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    ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ and the Goldwater rule for psychiatrists | Letter

    A bill was recently introduced to the Minnesota legislature to categorise “Trump derangement syndrome” as a mental illness. The proposed bill defines the syndrome as characterised by “verbal expressions of intense hostility toward” Donald Trump and “overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting [Trump] or anything that symbolises [Trump].”Such a bill obviously infringes on our constitutional right to freely criticise our elected leaders and can serve as a stepping stone towards labelling and punishing political opponents under the guise of utilising a variety of compulsory psychiatric interventions. However, this bill is reminiscent of anti-Trump mental health professionals who have opined that President Trump poses a great danger because of a severe personality disorder.Clearly, a psychiatric diagnosis can only be made by mental health professionals who are licensed to do so, and only after having examined a patient. It poses great danger to our society both when legislators use their political power to impose a psychiatric label on their political opponents and when mental health professionals misapply their expertise to give a psychiatric label to those whom they fear.In the 1960s, many psychiatrists opined on the mental health of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. As a result of that controversy, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association developed the “Goldwater rule”, which applies to public figures. It states that it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a proper authorisation for such a statement.This rule is still in effect, though much too often broken. Perhaps we need to develop a comparable national rule prohibiting political personnel, both elected and appointed, from creating psychiatric diagnoses as a tool against their political opponents.Leon Hoffman Psychiatrist, New York City, US More

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    View from the couch: therapists on sessions in new Trump era

