Robert Jay Lifton is an eminent psychohistorian. In this post, he talks with Bill Moyers about Trump, the Goldwater rule, the “duty to warn,” and what makes Trump so dangerous. Twenty-seven mental health professionals have written a book about Trump.
“The foreword is by one of America’s leading psychohistorians, Robert Jay Lifton. He is renowned for his studies of people under stress — for books such as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims nor Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986). The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the Hitler’s euthanasia project to extermination camps.
“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump will be published Oct. 3 by St. Martin’s Press.”
“Moyers: Some of the descriptions used to describe Trump — narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist — even some have suggested early forms of dementia — are difficult for lay people to grasp. Some experts say that it’s not one thing that’s wrong with him — there are a lot of things wrong with him and together they add up to what one of your colleagues calls “a scary witches brew, a toxic stew.”
“Lifton: I think that’s very accurate. I agree that there’s an all-enveloping destructiveness in his character and in his psychological tendencies. But I’ve focused on what professionally I call solipsistic reality. Solipsistic reality means that the only reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more dangerous for the country and for the world. In that sense, he does what psychotics do. Psychotics engage in, or frequently engage in a view of reality based only on the self. He’s not psychotic, but I think ultimately this solipsistic reality will be the source of his removal from the presidency…
“Moyers: There’s a chapter in the book entitled, “He’s Got the World in His Hands and His Finger on the Trigger.” Do you ever imagine him sitting alone in his office, deciding on a potentially catastrophic course of action for the nation? Say, with five minutes to decide whether or not to unleash thermonuclear weapons?
“Lifton: I do. And like many, I’m deeply frightened by that possibility. It’s said very often that, OK, there are people around him who can contain him and restrain him. I’m not so sure they always can or would. In any case, it’s not unlikely that he could seek to create some kind of crisis, if he found himself in a very bad light in relation to public opinion and close to removal from office. So yes, I share that fear and I think it’s a real danger. I think we have to constantly keep it in mind, be ready to anticipate it and take whatever action we can against it. The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He’s equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All those who are displeased about the election of Donald Trump, may take comfort in one fact. It could be worse. Hillary Clinton could have won.
LikeLike
Saying that truly marks you as a troll.
Even Theresa May — a conservative — understands that there is something truly dangerous about having a man of questionable impulse control or belief in facts running this country. You think there is a western democracy in the world who thinks Hillary Clinton would be worse? Aside from some rabid Trump supporters who seem to love Trump more than their country and Putin and his followers, not many people agree with you. But I’m sure you feel good about the company you keep.
LikeLike
You have a death wish or you are a Brietbart bot.
LikeLike
Tell your Representative to support H.R.669 – Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017: Congressional Switchboard: 202-224-3121
Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017
This bill prohibits the President from using the Armed Forces to conduct a first-use nuclear strike unless such strike is conducted pursuant to a congressional declaration of war expressly authorizing such strike.
“First-use nuclear strike” means a nuclear weapons attack against an enemy that is conducted without the President determining that the enemy has first launched a nuclear strike against the United States or a U.S. ally.
LikeLike
(I used to work in Nuclear weapons control, Strategic Air Command, US Air Force. I work in telecommunications engineering at the Pentagon now)
BAD law. NO chance of it passing. The military leadership is very much opposed.
Hell, Congress can’t even balance the budget, nor can they get rid of Obamacare.
I suggest everyone watch “Vietnam war” tonight on PBS. The Indochina war dragged on for years, and congress never got around to declaring war, and we got beat by a fifth-rate bunch of rice-eaters with bamboo sticks.
LikeLike
and to think we poured all those hundreds of billions into the war machine, only to get beat by “rice-eaters with bamboo sticks.” How many trillions wasted in Afghanistan?
LikeLike
Charles thinks that the first use of a nuclear strike law is “BAD law. NO chance of it passing. The military leadership is very much opposed.”
Why is Charles wrong? Because the use of nuclear weapons opens a Pandora’s box of horrors. Educate yourself, Charles, and get off of your nuclear war wagon.
“Nine countries together possess around 15,000 nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning. Most are many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. A single nuclear warhead, if detonated on a large city, could kill millions of people, with the effects persisting for decades.”
http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/
How many nuclear weapons are there in the world?
U.S. – 6,800
Russa – 7,000
UK – 215
France – 300
China – 270
India – 110 to 120
Pakistan – 120 – 130
Israel – 80
North Korea – 10
What Does Nuclear Fall Out Do To Your Body? – next video
Guess where the pollution produced in Asia blows and where the radioactive clouds from nuclear explosions in North Korea or China end up? North America
The Aftermath of World Wide Nuclear War – next video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2hFmQCHLk4
LikeLike
Quote: “Nearly half of Laos is now contaminated with unexploded ordnances (UXOs), explosive weapons such as bombs, grenades and land mines. Cluster bombs, explosive weapons that work by ejecting hundreds of smaller submunitions over a wide area, make up the majority of UXOs that plague the country. Cluster munitions pose an especially grave danger to civilians, according to specializing in the field of disability, because they are “highly imprecise and indiscriminate” weapons designed to “scatter explosives over swaths of land often hundreds of yards wide.”
