Trump Is a ‘Successful Sociopath’ and a Predator Who ‘Lacks a Conscience and Lacks Empathy,’ Says Former Harvard Psychiatrist

A retired Harvard psychiatry professor described President Donald Trump as “essentially a predator” and a “successful sociopath.”

By Shane Croucher

A retired Harvard psychiatry professor described President Donald Trump as “essentially a predator” and a “successful sociopath.”

Lance M. Dodes, MD, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is yet another mental health expert to call into question the president’s state of mind

“His focus on his personal benefit at any cost is why he’s a successful sociopath,” Dodes told Salon, adding that he can “see Donald for who he really is.”

“It’s very hard to get this across to the public, because every time people talk about him, they start out with the unspoken unconscious assumption that he’s basically like the rest of us,” Dodes told Salon.

“But in order to explain and predict Trump’s behavior, you have to begin with awareness that he is essentially a predator.

“Once you keep in mind that Trump lacks a conscience and lacks empathy, he becomes very easy to follow. Unlike normal people, who are complex, he’s basically running on a very simple and very disordered program.”Related Stories

Last week, John M. Talmadge, MD, a physician and clinical professor of psychiatry at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center, wrote on Twitter that Trump’s “mental impairment means he cannot think strategically or in abstract terms.”

“Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can think only in concrete, elementary, childlike, one dimensional terms,” Talmadge, who was commenting in a personal capacity, wrote.

“He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications.

“This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.”

Earlier in October, Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, suggested that Trump should be detained involuntarily to assess his mental health.

It followed a tweet by Trump in which the president claimed he would “totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!)” if Turkey did anything that “I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits.”

“Am I the only psychologist who finds this claim and this threat truly alarming? Wouldn’t these normally trigger a mental health hold? Right and Left must set aside politics and agree that there is a serious problem here,” Gilbert wrote on Twitter.

Last year, Bandy Lee, MD, a Yale psychiatrist, told Newsweek that a longtime Trump family friend approached her with concerns about the president’s well-being. She also said two officials from the administration did the same.

Lee wrote in a piece for The Conversation that Trump displayed “psychological symptoms reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration, narcissism and recklessness.”

In a recent article for The Atlantic, George Conway, an attorney and former Republican who is married to senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, detailed at length the evidence that Trump is mentally unfit to hold his office.

“Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires,” Conway wrote.

“The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust… Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.”Related Stories

As the impeachment process against Trump rolled on, a letter to Congress signed by 250 medical professionals led by Bandy Lee warned lawmakers to take into consideration the president’s mental state.

The letter stated that Trump “has the pattern of fragile sense of self and is prone to blame and attack others when threatened” and has “shown himself willing to encourage violence against his perceived enemies.”

“The unfolding of an impeachment inquiry raises the specter of President Trump feeling threatened in ways he never has before,” the letter said.

“This sense of threat is likely to lead to an exacerbation of his attacks on perceived enemies and to increased encouragement of violence against them. This encouragement may lead to violent actions by others, such as we have seen over the last couple of years but highly exacerbated.”

US President Donald Trump pauses while speaking during the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition at the McCormick Place Convention Center October 28, 2019, in Chicago, Illinois. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

We greatly thank you for your on-going generous financial and enthusiastic personal support in appreciation for this site!

CLICK ABOVE to DONATE

https://www.facebook.com/groups/377012949129789/

https://twitter.com/ageofblasphemy

TWITTER

Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed

Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed

Trump’s son-in-law has no business running the coronavirus response.

By Michelle Goldberg

Jared Kushner in March. He made his debut at the White House coronavirus briefing on Thursday. Credit…Pool photo by Evan Vucci

Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.

According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)

Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.

Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday.

This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.

The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006.

Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

“Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat,” reported The Times. It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. (As The Atlantic reported, a health insurance company co-founded by Kushner’s brother — which Kushner once owned a stake in — tried to build such a site, before the project was “suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.”)

The president was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed. Politico reported that Kushner, “alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government,” including the production and distribution of medical supplies and the expansion of testing. Kushner has embedded his own people in the Federal Emergency Management Agency; a senior official described them to The Times as “a ‘frat party’ that descended from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government.”

Disaster response requires discipline and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”

Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As The Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner,” reported Politico.