    In his conversations with trans clients, Will Williams, a therapist in Oakland, California, sees the psychic toll exacted by the fusillade of recent executive orders targeting transgender protections. Many of his patients are filled with fear – and for legitimate reasons.In the days after Donald Trump took office, the administration required passports to be marked with sex assigned at birth, banned trans people from serving in the military and cut funding for gender-affirming care. On some federal websites, the “T” was removed from “LGBT”.“There’s this literal embodied experience of ‘Oh I’m a target,’” said Williams, who is trans. “[We are] the 1% that is going to be targeted and blamed, and when it comes down from the theoretical into daily life – psychically there’s an experience of being erased.”When clients ask him “Do I even exist?”, Williams can at least offer some comfort. He asks: “How is it to be in a room with another trans person?” The question makes plain what is in front of them: yes, they both exist. “The medicine is in that,” Williams says. “Trump can say the moon doesn’t exist anymore, but the moon still shines, and it still waxes and wanes.”Williams is among the many therapists who are figuring out how to navigate a profession that has been plunged into uncharted territory during a tense second Trump term. It’s a new atmosphere, and therapists say they are “learning beside” their clients as they go.Many of those who spoke with the Guardian requested anonymity so they could speak freely about sensitive issues.Liberal therapists say they sometimes incorporate their political views into the healing process to provide support for clients distressed by Trump’s actions. “You’re taught in school that therapists aren’t supposed to be political, but it’s very political,” one liberal practitioner said. “Now, at least in my therapist friend group, we’re like, ‘Screw that, no, this is very political.’”Trump’s policies, such as deporting immigrants, go against therapists’ code of ethics that requires them to uphold client’s dignity and worth, she said. That hasn’t precluded her from working with Trump-supporting clients. Some don’t return “and that’s OK”, but she successfully works with a range of conservative patients.On the other end of the spectrum, some therapists say they are encountering liberal clients who are fearful of coming to therapy: “They want to know if their therapist voted against their human rights.” Providing assurance to anxious clients is an instance in which many are choosing to share their political views. “When appropriate, I want to let them know that it’s really safe,” one therapist said.Liberal therapists, conservative clientsThe relationship between liberal therapists and conservative clients has demanded a slight revision of therapeutic calculus. A few said they find themselves revolted by their clients’ beliefs but figure out how to work with them effectively despite the fraught dynamic.None of the therapists I interviewed said they try to change clients’ political views, but therapy is often about getting people to think about problems in their lives differently – and sometimes there’s overlap.One therapist I spoke with used the example of some of her clients’ fear and hatred of transgender people. She asks them where those fears stem from, because they are often passed on generationally.“What kind of things were you taught as a child? If you heard your parents talking about this – do all of your values align with your parents’ values? Have you ever broken from them? Will you feel rejected by your family or community if you think differently?” she asks.As therapy progresses, fears are often unlocked, and some of those questions are answered. “Even if the client isn’t focused on the political aspect, we can work on some of those themes, like fear, without getting into politics,” she said.Another liberal practitioner who took on a Trump-supporting client had doubts about their potential for growth in part because of the latter’s very religious, conservative beliefs. The client was upset with their church’s liberal positions on some issues, and that was causing a problem in their life.The therapist encouraged the client to talk with church leadership and to try to understand a different viewpoint. “I didn’t look at it as an opportunity or say, ‘Oh, I got a chance to try to win them over,’” she said. “It was, ‘Oh, you have this conflict, and maybe if you can see another perspective that would help you.’”Sometimes, the roles are reversed and fear is on the other foot. A practitioner who fears fascism and societal collapse, and has stocked up on supplies in case “the shit hits the fan”, said the money she makes taking on conservative clients is worth it.“You know, I’m billing $90 an hour, and I can listen to that bullshit for 50 minutes for $90,” she said. “I feel gross saying that because I do think my [Trump-supporting] clients are doing something awful, and are the personification of the problems I deal with.”A website, ConservativeCounselors.com, highlights the work of conservative therapists around the country. The Guardian sent emails to five of them, but only one responded in a brief email.“Conservative therapists have formed a pretty tight group, and many of us have shared that you’ve reached out for an interview,” the therapist, Maria Coppersmith, said. “The general consensus is that the Guardian is so ultra-liberal, that any conservative therapist that shares his or her viewpoint is likely to have their words twisted and will be highly misrepresented. You might get a naive newbie therapist that will agree to an interview, but I am respectfully declining.”‘Screw that, this is very political’To describe what’s occurring in the interplay between therapy and politics, Bill Doherty, co-founder of Braver Angels, a non-profit that works toward depolarization, borrowed a term from practitioners in destabilized Latin American countries: political stress. “It’s the anxiety and psychological preoccupation that stems from what’s happening in our political situation, how government officials are behaving and how we’re treating each other when we disagree,” Doherty said. “The challenge is therapists have their own viewpoints – they vote – this is not external to their lives. So the major challenge that’s now happening is therapists trying to keep their own political leanings from influencing clients.”Broadly speaking, therapists say the profound shock and sharp sense of fear that was almost universal among liberal clients after Trump’s first win has been replaced with variations of numbness, hopelessness and resignation.“After Trump won in 2016 everyone was like, ‘Oh my God what’s going to happen? What are we going to do?’ And during Covid they were like, ‘Oh my God, there are no adults in Washington! What are we going to do?’” a therapist said. Now his clients are much more despondent. “They’re like, ‘Fuck it, let it burn,’” he said.Williams said there was indeed less “fear and scrambling” in November 2024, but it has been more difficult for trans clients this time around. Many are running against the clock to make changes to identification cards, birth certificates, passports and other documents.Similarly, a therapist who works with federal employees says there is a broad sense of “whiplash”. The administration has also attacked minorities and women employed at federal agencies, claiming that they are unqualified and were only hired due to DEI initiatives. That takes a toll on some clients, who may end up questioning how people view their worth.And then there’s intra-family strife. One therapist certified to practice in Michigan and California said familial stress is greater in Michigan, a purple, more religious state. His clients feel a dissonance: “They say, ‘I love my parents, and they’re showing up for me, but then I also know that they voted for this person who’s completely appalling.’”Start honoring the numbnessEach therapist who spoke with the Guardian said anger and numbness over the second administration are initially appropriate responses. “Anger is a protective force,” Williams added.But to help his clients to settle their nervous systems, he directs them inward: “In the stillness they can access the greater wisdom – usually the message is there of what’s going to be supportive to them.” He also urges them to “go to nature and connect to systems older and larger than this moment, and put energy toward something life-affirming and creative”.Another therapist has clients accept this new reality. “Normalize that there is this threatening energy that is closing down certain civil liberties and trying to change social norms,” he said, adding that he also urges people to be curious about their numbness.This doesn’t mean embracing being inactive, however. “Find ways to start honoring the numbness, while starting to move energy, whether that’s physical movement, or getting out, seeing people and finding light in what feels like a dark time for some folks, whether that’s through art, music or nature,” he added.Doherty recommends what he calls “buffering”: limiting intake of news and conversations with friends and family about politics. That’s an especially helpful strategy for couples he counsels who have differing political viewpoints. Many still make it work, Doherty said.Most therapists tell their clients to focus on what they can control. Some suggest putting energy into mutual aid projects or partaking in local political action. One therapist is seeing her siblings more, making herself an ally to trans folks. She also likes to listen to the Moth story hour as a healthy escape from reality.However, another therapist pointed to a meme in which a person is lying in the road, about to get hit by a large truck. In the meme, a nearby therapist waves, shouting: “Just focus on the things you can control!” She finds the advice to be ludicrous. “I feel like an asshole as a therapist sometimes, so I try to not say shit like that.”Liberal therapists often face many of the same fears as their clients. Williams recounted how he worked with some of his youngest clients who were “heartbroken”, and how there was synergy in that process.“What I tried to do in those situations was reconnect them to: ‘We’re here, we’re alive, there’s a purpose,’” Williams said. “I actually left those sessions feeling more purposeful, and feeling more power from what I witnessed after reconnecting them with themselves.”Another therapist said she felt a similar energy by opening up about her political views and fears: “It feels more like we’re in this together,” she said. More

