Psychologists have been warning for years that Donald Trump is dangerously mentally unstable, but one prominent psychiatrist with more than 40 years of experience as a physician has come forward to let us know the situation is even worse than we thought.

This president has many weird characteristics that have been well-recorded and he’s basically a giant walking thought bubble who’s as transparent as cellophane. His emotions are that of a three-year-old, and as Chauncey DeVega, writing for Salon notes:

“Through his public behavior Trump has repeatedly shown that he is mentally unwell. His apparent pathologies include malignant narcissism, delusions of grandeur, an attraction to violence, sadism, a lack of impulse control, utter disregard for rules and norms and a pathological tendency to lie. In sum,” he writes, “our president can reasonably be described as a psychopath and a sociopath.”

At a time when deaths from coronavirus in the U.S. are nearing 157,000, DeVega notes, Trump has been obsessed with his own “popularity” and “ratings.” Clearly, this is a man who is incapable of feeling empathy for others who are suffering as the pandemic rages. And Trump, DeVega writes, “cares about his followers only as a source for narcissistic fuel.”

In order to fine-tune his insights into Trump, DeVega decided to interview Dr. Justin Frank, who, as I mentioned earlier, has 40 years of experience and is a former professor of clinical psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center. The good doctor has also written the best-selling books “Bush on the Couch,” and “Obama on the Couch.” His most recent book is “Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.”

The interview is lengthy, so I’m going to encapsulate it as best as I can. DeVega couldn’t help but note the past few weeks have been disastrous for Trump and Dr. Frank noted that some of this stems from Trump having a “split mind.”

“He has always had a split mind. It is split between two sides. This is called ‘binary thinking.'” Frank said. “In this way of thinking a person is either right or wrong. You like me or you hate me. You’re loyal or disloyal. Trump’s world is very clearly demarcated.”

He noted that this is likely one reason why Trump is upset at Fox News right now because he completely fumbled his interview with Chris Wallace.

“In his mind, Fox News is now a very difficult organization,” Frank said. “How is he going to place them? Good or bad? Friend or foe? A person develops binary thinking as a way of protecting themselves from anxiety. Trump has made his world very simple. If anyone questions or challenges him, they are ‘nasty’ and must be retaliated against. That’s how his world is.”

This behavior, he noted, is typical for very young children.

“Every child feels that way until they are five or six,” he said. “Sometimes children do not engage in such simple thinking for long, it may stop at age two or three.”

DeVega noted Trump has returned to daily press conferences but he chided the media for trying to normalize a man who is basically “mentally pathological and cannot change.”

But according to Frank, the media is doing this because “those people want Trump to be normal because it is terrifying to have a president who is psychotic.”

“People do not want to believe a president would commit genocide, attack Black and brown people, separate children from their mothers, and cheat and steal all the time. Trump is a man who is both criminal and dangerous. Most people, including the journalist class, cannot accept that reality because it is too frightening.”

But that’s not all, he added.

“The American news media wants to normalize Trump for another reason, not only because they’re scared to stand up to a sadistic and disturbed and paranoid president, but because they are also guilt-ridden about trying to normalize him in the past,” Frank said. “When a person tries to normalize an abnormal and dangerous person, then guilt sets in. The news media keeps trying to normalize Trump so that they rush to praise any positive thing Trump does as a way of justifying their previous need to normalize him.”

Some of this, I suspect is also because sane people are trying to understand a man that they can’t possibly understand. We’re trying to figure out his way of thinking from our own standpoints and we aren’t capable of doing this. Because we wouldn’t commit genocide or separate children from their parents. Or allow a pandemic to kill hundreds of thousands of people when we have the means to prevent it. It’s beyond our ken to think this way.

But now here’s the last part: Frank commended Mary Trump’s book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man” for its insight into previously unknown things that Trump did. He notes this is a man whose parents lied to him from the get-go, telling him they loved him when they didn’t.

“Trump knew his parents did not love him,” Frank said. “Trump knew he wasn’t loved by his father or his mother. With compulsive liars, they are usually lying because they are deflecting outward a trauma that happened to them. Because Donald Trump was lied to as a child, he has lied to everyone else ever since.”

And perhaps this is the most telling part: “Donald Trump thinks that people do not like him and that they are all out to get him.”

It sounds like Trump’s upbringing was very sad indeed, but we’re suffering the fallout from that and it really isn’t our job as Americans to make it “all better” for this deranged man. Let’s hope this doesn’t end in disaster.

There are many excellent points the doctor made; too many for me to mention here, so I’m including the podcast below.