On Thursday, Governor Cuomo said that New York would run out of ventilators in six days. Perhaps Kushner’s projections were incorrect. “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them,” Cuomo said. “Assume you are on your own in life.” If not in life, certainly in this administration.

We greatly thank you for your on-going generous financial and enthusiastic personal support in appreciation for this site!

CLICK ABOVE to DONATE

https://www.facebook.com/groups/377012949129789/

https://twitter.com/ageofblasphemy

TWITTER

Trump Uses Coronavirus Press Conference to Confirm He’s an Actual Sociopath

Even with everything we know about the guy, the moment was still chilling.

By Bess Levin

By Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Over the past three years, many terms have been thrown around to describe Donald Trump. Phrases like “huge moron,” “colossal jerk,” “massive prick,” and, our personal favorite, “malignant tumor.”

Obviously many have agreed that the 45th president of the United States is both a terrible person and an idiot incapable of tweeting a coherent sentence, let alone running the country. Still, some have worried it would be taking things too far to diagnose the man as a full-blown sociopath. Are we being too cavalier with the designation, they’ve likely fretted. Shouldn’t we wait until the Mar-a-Lago groundskeepers find a few dozen heads in the basement, they’ve probably wondered. On Friday, however, Trump confirmed for all the world to see that he indeed has no conscience.

During a press conference at the White House, NBC reporter Peter Alexander asked Trump, “What do you say to the Americans who are scared, though? Nearly 200 dead, 14,000 who are sick, millions, as you’ve witnessed, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?” In reality this was a softball question that anyone with a semblance of a soul would be able to answer, responding with something like, “That’s an understandable feeling. I would tell them we’re in this together and we’re doing everything we can, as fast as we can.” But Trump literally only thinks about himself, so instead he told Alexander: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people. The American people are looking for answers and they’re looking for hope, and you’re doing sensationalism and the same with NBC and con-cast. I don’t call it Comcast, I call it ‘con-cast.’ Let me just tell you something. That’s really bad reporting, and you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.” Seemingly responding to criticism that he’d irresponsibly hyped the drug chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, despite the fact that it hasn’t yet been approved by the FDA for the virus, Trump snarled, “Let’s see if it works. It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows. I’ve been right a lot.”

Caroline Orr @RVAwonk : Peter Alexander was trying to get the president of the United States to address the fears Americans have about #coronavirus. His attack on Peter is absolutely shameful and hard to watch — but realize that he attacked Peter so he could avoid answering to you.

Peter Alexander was trying to get the president of the United States to address the fears Americans have about #coronavirus. His attack on Peter is absolutely shameful and hard to watch — but realize that he attacked Peter so he could avoid answering to you. pic.twitter.com/fJ0PC4Hk9N

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) March 20, 2020

As many have noted, employees at NBC, where Alexander works, lost a colleague to the virus today, but obviously it shouldn’t take such an event for the president to muster up or even fake some empathy for people who are terrified about a fast-moving pandemic. Later, given the opportunity to prove to the American people that he’s not a total monster, Trump declined:

Kyle Griffin ✔ @kylegriffin1

CNN’s Kaitlin Collins follows up: “Do you really think going off on Peter, going off on a network is appropriate when the country’s going through something like this?”
Trump responds: “I do.”

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1241042158569676800 … Kyle Griffin ✔ @kylegriffin1

NBC’s Peter Alexander: “What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?”

Trump: “I say you’re a terrible reporter.”

As did his merry band of sycophants, who would apparently rather kiss the ring than calm the nation during an unprecedented, petrifying time:

Rebecca Ballhaus ✔ @rebeccaballhaus

After Pompeo asks Americans to rely only on trusted sources of information, @colvinj asks him: “Does it undermine you at all when the president stands up here and he attacks news outlets, calling us untrustworthy?”

Pompeo: “Somebody else have a question?”

266 3:50 AM – Mar 21, 2020Twitter Ads info and privacy 170 people are talking about this

We greatly thank you for your on-going generous financial and enthusiastic personal support in appreciation for this site!

CLICK ABOVE to DONATE

https://www.facebook.com/groups/377012949129789/

https://twitter.com/ageofblasphemy

TWITTER

Is Tony Abbott a Sociopath?

Is Tony Abbott a sociopath?