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    Medicaid recipients fear ‘buzzsaw cuts’ for Trump’s agenda: ‘We’re not going to be alive forever’

    At the age of 62, Marya Parral knows that her, and her husband’s, years of being able to care for their two developmentally disabled sons are numbered, and so they have done everything they can to ensure their children can continue to live independently.For their oldest, Ian, that’s meant placing him in a program on an organic farm that caters to people diagnosed with autism. For Joey, their youngest, who has both autism and Down syndrome, Parral has found a caregiver who can help him deliver newspapers and run errands around their community of Ocean City, New Jersey.Parral said none of this would be affordable without help from Medicaid, the federal government’s insurance program for poor and disabled Americans. But this week, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a budget framework that would make deep cuts to the program, and Parral worries her sons will lose what she has worked so hard to build.“We’re not going to be alive forever. We’re trying to set up a life for them, but that entire life that we’re working so hard to set up for them is dependent on Medicaid,” Parral said. “So it’s really devastating to think about cuts.”Producing a budget is the first step in the Republican-controlled Congress’s drive to enact legislation that will pay for Donald Trump’s priorities. House lawmakers will now spend weeks working to write and pass a bill that is expected to approve $4.5tn in extended tax cuts, as well as funding for Trump’s plan for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.To pay for it, Republicans are considering a rollback of the federal social safety net, particularly Medicaid, which has nearly 80 million enrollees in all 50 states. The budget plan proposes an $880bn reduction in funding for the insurance over the next 10 years, an amount that experts warn would hollow out the program and have ripple effects across the entire American healthcare system.Megan Cole Brahim, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health and an expert on Medicaid, said the cut was the largest ever proposed, and if enacted would “have far-reaching impacts not just for those who rely on Medicaid, but for entire communities and economies”.“These changes mean millions of Americans – including the low-income, elderly, persons with disabilities, children – will lose health insurance coverage,” she said. “Others may see significant reductions in benefits or limited access to care. The impact on hospitals and health systems will be significant, particularly for safety-net and rural hospitals, which are already on the brink of closure. Patient revenues will fall, uncompensated care will rise. There will be staff layoffs and site closures.”John Driscoll, a healthcare executive and chair of the board of UConn Health in Connecticut, said: “The scale of the buzzsaw cuts to Medicaid would undermine every hospital’s ability to actually support its mission to care for the community, and would be a dangerous cut to the nursing-home infrastructure in the country.”Republican leaders backed the cuts to Medicaid, as well as to similar programs such as one that helps poor Americans afford food, as a way to mollify lawmakers in their party who want the US’s large budget deficit addressed. Still, not everyone is pleased. As the budget was being debated, eight Republican representatives, some of whom Democrats are keen to unseat in next year’s midterm elections, wrote to the House speaker, Mike Johnson, warning that their districts’ large Hispanic populations would be harmed.“Slashing Medicaid would have serious consequences, particularly in rural and predominantly Hispanic communities where hospitals and nursing homes are already struggling to keep their doors open,” they said.All eight ultimately voted for the resolution, but the dissent may be a warning sign for the budget’s prospects of enactment, particularly in the House, where the GOP has a mere three-seat majority. It also remains unclear whether Republicans will try to pass all of Trump’s priorities in one bill, or split them into two.The GOP has made clear they want to fully pay for the extension of Trump’s tax cuts, and Elyssa Schmier, vice-president of government relations for advocacy group MomsRising, said Medicaid and social safety programs are the party’s prime targets for cost savings.“If you’re not going to go after, say, the Pentagon budget, if they’re only going to go to some of these big mandatory spending programs, there’s only so many places that Republicans feel that they can go,” she said.In the days since the budget’s approval, Johnson and Trump have scrambled to downplay the possibility of slashing Medicaid, insisting they intend only to root out “fraud, waste and abuse.”“The president said over and over and over: ‘We’re not going to touch social security, Medicare or Medicaid.’ We’ve made the same commitment,” Johnson told CNN in an interview.Democrats have little leverage to stop the budget, which can be passed with simple majorities in both chambers. But the Democratic senator Ruben Gallego warned that gutting the social safety net to extend tax cuts that have mostly benefited the rich will alienate voters who sided with the GOP last November.“It will be on Donald Trump and Republicans, the fact that he’s going to side with the ultra-rich versus the working poor,” said Gallego, who won election to his seat in Arizona even as Trump captured the state’s electoral votes. “Families that are barely making a living, scratching a living, they’re now going to get kicked off healthcare to give tax cuts to the mega-rich.”The proposed cut to Medicaid would remove billions of dollars in funding from congressional districts nationwide that are represented by lawmakers from both parties, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress.In California’s San Joaquin valley, the Democratic representative Jim Costa’s district would lose the third-largest amount of funding, according to the data, and Medicaid coverage would be imperiled for more than 450,000 residents.“This reckless budget prioritizes the wealthy while devastating those who need help the most,” Costa said. “I voted no because this resolution is bad for our valley and a threat to the wellbeing of the people I represent.” More

