A sobering article by Forbes investigative journalist Richard Behar — summarized.
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There’s a forensic psychiatrist at Harvard who argues that the deeply dangerous behavior of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers can best be understood — and combatted — as a national mental-health crisis.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a faculty member in Harvard’s Program in Psychiatry and the Law, minces no words in labeling Trump a pathological liar:
The effect of pathological lying … is to inundate public discourse until … truth no longer matters, the public is “gaslit” to disorientation, and his audience conditioned to accept fantastical assertions that are no longer tethered to reality.
Lee has a few critics in psychiatric circles; they claim she violates a principle of her specialty, or skirts too close to the line, by diagnosing a public figure whom she has never privately interviewed as a patient. Lee says she does not do that (and ‘pathological liar’ is not an official diagnosis in the field’s manual).
Moreover, to Lee, and the many psychiatrists and other professionals who take her side, silence is not an option with the fate of the nation at stake. “No one with Donald Trump’s impairments,” she says, ”would be hired by a private corporation or by the military, the police, or the government civil service.”
For a thoroughly reported and closely reasoned story on this issue, look to Richard Behar, a much-acclaimed investigative journalist for Forbes — “Trump, Madoff, And The Art (And Science) Of Pathological Lying.”
To put the Trump phenomenon in perspective, Behar brackets the former president with Bernie Madoff, the progenitor of the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, the $68 billion scam that fooled hundreds of otherwise intelligent people — for nearly a half-century, as Behar reveals in his recent book, Madoff: The Final Word.
Once you see Trump — with Behar’s guidance and Lee’s professional insights — as a preternaturally gifted con artist, a malign master of hiding his self-serving flimflammery behind the distracting rhetoric of a snake-oil salesman, you cannot unsee it.
As for Lee’s credentials in the field of political prognostication (she also spent 25 years treating violent criminals in prisons), Behar offers this quote:
I predicted in my 2020 book [Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul] that his fragile psychology would not be able to tolerate an election loss, that violence would result, and that his “presidency” would not end for his followers.
In the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, veteran journalist Bill Moyers, a White House press secretary under LBJ, called Lee “the least surprised person in the country.”
