Alan Zendell, July 6, 2024

The past couple of weeks have seen a media frenzy around President Biden’s mental fitness to serve a second term. It stemmed from his awful debate performance during which he often seemed confused and unable to speak coherently. It was chilling, and the attention paid to Biden’s mental acuity is not unreasonable.

On the other hand, the days of scrutiny over the health of Biden’s brain also illustrates another, subtly sinister issue. There were two people on that debate stage, neither of whom performed like someone we want leading our country, but Donald Trump got a free pass. What makes that so concerning is that it is part of a pervasive pattern that has existed for nine years.

From the moment he walked down the escalator in Trump Tower, Trump was a media sensation. He had always craved being a celebrity, and he loved nothing more than huge audiences paying obeisance to him. He was good for ratings, so every news network that relied on happy sponsors gave him as much air time as they could. The public is so used to Donald Trump’s outrageous behavior, the media just treat it as normal – but it’s not.

The Biden-Trump debate demonstrated two aspects of Donald Trump’s mental health that we’re so used to, most people now take them for granted. That has to stop, and the media must accept responsibility for creating at least part of the Trump monster who threatens our future today.

One is a very serious mental health condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD.) The other is mental acuity. As I’ve noted in earlier posts, the American Psychological Association’s website defines NPD in terms any lay person can understand. It also lists the nine most common symptoms of NPD. People who suffer from NPD:

    • Have a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerate achievements and talents).
    • Are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
    • Believe that they are “special” and can only be understood by other special or high-status people.
    • Require excessive admiration.
    • Have a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment).
    • Take advantage of others to achieve their own ends.
    • Lack empathy or are unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
    • Are often envious of others or believe that others are envious of them.
    • Show arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Can you think of a better description of Donald Trump? His niece, clinical psychologist, Mary Trump has frequently asserted that her uncle Donald is severely mentally ill, and that should concern all of us. Recently, she also told the media that his claims of physical fitness and health are lies, and that if the public knew how unhealthy he really was, they would be shocked.

PSD symptoms are more than just personality traits. Recent research has linked them to a number of psychotic behaviors, finding that NPD sufferers have “a cognitive bias in which individuals tend to attribute the causes of events or outcomes to external factors or circumstances rather than internal factors related to themselves.” That might explain why Trump cannot let go of the fantasy that he won the 2020 election.

The researchers also linked NPD to other psychotic behaviors including “the need to control thoughts, subjective cognitive complaints, and the use of fantasizing as an emotional regulation strategy.” Donald Trump is mentally ill.

Trump also exhibits serious symptoms of cognitive decline. They’re not as striking as the problems Biden exhibited because Trump is skilled at making them seem like part of his act. Trump cannot string ten words together if he’s not reading from a teleprompter – he seems unable to construct a complete English sentence. He forgets people’s names, confuses countries with each other, and he rambles incoherently. He also invents idiocies like swallowing bleach to cure COVID, and he lies so consistently, it’s not clear he even knows what the truth is.

Check out the links above and draw your own conclusions. All this leaves me with one question. Would you rather be led by someone who sometimes trips over words but has been respected by his peers in Congress and by foreign leaders around the world for fifty years, or someone like Trump who has no respect for the rule of law and marks every negative box on the mental health checklist?

It’s time the media started covering Trump responsibly. In a very real way, they have been drawn into Trump’s transactional fantasy world, in which everything is evaluated in terms of money and power. And it’s not just right-wing media – even gold standards like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are guilty of it. That’s because they all answer to the same breed of corporate masters who fill Trump’s coffers and supply the $$ that keep the media solvent. It’s an unholy partnership that may destroy us.