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    In this age of rage, it’s easy for Trump to keep stoking people’s anger | Henry Porter

    Donald Trump and the Republican party may have won a decisive victory, but do not expect the anger that has blighted America since Trump announced he was running for office nine years ago to subside. Anger and grievance are the fuel rods of Maga populism, and they must be kept at dangerously high temperatures for the movement and a second Trump term to operate.Watching the last four weeks of the campaign, the uninhibited rage of Trump and his supporting acts at rallies was very striking. There was no attempt at decent norms. As the election neared, speeches became louder and more laced with vitriol, to the degree that commentators believed they had gone too far for the American public.First lesson of the Democrat defeat is that most US voters lapped it up. This is what they want. America is a very angry place, much more so that than its neighbour to the north, Canada. In the US, dissatisfaction with opportunities, the state of the country and the government have risen sharply since the Reagan era, whereas in Canada dissatisfaction has only increased over the government’s failure to protect the most vulnerable in society. That says a lot about the wildly differing tone of the two societies as well as levels of available empathy.Road rage in the US doubled between 2019 and 2022, with 44 people killed or wounded by gunfire on the roads every month, a ­figure that bucks the trends of violent crime and murder that have been generally declining in the US since 1990.There are a lot of people walking around with the bewildering, hair-trigger rage of John Goodman’s character Walter Sobchak in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski. Trump echoes the craziness, amplifies it, then uses the energy tha t it returns to him.This is a feedback loop, but the anger doesn’t just circle with the same intensity between Trump and his people; it steadily increases.At a Trump rally you became aware of the exuberant high of the outrage, that this is a fix enjoyed across America both by those who tend towards unreflective negativity, racism and misogyny and by people who have a genuine complaint about their lives. In both cases they have acquired the habit of rage, and it has become a meaningful and gratifying part of their identity.The anger is not simply going to evaporate when Trump takes over in January, not only because it’s too important to people’s sense of political self but also because the communication channel between the president and his supporters works only at this level. There is no exchange of ideas, of course, no sense that he leads with a vision other than the one that meets their anger with a promise of destruction.The early evidence of this political wrecking machine comes with the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News anchor Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, all of whom cannot fail to vandalise and degrade the institutions they take over. Indeed, that appears to be their brief.When he moves back into the White House with the Senate, Congress and supreme court in the control of the Republican party, he will be one of the most powerful presidents ever to have governed and he will be 100% responsible for the fortunes of Americans.How will his supporters, so used to reflexively blaming Washington and the government, confront his responsibility when he fails to improve their lives, as he certainly will because of a suicidal tariff regime, tax cuts to the rich and corporations that will increase national debt, cuts to Medicaid and mass deportations of undocumented immigrants that will severely damage growth as well as cause unbelievable pain to separated families across America?His failure will be a problem for his supporters, who can’t lose faith in their idol, and also for Trump, who must not let their support fall away. The solution for both parties will be to maintain the anger but divert it away from Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnd this is where we should fear for America. Trump has been lining up scapegoats. He has promised to persecute “the enemies within” and “radical left communists” like Adam Schiff, the new senator for California, and the former speaker Nancy Pelosi. He has made threats to Michelle Obama and Liz Cheney, who endorsed Democrat candidate Kamala Harris, and has demanded that CBS’s broadcast licence be revoked. He has suggested “one really violent day” and “one rough hour” against petty criminals.He will resort to this list whenever he needs to, but it will be America’s undocumented immigrants who will initially suffer, for next to the economy they topped the concerns of Republican voters. Trump will always be able to satisfy Maga anger by promising new and more cruel actions against immigrants, among which measures are likely to be privately run detention camps.There is no telling where this will end, no sense where national resistance will come in a society that is unused to dealing with an authoritarian who exploits dark and violent emotions as expertly as Trump does.The Democrats are plunged in a round of recriminations about the defeat, but they need to find new leadership and a strategy to deal with the anger that now threatens America and its institutions of government. When fuel rods overheat in a nuclear reactor, the result is usually meltdown. More

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    Donald Trump is a superspreader of a craziness that has split America in two | Simon Tisdall