Of the 260 million cluster bombs dropped by the United States, up to 30 percent of them failed to detonate. These bombs were released on targets in a large shell or casing. Each of the casings contained roughly 600 to 700 small bomblets, or “bombies,” as they are often called in Laos.
There are now close to 78 million unexploded bomblets littering rice fields, villages, school grounds, roads and other populated areas in Laos, hindering development and poverty reduction. More than 34,000 people have been killed or injured by cluster munitions since the bombing ceased in 1973, with close to 300 new casualties in Laos every year. About 40 percent of the accidents result in death and 60 percent of the victims are children. At this time, less than 1 percent of the UXOs have been cleared. End quote
LikeLike
Charles,
I want to add to what Joe wrote.
The Vietnam War (1955 – 1975) was based on a lie just like Iraq was – More than 3.3 million Vietnamese were killed by that war vs 58,220 U.S. troops and many of the U.S. troops that survived and came home have never stopped suffering due to their physical wounds and/or PTSD.
Congress never approved of the bombing of Laos and Cambodia but Nixon did it anyway.
It’s estimated that 28,000 to 115,000 Laotians were killed.
273,000 Cambodians were killed.
Bush #2’s Iraq War was also based on lies.
It is estimated that at least 165,000 civilians have died (that number could be much higher) and the fighting continues. In addition, “the overall number of orphans across Iraq to be no more than 400,000,” while a UN report from 2008 estimated the number to be around 870,000. A large-scale survey of Iraqi households by UNICEF, published in 2012, estimated that between 800,000 and a million Iraqi children under 18 – or about five percent of Iraqi children – have lost one or both of their parents.”
The US lost 4,491 troops and many of the combat vets that survived and came home never stop suffering. I know several that live one day at a time with their PTSD.
The War in Afghanistan (2001 – still going on 17 years later)
About 31,000 civilians have died.
25,500 to 40,500 Taliban, etc. have died.
The U.S. has lost so far, 3,407 troops with another 22,773 wounded. Many combat vets come home with PTSD and they never get rid of that disease.
It sounds like Charles approve of a first strike using nuclear weapons. How many people in other countries does Charles approve of killing because they don’t think like him – a hundred million, a billion, or more?
A friend of mine, a special forces medic that served in the Middle East told me once that most of the people he met in the Middle East don’t want to fight. They just want to live their lives and to be left alone. He said the actual number of Islamic insurgents, terrorists the U.S. is fighting is small compared to the number of civilians that have lost their homes and/or lives.
LikeLike
Link for the above quotation: http://legaciesofwar.org/resources/books-documents/land-of-a-million-bombs/
LikeLike
Charles
I guess that means our military really stinks . Pretty good in a war the size of Granada
LikeLike
Joel,
That must be why Trump wants to cut everything but add $60 billion to the military. Just throwing money at the military won’t make it better, don’t you know?
LikeLike
Yes, well, among other things, when Charles wrote that “Congress never got around to declaring war,” regarding the Vietnam War, perhaps he doesn’t realize that there has not been an actual, formally declared war since World War II.
Odd that someone who works at the Pentagon does not appear to know this.
LikeLike
Lloyd, your comments remind me of a song by Tom McInrath of Rise Against. I first heard this song a few years ago when he joined Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Wayne Kramer from the MC5 to do an acoustic concert to raise funds and awareness to oppose SB 5 in Ohio, a bill that tried to kill unions. It was powerful then and still is:
LikeLike
This song?
LikeLike
Is that you, Dick Cheney? Cheney & his sick warmongering cabal have wanted the US to engage in another nuclear war since the 1970’s.
As part of the Ford & Reagan administrations this group of arrogant fools tried to stop nuclear physicists from publishing their research on nuclear winter- the after effects of a thermo-nuclear war. They waged a PR campaign to convince the US public that they would survive a nuclear war. Lies.
You and your sick friends should burn in hell.
LikeLike
“…a fifth-rate bunch of rice-eaters with bamboo sticks.”
Really? This is the rhetoric you choose to persuade people of the credibility of your opinions?
This is at best in poor taste, and arguably bigoted. Try to use grown-up words when you sit at the grown-up table, will you Charles?
LikeLike
“rice-eaters”?
seriously? That you would use such a phrase without a second’s thought is extraordinarily revealing
LikeLike
As you may have forgotten, Charles, that “fifth rate bunch of rice eaters with bamboo sticks ” won that war. And as Bob Shepherd correctly points out, you reveal a great deal about yourself – arrogance, ignorance, racism – with that statement.
