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Psychoanalysis -- COULD DONALD TRUMP PASS A SANITY TEST?

What do you think?

by Keith Olbermann
July 21, 2016 5:00 am

VIDEO:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/07/donald-trump-keith-olbermann-sanity-test

Short answer: probably not.

First, several important caveats. There is little worse and nothing cheesier than questioning the psychological stability of a public figure, especially a candidate for president, even in this case.

Except that in his year of campaigning, Donald Trump has called Lindsey Graham “a nut job,” Glenn Beck “a real nut job,” and Bernie Sanders “a wacko.” Trump has insisted Ben Carson’s got a “pathological disease,” and asked of Barack Obama: “Is our president insane?” He called Ted Cruz “unstable,” “unhinged,” “a little bit of a maniac,” and “crazy or very dishonest.” He also called the entire CNBC network “crazy.” He called Megyn Kelly “crazy”—at least six times.

Respectful reticence about aspersions and cliches and mental-health questions in a time in which mocking was seemingly slowly maturing into concern, died a long time ago in this presidential cycle—and it died at Donald Trump’s hands. Moreover, if the question is asked seriously and not gratuitously, just the examination might explain how Trump has seemingly survived dozens of moments that might each have been campaign-enders for almost anybody else. Why have we not asked if a given presidential candidate might be disqualified from office due to psychological reasons? Because we not only can’t see this forest for the trees, but each time we try, there are even more trees blocking our view. In the 24-hour news cycle, each successive John Yerkes Iselin moment is not registered cumulatively; it merely supplants the one from last week. Or yesterday. Or this morning.

This could also explain Trump’s seeming imperviousness to his own mind-bending campaign. Surely it must be exhausting to attack Mexicans (June 16, 2015), to attack John McCain (July 18), attack Muslims (December 7), attack the Pope (February 18, 2016), attack President Clinton (May 18), attack candidates who use a teleprompter (May 27) a day after you give a speech using a teleprompter (May 26). It’s got to be exhausting—unless, as the old joke goes, “No pain, no gain. And: no brain, no pain.”

Anyway.

The actual sanity test I found is called, by delicious coincidence, “The Hare Psychopathy Checklist.” Introduced by Canadian criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare in 1980, it is still in use, though with ever more diffuse and specific mental-health diagnoses, it is not without its critics. However, as a practicing therapist who walked me through it agreed, it serves as a kind of triage device to separate the injured from the tripping from the psychopathic.

And about that word. We seem to have completely muddied up sociopath and psychopath. Sociopath? Roughly speaking, think Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, living out there in his shack in the woods, feeling nothing for other humans and unable to interact with them, literally mailing it in. Psychopath? Think Ted Bundy, feeling nothing for other humans but having long ago learned how to expertly mimic relationships by being whatever he needed to be to whomever he needed to use, killing at least 30 women, serving as his own counsel and cross-examining a female witness, proposing marriage to her while she was on the stand—and getting her to say “yes.”

For each of the 20 items on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, you’re supposed to assign the subject a 0, 1, or 2.
The highest and most dangerous score is a 40. In the U.S., the accepted minimum score for possible psychopathy is 30.


So. Those are the rules. Let’s play the Freud:

1. Glibness/superficial charm ...

--- THRU ---

20. Criminal versatility
The psychological professional and I got into a big debate about this one. She argued that “criminal” is not necessarily meant literally here, that if you scammed charities, stole money from grandmothers via a phony university, and directed about 20 percent of your campaign’s monthly spending toward companies you own and the reimbursement for travel by your children, it all qualified.

My point was that the word “criminal” is used. Not “dishonest,” not “unethical,” not “nefarious.” Capital-C “criminal” and the perp walk or multi-million-dollar fine and restitution that that implies. Not that that couldn’t be the end result of “Trump U” but it isn’t, not yet.

Points Awarded: 0
Final Score: 32, out of 40

So, there you have it. He peters out toward the end there, but with 30 points being the marker at which professionals could present a diagnosis of psychopathy, the implications are clear. Our Trumperor’s New Clothes media rightly sees the latest Trump “event”—whatever it is this time—as one of the most unbelievable developments in American political history. But the simple mechanics of following, reporting, and writing the proverbial “new high in low” every single day means that they could be missing one overriding truth about the health of the most remarkable presidential candidate since at least 1864.

In short, our amateurs’ exercise with the very professional Hare Psychopathy Checklist suggests that if you were betting on it, you’d probably want to bet that Donald Trump couldn’t pass a sanity test—open book.

And now, having slogged through this inventory of the Citizen Kane Storage Unit of bizarre presidential candidate conduct, go look at Twitter. Because in the time it took you to read this, he’s probably just done something new to raise his score.


http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/07/donald-trump-keith-olbermann-sanity-test