    Is Donald Trump going mad? It depends how you define the word. But since he’s hoping to be elected US president on Tuesday, it would be handy to know. Democrats describe him as “weird” and “unhinged”. His rival, Kamala Harris, raised the “M” question again last week. “This is someone who is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power,” she warned.Harris, to her credit, was being relatively polite, though goodness knows why, given the way he disses and demeans her. So let’s pose the question in more colloquial, idiomatic terms. Has stark raving Trump finally lost his marbles? Are there bats in the belfry? If he’s off his rocker, not playing with a full deck and away with the fairies, the world and the voters have a right to know.Harris’s assessment is obviously not an objective medical diagnosis of mental disorder. It’s a normal person’s reaction to the abnormal things Trump says and does. Crazy-strange campaign speeches by him and his supporters, notably at Madison Square Garden last weekend – a gathering akin to a Nazi Nuremberg rally – are reviving the debate about his sanity that began during his first term.In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, published in 2017, a group of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals raised numerous red flags. One contributor suggested he was clearly off his chump: “Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving.”That professional opinion, made seven years ago, still rings true. Yet is the madness of “King” Trump, like the madness of King George (whose tyrannical rule Trump seeks to emulate), getting worse?By one measure – his wild, deranged language – the deterioration is marked. “His speeches have grown coarser and coarser,” wrote veteran White House watcher Peter Baker, who dubs him “the profanity president”.“Counting tamer four-letter words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell,’ he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times in 2024,” Baker wrote. His analysis shows Trump is using such language 69% more often than when he ran in 2016. It’s shocking, even by today’s tawdry standards. Trump calls Harris a “shit vice-president” who is “mentally impaired”. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks.Vulgarity, however gross, is not proof of madness. But it may be symptomatic. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, America’s oldest, defines a mad person as one “completely unrestrained by reason and judgment; unable to think in a clear or sensible way”. Trump aces this definition every time he opens his mouth. It fits him to a tee. Exhibit A: his oddball musings about golfer Arnold Palmer’s penis.Bizarre Trump traits, such as compulsive, blatant lying, meet another dictionary definition of madness – behaviour that is “incapable of being explained or accounted for”.A third definition, rooted in US rather than British usage, suggests that Trump is indisputably bananas, in the sense that he is constantly “intensely angry or displeased”. Always feeling furious, feeling “mad as hell”, must be exhausting. It’s enough to drive anyone round the bend. Older people often get irritable, of course; and screw-loose Trump is 78. So is incipient senility, or cognitive decline, another cause of his exceptional looney-ness?Trump stumbles, mispronounces words, forgets where he is and loses his train of thought. Just like Joe Biden, in fact. But Biden is merely old. Trump is nuts.Trump has refused to take credible mental acuity tests or release his medical records. Last month, more than 230 healthcare specialists urged him to be more transparent. “As we all age, we lose sharpness and revert to base instincts,” they noted. “We are seeing that from Trump as he uses his rallies… to crudely lash out.”It may go back to childhood. One theory is that Trump, bullied and bullier, was driven up the wall by maternal love denied. Another theory is that he suffers from “disinhibition”. This is when people become less restrained, the older they get.But the Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins, who interviewed Trump 10 years ago, says he’s always been this way. His “depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval” haven’t changed one bit, Coppins wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNarcissism, hedonism, obsession, a need to provoke, scare, shock and scandalise, and chronic, paranoid feelings of victimhood are all indicators of worsening mental imbalance, if not early-onset imbecility. Recent Trump lunacies include claims that flies are buzzing round his head for “suspicious” reasons, North Korea is trying to kill him, the 6 January riot was a “lovefest”, pet-eating migrants are akin to Hannibal Lecter, and that God saved him in the assassination attempt on his life.If Trump were to go mad on his own time, no problem. Unfortunately, by publicly projecting and displaying mental dysfunction daily on a national stage, he is driving America nuts, too – fans and foes alike. He brings out the worst in everyone, right and left. It could be termed national derangement syndrome (NDS).The poisonous effect of NDS was on show at Madison Square Garden, where “comedians” amplified Trump’s sexist, racist, hate-filled messages. This superspreader craziness destroys reasoned debate, splits the country into opposing camps (hence the dead-heat opinion polls) and sends blood pressure soaring. Many Americans fear civil violence. That’s bonkers.This collective madness, akin to mass hysteria, is all-consuming and universally destructive. Like much that happens in America, it reverberates around the globe. Trump’s fascistic Mad Hatter world is also the world of sicko revanchist dictators like Russia’s Putin, Europe’s far-right ultra-nationalist fruitcases, Iran’s manic mullahs and off-their-heads Israeli génocidaires.It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world – to hijack the title of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 comedy classic – but it’s no laughing matter. It may be about to get madder still. Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator More

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    Therapy-speak and 80s hairstyles: will Harris’s Brené Brown sit-down swing white female voters?