It also gives a good indication of what you probably say about public school students in your unguarded moments. But, then, that’s why you’re a so-called reformer, isn’t it?
LikeLike
The Ken Burns’ series on the Vietnam War started last night. It is amazing.
Ho Chi Minh reached out to western democratic nations repeatedly and was rebuffed.
This was a truly tragic and unnecessary war.
I grieve for all those who lost their lives because of stupid policymakers.
LikeLike
Charles said, “fifth-rate bunch of rice eaters with bamboo sticks”
Many Chinese also eat rice with bamboo sticks called chopsticks.
You should read “The Man Who Loved China” by Simon Winchester, a nonfiction book based on actual, factual evidence that China was world’s most technologically advanced country for more than 1,500 years.
How long as the white man’s racist, colonial powers been the worlds most technologically advanced countries?
The answer is almost 200 years, and what has China accomplished in the last 68 years?
1. women became equal to men after having been the property of men for several thousand years and that was accomplished in one speech on one day.
2. China is responsible for 90-percent of the reduction in poverty in the world.
3. China has the largest high-speed rail network in the world.
4. China’s middle class is larger than the entire population of the U.S.
5. For a country that is allegedly a dictatorship, why does China encourage its young people to get an education and even allows hundreds of thousands to go to college annually in the United States and other western countries? Wouldn’t an autocratic dictatorship want to stop the next generation from being exposed to Western democratic ideals?
6. China locks up about 135 people out of every 100,000 vs the U.S. that locks up about 700 per 100,000 – and many in the U.S. think they live in a free country.
7. If China wants to control what their people think, why do they let anyone that can afford to travel to go anywhere in the world as tourists – more Chinese travel to visit other countries than any7 country on the planet?
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> Michael Fiorillo commented: “As you may have forgotten, Charles, that > “fifth rate bunch of rice eaters with bamboo sticks ” won that war. And as > Bob Shepherd correctly points out, you reveal a great deal about yourself – > arrogance, ignorance, racism – with that statement. It also gi” >
LikeLike
Nice find, Lloyd! Did not know about that. And for a German audience! His music is much more accessible when acoustic. (How do you place a response so that it fits like yours did? Can’t figure that out.)
LikeLike
“Ho Chi Minh reached out to western democratic nations repeatedly and was rebuffed.”
Diane,
Ho Chi Minh was also a spy for the French during WWII.
In addition, after the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Mao also reached out to the U.S. for help. He was a nationalist and had never gone to Moscow to be indoctrinated into Stalinist style Communism. Mao didn’t want to seek help from the Soviet Union, but the U.S. spurned his overtures and Mao had no choice. Mainland China was broke. When Chiang Kai-shek fled China with his army to Taiwan he also emptied the banks and took all of China’s gold and silver with him. Instead of filling trains with people to help them escape. Chiang Kai-shek focused on China’s treasures and wealth.
The Communist Chinese Party started with nothing but people to rebuild China and the people stuck with the CCP because most of the people felt they were a better choice than the KMT and Chiang Kai-shek that represented China’s powerful oligarchy.
Chiang Kai-shek was a brutal dictator to the day he died. Taiwan didn’t hold its first elections until the 1990s about twenty years after Chiang died.
Then Nixon changed history in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Soviet Union notified the Nixon’s that they planned to nuke China’s major cities. Nixon replied that if the USSR nuked China that would mean World War III, because the U.S. would nuke Russia.
Soon after that, Nixon went to China setting the stage for Deng Xiaoping a few years later after Mao died to open China to the world and move toward a capitalist-socialist mixed economy Chinese style.
The only thing Communist about China today is the fact that the one political party (with more than 80 million members) that rules China still has that word in its name, and that is enough for people like Charles to never accept China.
The CCP should change its name to something like the Peoples Party.
LikeLike
There’s never one most dangerous person. Trump is admittedly a raging malignant boil on the arse of the world. But the most dangerous people – in any time period or situation – are those who enable him (her). Those who follow orders, especially those who are very efficient about it. Hitler would have been nowhere without the seemingly innocuous likes of Adolph Eichmann and his ilk.
LikeLike
You have a good point. At the same time, Trump has ingathered people who do follow his orders. Sometimes they smile while enabling him. His cronies are in the White House, in every cabinet position, and all with Congressional approval. Then there are the fans who turn up in his continuing campaign to feed his ego. Scary–all of them.
LikeLike
Yes, dienne.
The fact that there are still his hard-core followers, and that the people who are working for him, including the members of his cabinet who have not resigned in good conscience…..
Well, that pretty much makes them all complicit, doesn’t it? 😪
LikeLike
dienne77 says: “Hitler would have been nowhere without the seemingly innocuous likes of Adolph Eichmann and his ilk.”
Are you kidding me? You have it completely backward, dienne77.
