Here’s the grim truth about our beautiful world in the age of Trump and the arsonists / The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
Here’s the grim truth about our beautiful world in the age of Trump and the arsonists
We knew this presidency would be deadly. We were not exaggerating when, three years ago, we put together the public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. We meant in part that the president would be dangerous to civic life, to democracy, and to the nation’s mental health — but we also meant that he would endanger lives. Politics did not concern us. We are health professionals. Everything falls secondary to life and death, including politics.
After we got together to write the book, hundreds, and later thousands, more mental health professionals gathered from all over the country and the world with their shared concerns. Together we formed first the National Coalition, and then the World Mental Health Coalition, to organize around our goal of societal safety. Through consultation with Congress members, letters, petitions, and education of the public, we tried to emphasize that mental impairment in the office of the US presidency is a serious matter. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” an intelligence official recently said about the lack of mobilization around the now deadly coronavirus pandemic.
His behavior is exactly of what we expect of someone who is dangerously lacking in mental capacity. Just when surveillance was needed, he was more preoccupied with “keeping the numbers low” than testing and containment. And when behavioral change would decide the scale of the eventual calamity, he defiantly appeared in crowds, shaking hands and touching surfaces all the more. As his rallies were canceled, he used daily press conferences for his emotional compulsion to create a desired, alternative reality, through delusional-level distortion and misinformation, rather than working to save lives. The pandemic makes stark the deadliness of his symptoms, and if we believe those around him will be able to contain or go around them, we are mistaken.
Here we enter the realm of pathology. What is truly dangerous is not the overt symptoms — even a psychotic patient wearing a tinfoil hat is not very dangerous — but the denial and the extent to which one would go to cover up symptoms. And this also goes for the president's handlers, by extension. We call this “loss of insight.” It is the loss of ability to take care of oneself or to see that one has a problem, which diminishes all the more in those who need intervention the most....
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-coronavirus-reaction-psychiatric-issues-pandemic-impeach-a9421441.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=Feed
TotalCretin.Com - Trump and Coronavirus
Robert Reich: America has no real public health system – coronavirus has a clear run // America Is a Sham
It was no mistake, for instance, that, when
Donald Trump finally turned his mind to the coming pandemic (rather than
denying it) as the economy he had been bragging about for the previous three years began to
crash, one of the first groups he genuinely worried about didn’t include you or
me or even his base.
It was America’s fossil-fuel industry. As global transportation ground down amid coronavirus panic and a wild
oil price war between the Saudis and the Russians, those
companies were being clobbered. And so he quickly reached out to them
with both empathy and money - promising to buy tons of extra crude oil for the nation’s strategic
petroleum reserve (“We’re going to fill it right to the top”) — unavailable to
so many other endangered Americans. At that moment he made it perfectly
clear that, in an unfolding crisis of the first order, all of us remain in a
world run by arsonists led by the president of the United States.
So, a cardinal?
Really? That’s what I want to focus on in a world which, as it grows
hotter by the year, will only be ever more susceptible to pandemics, not to speak of staggering fires,
flooding, extreme storms, and god knows what else. Honestly, given a
country of closed schools, self-isolating adults, and the sick and the dying,
on a planet that seems to be cracking open, in a country which,
until recently, couldn’t test as many people for Covid-19 in a couple
of months as South Korea could in - yes, this is not a misprint - a day,
where’s my sense of proportion? Still, if you can,
bear with me for a moment, I think there’s a connection, even if anything but
obvious, between our troubled world and that flaming bird I first saw so long
ago. Let me start this way: believe it or not, birds were undoubtedly the
greatest secret of my teenage years...
We knew this presidency would be deadly. We were not exaggerating when, three years ago, we put together the public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. We meant in part that the president would be dangerous to civic life, to democracy, and to the nation’s mental health — but we also meant that he would endanger lives. Politics did not concern us. We are health professionals. Everything falls secondary to life and death, including politics.
After we got together to write the book, hundreds, and later thousands, more mental health professionals gathered from all over the country and the world with their shared concerns. Together we formed first the National Coalition, and then the World Mental Health Coalition, to organize around our goal of societal safety. Through consultation with Congress members, letters, petitions, and education of the public, we tried to emphasize that mental impairment in the office of the US presidency is a serious matter. “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” an intelligence official recently said about the lack of mobilization around the now deadly coronavirus pandemic.
His behavior is exactly of what we expect of someone who is dangerously lacking in mental capacity. Just when surveillance was needed, he was more preoccupied with “keeping the numbers low” than testing and containment. And when behavioral change would decide the scale of the eventual calamity, he defiantly appeared in crowds, shaking hands and touching surfaces all the more. As his rallies were canceled, he used daily press conferences for his emotional compulsion to create a desired, alternative reality, through delusional-level distortion and misinformation, rather than working to save lives. The pandemic makes stark the deadliness of his symptoms, and if we believe those around him will be able to contain or go around them, we are mistaken.
Here we enter the realm of pathology. What is truly dangerous is not the overt symptoms — even a psychotic patient wearing a tinfoil hat is not very dangerous — but the denial and the extent to which one would go to cover up symptoms. And this also goes for the president's handlers, by extension. We call this “loss of insight.” It is the loss of ability to take care of oneself or to see that one has a problem, which diminishes all the more in those who need intervention the most....
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-coronavirus-reaction-psychiatric-issues-pandemic-impeach-a9421441.html?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=Feed
TotalCretin.Com - Trump and Coronavirus
Robert Reich: America has no real public health system – coronavirus has a clear run // America Is a Sham