    In the quest to win over white female voters – 53% of whom showed up for Donald Trump in 2020 – Kamala Harris made her case on a podcast hosted by one of their beloved avatars, the vulnerability researcher Brené Brown. The episode, released on Monday, was a mostly fluffy discussion about leadership, trauma and the notion of voting as agency in an uncontrollable news cycle.Brown, a University of Houston professor and bestselling author who has spent two decades studying social sciences, became an overnight celebrity after giving a 2010 Ted Talk called “the power of vulnerability”. One could argue the talk, which birthed Brown’s Oprah-approved speaking empire, also spawned our culture’s current obsession with therapy-speak.Brown’s mottos, such as “courage over comfort” and “what we know matters, but who we are matters more”, align with Harris’s oft-maligned tendency toward a self-help speaking style and vibes-only posturing. Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us, leads the relationship genre on Apple Podcasts. The vice-president’s campaign might have also hoped that an endorsement from Brown, a 58-year-old church-going Texan, will swing undecided white female voters – a crucial demographic that would help shore up Harris’s record support among women and counterbalance Trump’s popularity with men.That’s not to say Brown’s own politics are inscrutable: she reportedly donated to the White Women for Kamala Harris fundraiser, and she kicked off the episode by declaring herself an “unapologetic Harris/Walz supporter”. Thus began an hour-long chat about “courageous leadership”.Harris spoke about the importance of family and friends as a support system for leaders. She spoke lovingly of her mother, a late cancer researcher, and of her lifelong girlfriends whom she considers just as valuable, if not more so, than romantic partners – a line that probably resonated with gen Z women, who increasingly prioritize platonic relationships, and the many older women who are learning to live alone. When asked about her two biggest values in a leader, Harris called out “fairness and justice”. “That’s so powerful,” Brown cooed back.With just a week to go before election day, as she struggles to communicate policy issues with voters, Harris cycled through her greatest hits. While speaking on reproductive rights, she said she was the first sitting vice-president to have visited an abortion clinic. She imagined Trump in the Oval Office on the first day of his second presidency drafting an “enemies list”, unlike the “to-do list” she would be looking at – he’ll stew while she gets to work. In this vein, much of the conversation focused on fear of another Trump presidency. Using a favorite therapy buzzword, Harris said Americans were “traumatized” by the “cruelty” of Trump’s Maga movement. “Trauma blunts our senses,” and voting blue was a way to take back some of the power, she said.Harris seems to genuinely enjoy speaking to people in these lower-stakes, conversational formats, and some of her standout bits with Brown appeared off the cuff. We learned that her college nickname was “C Cubed”, which stood for “cool, calm and collected”. And despite having what Brown described as a “Depeche Mode haircut” in her 20s (a closely cropped, asymmetrical look), Harris said she was never big on the goth sound – though her husband, Doug Emhoff, loves the group.Except for the two women’s emphatic support of abortion rights, the chat came off as cozy and largely apolitical. That tactic could play well with Unlocking Us listeners, who probably come to Brown’s lovey-dovey podcast as an escape from the hyper-partisan news cycle. Harris seemed, if not the candidate you want to have a beer with, then the pleasant-enough person sitting next to you at an airport bar sipping on a glass of chardonnay.Positioned against Trump’s macho posturing, which reached an apex this weekend with an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast and the racist Madison Square Garden bonanza, Brown’s interview with Harris was like a cardigan on the first day of fall. And we know how much white women love fall. More

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    More than 200 health professionals say Trump has ‘malignant narcissism’ in open letter

    An anti-Trump political group organized a letter signed by more than 200 mental health professionals, warning that Donald Trump is dangerous because of “his symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder – malignant narcissism”, which makes him “grossly unfit for leadership”.Less than two weeks before the presidential election, the group bought a full-page ad styled as an open letter in the New York Times on Thursday, arguing that the Republican nominee for the White House is “an existential threat to democracy” in the US.The ad was funded by Anti-Psychopath Pac – a political action committee that has produced attack ads questioning Trump’s mental fitness for office.“Using the DSM V”, or the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a bedrock text that helps mental health professionals define and treat mental disorders, “it is easy to see that Trump meets the behavioral criteria for antisocial personality disorder,” the open letter said.“Even a non-clinician can see that Trump shows a lifetime pattern of ‘failure to conform to social norms and laws,’ ‘repeated lying,’ ‘reckless disregard for the safety of others,’ ‘irritability,’ ‘impulsivity,’ ‘irresponsibility,’ and ‘lack of remorse,’” the letter said.The American Psychiatric Association considers it unethical to diagnose individuals whom a psychiatrist has not personally assessed, a prohibition known as the Goldwater Rule.The rule is named after Barry Goldwater, a former US senator and 1964 Republican presidential candidate who was called “psychotic”, “schizophrenic” and compared to the late leaders “Hitler, Castro, Stalin”, by psychiatrists who responded to a survey from Fact magazine. Goldwater successfully sued the magazine for libel. Fact was ordered to pay the former candidate $75,000.Anti-Psychopath Pac is led by George Conway, an attorney and activist best known for leading the Lincoln Project, a Republican group that was a thorn for Trump during his presidency but later imploded amid allegations of sexual misconduct against one of its co-founders. Conway is divorced from Kellyanne Conway, a senior Trump adviser from 2016 to 2020.Thursday’s letter addressed the Goldwater Rule directly by stating that since it was adopted in 1973, “the field has modernized the DSM diagnostic system, which relies exclusively on ‘observable behavioral criteria.’ For many years, we’ve all observed thousands of hours of Trump’s behavior, reinforced by the observations of dozens of individuals who have interacted with him personally.”The professionals argued that disorder they discern in Trump “makes him deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous”.Trump’s rival for the White House, the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, earlier this month called the former president “increasingly unstable and unhinged” and, this week, a fascist.The letter also argued Trump exhibits signs of cognitive decline, and said he should be subject to “a full neurological work-up”. Signatories of the letter run the gamut from a Cornell University lecturer to a professionals such as a Maryland psychotherapist, a mental health nurse practitioner, a sex therapist and a social worker.