Sociopaths and murderers like Adolph Eichmann and his ilk would have been pushed to criminality and (if caught) imprisoned without having a fascist demagogue leader who enables them and gives them legitimacy.
There will ALWAYS be people who have no compunction about killing and murdering and doing evil. It takes someone like Hitler to find them and turn their evil into “good government” that people accept as perfectly fine.
If Hitler hadn’t found Eichmann, he would have found some other low-life amoral person to empower. But Eichmann without Hitler becomes a common criminal.
LikeLike
Granted, there probably would have been other functionaries. But the point is, without unquestioning GAGAers (as Duane would put it), anyone like Trump or Hitler is just a raving madman. It’s the dutiful (and talented) functionaries “just following orders” that make a toxic dictatorship work so awfully well.
LikeLike
As usual, you’re history is off, and you miss Dienne’s point.
If you ever read “Eichman In Jerusalem” by Hannah Arendt, or anything else about the man, you’d know that he was neither a psychopath, a common criminal or someone who directly killed people.
Instead, was a mediorcre, unthinking follower, concerned with little or nothing beyond the approval of his superiors and his personal advancement. That was Arendt’s point when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”
Her point was that the truly evil cannot succeed unless they are enabled and facilitated by small, unmindful go-getters who are just concerned with making sure the trains run efficiently (which was essentially Eichman’s job), and not what happens to the people at the end of the line.
LikeLike
Michael Fiorillo,
“a mediocre, unthinking follower, concerned with little or nothing beyond the approval of his superiors and his personal advancement.”
Correct. I shouldn’t have called him a psychopath. But the fact that he was not — the fact he was just a normal typical anti-Semite looking to please his boss — just proves my point.
There will ALWAYS be people like that. Sure I wish we could make sure those people don’t exist, but they do.
They can either be marginalized by society or enabled by society.
Electing a leader like Trump or a leader like Hitler enables them.
That is what is dangerous.
If Germany had a normal political leader instead of a charismatic madman with absolutely no compunction about exterminating an entire population, how dangerous is Eichmann?
I would like to believe it is possible that we can be a country where there are no “small, unmindful go-getters who are just concerned with making sure the trains run efficiently (which was essentially Eichman’s job), and not what happens to the people at the end of the line.”
But that’s human nature. People like that exist. I suspect we all know at least one person like that.
What is dangerous is when we elect a leader who IS a psychopath and those people follow his bidding.
They aren’t dangerous if there is no one in power telling them to do evil.
LikeLike
^^I should have said, those people are not dangerous if there is no one in power REWARDING them and PROMOTING them for doing evil.
LikeLike
The APA (American Psychiatric Association) just updated it support for the original concept of the Goldwater Rule.
How about if I get a doctor that has never seen you to diagnosis you? Does it really seem logical that half of the country is suddenly cowering in fear because of one election? More to the point, I think doctor’s that are violating the Goldwater Rule are preying on the fears of the mentally challenged and creating the fear.
LikeLike
Which is the kinder analysis? That Trump and his aging brain are mentally incapacitated?
Or that Trump is simply a sociopathic liar who will say anything and lie about any person if it allows him to get what he wants, and what he wants is always about him?
Saying that he is psychologically incapacitated is far kinder than saying that the man intentionally lies and lies non-stop and that people like you think it is perfectly fine. I’m shocked, but since I suspect you are a nasty unAmerican troll who hates our country, I’ll give you a pass.
LikeLike
I am stunned that anyone would be amused by his retweet of himself hitting a golf ball that fells a woman, in this case, his former political opponent.
Is it funny for a man to assault a woman violently?
Forget the names.
The imagined physical assault encourages and gives permission to other men to do the same.
The fact that the man in question is the president of the United States makes the matter triply scandalous because he is expected to be a role model for men and women, boys and girls.
Simply put, he is a model of what not to be, how not to behave. He exemplifies a classic bully, a tyrant, a very bad hombre who should be deported.
LikeLike
These 2 diagnoses are not mutually exclusive. He can have both. Making him dangerous on so many different levels.
LikeLike
Linda Giffin
You need a doctor if, you need a doctor to tell you that there is something seriously wrong with Trump ! So when are you making an appointment?
LikeLike
That Dump is: Making America GRATE, not great. He’s really sick to the core.
LikeLike
I was married to a man who was finally diagnosed as bp 2 . He had very similar baffling inconsistent actions hand gestures and vitriolic language.
He was narcissistic a misogynist and a ladies man…
Very highly regarded professionally
and throughout our neighborhood . This man in the White house startles me whenever I watch or hear him
I really feel fear as i am reliving those horrible days in that. Sham of a marriage .As was the case with me most folks do not see this man as harmful.
Ive learned first hand that as long as you allow them to get away with one indescretion they will continue until you are deviod of self.
LikeLike