Trump’s Psychological Afflictions + Diminishing Cognition Portends Disaster

Those of us who have studied Donald John Trump, even before his run for elective office, understand his decision-making process.

We have concluded by observation and by his repeated verbal confirmation, that Donald Trump arrives at his decisions through instinctual and intuitional impulses alone. He hardly ever conducts research or even confers with experts in the fields that his decisions involve.

We know this in the context of his psychological and emotional afflictions. Professional clinical psychiatrists and psychologists have diagnosed Donald Trump with mental conditions in their 2017 book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

In addition, his niece and trained psychologist, Mary Trump, in her 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, wrote a tell-all memoir showing her uncle, Donald, as mentally damaged with clear signs of narcissistic and sociopathic personality disorders.

Reasoned inquiry and logical inferences never underpin Trump’s course of action. On the contrary, impulse and intuition based solely on self interest are the means toward his sorted ends.

While this has always been a problem to those around him – from his children who have felt his over-demands for perfection and ultimate sacrifice to his needs, to his hired building contractors whom he has stiffed, to world leaders who have been steadfast allies to the United States whom he as alienated and have thrown under the proverbial bus, to the people of his country whom he swore to represent to the best of his ability but, instead, has turned his back on to enrich himself.

But as seriously damaged a human being he has been for the majority of his almost 80 years, and with all the past damage he has wrought, with the onset of his obvious declining cognitive abilities, Donald Trump poses an even greater threat not only to our democratic institutions, but more substantially, to the potential destruction of the world order and to life itself on our fragile planet.

Until and unless people in power, including Republican legislators in the Senate and House of Representatives stand together with their Democratic counterparts united in constructing a big beautiful rhetorical wall to get in the way of Trump’s dangerous instincts and impulses, this president, unrestrained, will cause permanent devastation to the world.