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    Since Joe Biden left the race amid concerns about his age and mental fitness for office, some of the same scrutiny has come to dog Trump, who would become the oldest US president ever, if elected, and 82 years old by the end of his second term.Recognizing his speeches are often rambling and even incoherent, Democrats have taken the unconventional step of encouraging voters to watch Trump’s speeches and rallies.“I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said during their only presidential debate.“You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said.The ad from Anti-Psychopath Pac comes in the same week as another full-page New York Times ad signed by more than 200 survivors of sexual assault and gender violence. One of the signatories was an ex-girlfriend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and alleged in an interview with the Guardian that Trump had groped her in the past. The aim of the ad was to remind voters that Trump was found liable for sexual abuse in civil court, after a case brought by the New York writer E Jean Carroll. More

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    ‘Undisciplined, unhinged and deranged’: will Trump’s strange behavior hurt him at the polls?

    A “beautiful” beach body and a “mentally disabled” opponent. “One rough hour” of police retaliation to stop criminals. “A million Rambos” in Afghanistan. Haitian immigrants “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats”. Death by electrocution versus death by shark. Insane asylums and, of course, “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”.These are just a few of the recent remarks made by one of two major candidates for president of the United States. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has spent years saying the unsayable to entertain, goad and grab attention. But his pronouncements over the past few weeks have plumbed new depths of absurdity and incoherence.Trump, 78, increasingly slurs or stumbles over his words, raising fears over cognitive decline. He is slipping in polls against Kamala Harris and knows that defeat could lead to criminal trials and even prison. After a decade of dominating American politics, critics say, Trump could be in the throes of a final meltdown.His verbal output now is “absolute batshittery”, according to Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill. “These are not the musings of a well-adjusted adult. He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.”Trump was mostly given a pass by the mainstream media, Setmayer added, because of the intense focus on Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity when he was still running. “Now the focus is solely on him because he is the oldest candidate in this race. His kookery is even more highlighted now than before because he is alone on an island with his deterioration.”Trump has always thrown dead cats on tables, as the metaphor goes, offering his fans the thrill of transgression and watching with glee as liberals howl with outrage. His run for president in 2016 was characterised by racially divisive rhetoric and a constant stream of controversies that dominated news cycles and forced rival Hillary Clinton into reactive mode.A Guardian analysis of a campaign rally Trump held in Greensboro, North Carolina, in October 2016 found references to “Crooked Hillary” and the assertion: “For what she’s done, they should lock her up.” Even then, Trump was obsessed with crowd sizes, media lies “poisoning” the minds of the electorate and the fantasy that “this whole election is being rigged”.But the Trump of eight years ago also brought a more disciplined and focused message. He railed against bad trade deals and reeled off a list of policy priorities: the biggest tax cut since Ronald Reagan, eliminating regulations, defending religious liberty, supporting law enforcement, repealing and replacing Obamacare, saving the second amendment, and appointing “great justices” to the supreme court.Perhaps most strikingly, Trump asked independents and Democrats to join a fight against the “corrupt establishment” that would give government back to the people. He decried national divisions, promised that “we’re going to be a unified nation, a nation of love” and wrapped up in a relatively tight 40 minutes.Today Trump’s rallies tend to sprawl for an hour and a half or two hours which, as Harris noted in their debate, means some people leave before the end. He has sought to defend his rhetorical meanderings as “the weave”, claiming the threads all come back together to make sense.But at a recent stop in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, “Trump shifted from topic to topic so quickly that it was hard to keep track of what he meant at times,” the Associated Press reported. There were digressions about the climate crisis, Harris’s father, how his beach body was better than Biden’s, and a fly that was buzzing near him. “I wonder where the fly came from,” he said. “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have had a fly up here.”The Trump of 2024 also strikes a darker tone as he struggles to define Harris with a nickname or brand. In Prairie du Chien he tested a new insult: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. Anybody would know this.”At another rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump painted a lurid picture of crime spiralling out of control, which he said could be ended “immediately” with one “real rough, nasty day”, or “one rough hour”. Some critics compared the idea to the dystopian horror film The Purge.View image in fullscreenAt a press conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, “Trump at times interrupted his own asides with even further asides,” according to the New York Times. He mixed up Iran with North Korea and struggled to pronounce the name of the United Arab Emirates. He spoke glowingly of fighters in Afghanistan: “They could take a knife, they were like Rambos, just like putting a million Rambos – good old Sylvester