 

BY TURNLEFT2013

BY Turn Left (Alison Parkes) with Penny Carter, first published on Progressives Tea Party, reproduced with permission

Actually, I have no idea whether Tony Abbott is a sociopath or not. I am not a psychiatrist. I am also not going to put up a list of Hare’s traits of a sociopath checklist and then trawl through Tony Abbott’s long history of violence, bullying, intimidation and abuse to find instances of quotes or actions that may correspond with that checklist.

What I will do, is put up Hare’s checklist, and let readers draw their own conclusions, not about whether Tony Abbott is a sociopath, or not… but whether the entire country as a whole needs some time on the leather couch talking about our feelings, our childhoods and our mothers:
• glibness
• superficial charm
• grandiose sense of self-worth
• need for stimulation
• proneness to boredom
• pathological lying
• cunning
• manipulative behaviour
• lack of remorse
• shallow affect [superficial emotional responses]
• callousness
• lack of empathy
• parasitic lifestyle
• poor behavioural control
• lack of realistic long-term goals
• promiscuity
• impulsivity
• irresponsibility
• failure to accept responsibility [for their own actions]
• criminal versatility ¹
• relying on sociological strategies and tricks to deceive

The problem is not so much that there are sociopaths, they have always existed, and will always exist in our societies. The problem is we keep electing them to govern over us, then bizarrely, expect they will govern inour best interests.

Like a nation of sheep we bought the lies and myths propagated in the Murdoch and Murdoch mini-me (ABC) media about how Tony is a changed person. Not even three months in, and that choice at the ballot box is proving disastrous. The almost cult-like worshiping of the thug who conned his way into the Lodge means our media has to tell us on a daily basis that black is white in order to maintain the illusion that Tony Abbott is the new messiah who will save Australia from the regional peace and AAA prosperity that Labor delivered us.

This is not who we are, there is nothing peculiarly Australian that requires us to vote in a violent, abusive, bullying man to become Prime Minister. Just as there was nothing in the German people in the 1920s and ’30s that meant they were more likely to vote in a fascist government. The only question is why they continued to support the fascist government, when it become blindingly obvious their leader was a dictator.

As Howard Zinn said: “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… [and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
(A video of Matt Damon reading that full speech can be found here…)

The lust for power, the easy access to the bottomless ATM known as taxpayers, the ability to get courts and federal police to bend to your will, is a lure so strong that those with evil and malevolent intentions find it difficult to resist. For these people, the ends justifies the means. The ‘ends’ being access to unlimited power, the ‘means’ is throw anyone under the bus that gets in their way. The trouble is, when the elected officials use lies, propaganda and intimidation to get there, they need to reproduce those tactics on a much larger scale to maintain their position of power, then our democracy gets thrown under that bus.

Do we still think our elected leaders act in the best interest of our country? As recent events in the US has shown, the Right Wing Teaparty republicans were prepared to crash the US economy by hitting the debt ceiling because they are ideologically opposed to poor people getting medical care that doesn’t result in bankruptcy. Our current government (it seems) is governing for the benefit of select few – Tony Abbott, George Pell, Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch.

This current governments policies are ideological, and designed to transform our environment to maximise profits for mining magnate Rinehart, transform our economy to benefit a foreign billionaire Murdoch, push the stone-age values of a religious institution, and our work place laws to benefit a handful of foreign corporation and not millions of people who work for their wages.

We, as a nation, have surrendered our freedom, optimism, compassion, generosity, empathy, in exchange for security* and ended up with neither.

* an illusion of security, both budget and border. I say illusion because the crises that Liberals promise to save us from exist only in their own minds and in newspaper headlines, and do not reflect reality. Our budget under Labor was not an ‘emergency’, it was one of the best in the world, our borders are not in crisis because of a couple of boats.

Source: Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior
edited by Theodore Millon, Erik Simonsen, Morten Birket-Smith, Roger D. Davis (2003)

Related articles

• Is Tony Abbott a sociopath? (theaimn.com)
• PM Tony Abbott; Personally and Politically Rooted in Fascist Catholicism (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• Is Tony Abbott a sociopath? (progressivesteaparty.wordpress.com)
• Broken promises to haunt Abbott (smh.com.au)
• Yes, we are independent and this is why (theaimn.com)
• Gonski may be Abbott’s Achilles heel (smh.com.au)
• The Racial Bacillus: Eradicating the Wog (nuovonovalis.wordpress.com)
• The leaders we deserve? (hieronymous.net)