reported that “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe.” Pew found:
Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three-in-four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.
A recent editorial in The Economist, carried the headline: “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concludes:
would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.
Klaas, who opened this column, concludes that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that dominates over all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:
The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.
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