Stallone was my friend. But it’s like putting a million Rambos.”The campaign has also been punctuated by bizarre riffs about the 30-year-old fictional character Hannibal Lecter and whether it would be better to be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. Trump used a debate watched by tens of million of people to push the dangerous lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.This week Trump was the subject of a withering takedown on Comedy Central’s satirical news programme The Daily Show. Host Jon Stewart played a clip of an interview asking Trump for the specific mechanics of how prices would come down.His reply: “First of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions like, give me a specific answer.” Then he rambled off track into how much Russia had taken from presidents George W Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “With Trump, Russia took nothing,” Trump said.Stewart had produced a chart to mark his responses on “policy specifics”. He quickly replaced it with a chart that said “Huh?” “I guess I had the wrong chart,” Stewart said.He then played another clip showing Trump zigzagging all over the place in response to a question about his childcare plan before announcing: “Childcare is childcare.” A third clip showed Trump being asked about claims that he wants to ban IVF. Again his answer swerved wildly before settling on “We have no taxes on a thing called tips”. Stewart reached for a new chart that said: “What the actual f#@k are you talking about?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrats see Trump as a politician in decline. Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “He has definitely lost a step, as they say. He is less coherent than he was certainly four years ago.“He used to insult people in a way that got to one of their problems, like ‘Little Marco’ [Rubio], but now he’s just throwing random insults. Whatever you say about Kamala Harris, she’s not mentally disabled. That’s crazy. A lot of people have noticed he would occasionally be off the wall but now it seems to be more so.”Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, recalls that in 2016 Trump could read from a teleprompter like he believed it – but now he sounds like he does not want to be here. “He reminds you of a sixth-grade boy having read something out loud at the front of the class who’s generally pissed off that he’s there and not on the soccer field.”And yet the former president’s rallies still draw big crowds, with many supporters apparently amused and entertained by Trump’s verbal antics. Kamarck added: “One of my friends who’s a movie critic – not in politics – watches Trump’s rallies and says, look, the guy is literally an entertainer and he says these things to get laughs and applause from the crowd.“Yet those of us who are in this business take him seriously. Part of it is that his base loves him, loves the entertainment of him. They’re not for Kamala Harris – they don’t think she’s mentally disabled – but they like him ‘calling it out like it is’. They don’t take him quite seriously and they like his plain-spokenness and they see that as a sign of authenticity.”The knockabout humour comes with a sinister aspect, however. Trump continues to demonise immigrants, pushing falsehoods about them spreading diseases and stealing jobs from US citizens, and trafficks in racist stereotypes. He has spent the best part of a decade tapping into white anxiety and grievance. Now, reminded by a court filing this week of the legal peril he faces if he loses the election, he is preparing to make his last stand.Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, said: “He’s definitely more undisciplined, unhinged and deranged. He’s always had these tendencies but, as he’s gotten older, they’ve become much greater. The Hannibal Lecter stuff or the shark versus electrocution stuff is just insane, just crazy and should be discussed on that basis.“But it’s a big mistake just to talk about Trump being unhinged or insane. You’ve got to talk about also how dangerous and retrograde what he’s saying is. We also ought to stress the extreme racism and misogyny.”Lichtman, known for an election predictions model which this year favours Harris, added: “Trump saying that Kamala Harris is mentally impaired, mentally disabled, and had these deficiencies even from birth, reprises one of the worst and oldest stereotypes that has been used to demean and put down Black people throughout American history. And that is that Black people are inherently deficient in their mental capacities and not able to do the same job as white people. I was astonished to see a candidate for president of the United States reprise that horrific old slur and stereotype on Black people.”As of a week ago, the latest national polling averages showed Harris at 48.2% compared with 44.4% for Trump, giving the Democrat a 3.8-point advantage. But she describes herself as the underdog and the race in swing states remains too close to call. And this week Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, gave a polished debate performance that critics called “sanewashing” – an effort to make Trump seem moderate and palatable, even though the substance was no less abrasive.Setmayer, the former Republican spokesperson who is now a co-founder of the Seneca Project, a Super Pac aiming to mobilise moderate women on Harris’s behalf, said: “Many of us underestimated how deep the scars of grievance and misogyny and racial animosity are in this country and Donald Trump gives voice, aid and comfort to the lowest common denominator, the worst in us. This is an ugly reality that we are facing in America.“We’re being tested and our democracy is on the line because what Donald Trump is saying is not just crazy batshittery. It’s dangerous. It’s authoritarian. It’s anti-democratic. It’s the ideology of hostility toward others. In Trump’s mind we’re not all equal and American voters need to make a decision about the type of country they want to live in and what kind of future they want to leave for their children.” More