We have to thank Rawstory and their relationship with Salon to pull just a few quotes from a brilliant collection of assessments by mental health professionals contemplating another Trump run in 2024 (Which we still maintain is dicey), and the implications on the national psyche.
The constant, throughout the opinion of many experts (just a few paragraphs from various interviewees below is that of the malignant narcissist as an abusive spouse, in which the country is the victim, though his supporters are the enablers that still maintain their adoration, despite the onslaught.
Here below are some of the most compelling quotes with a few+ observations intermixed:
The Trump regime and Republican policies more generally have literally caused trauma — physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual — for millions of Americans, including of course the deaths of at least 700,000 people from the coronavirus pandemic.
And yet if one asks Trump of the MAGAs, his management of COVID is a near-miraculous success. Such it is with cult leaders.
[F]or the first time in America’s history the latent ugliness in people was revealed and validated and celebrated by a sitting president — it was officially normalized. And what we’re experiencing now; this staggering, insensitive posturing in the face of so many people’s suffering, is the late-ripening fruit of something that has been set into the bedrock of half our nation. It is the malicious entitlement that MAGA was designed to nurture from the beginning….
This quickly metastasizing moral cancer is something we’ve never experienced on this level in our lifetimes and it’s something we’re going to have to reckon with regardless of the political outcomes of the next four years. If the former president somehow takes that office again, these stories will surely grow exponentially more vi0lent and more commonplace, but either way, the ugliness is here now.
Yes, if anything, he’s learned how to do it more effectively at this point.
The Trump Effect on America, is that once reasonable, rational human beings whose prejudices, fears, and phobias were all bound by some baseline decorum and common courtesy that kept them from intentionally harming others — have been empowered to revel in the worst of themselves. They believe cruelty is their birthright.
Or maybe they just always wanted to be cruel and were waiting for permission. The reason the MAGAs went to Trump in the first place is that he hated the right people with the same passion they wanted.
Trump’s primitive emotional state make him an enormous danger to democracy, which he cannot abide. As a consequence, if he were to again become president, the end of democracy in this country would become a realistic possibility.
A probability. He would try to run again for a third term or appoint a family member as a successor.
It is really too bad that our media, broadly speaking, has remained in the dark about Trump’s well-defined character pathology. Therefore, many journalists, mostly among the mainstream news media, continue to be shocked by these “revelations” as if unable and/or unwilling to finally arrive at an understanding of Trump’s disordered character.
No one is shocked that it happens, we’re shocked how it happens. We are never surprised at the lengths he goes, it’s how he does it that can be so shocking. We know he’s never hitting bottom, it’s the odd stuff he hits along the way.
If Trump runs and wins in 2024, we will see an accelerated continuation of our demise. Every negative trend we are experiencing now will be augmented, especially our polarization, inequality and vi0lence.
From the perspective of the former president as an abuser, a future Trump candidacy and potential presidency would be a psychological slap in the face to all of his victims from the past six years. I’ve often used the analogy of an abusive relationship when it comes to the former president and his approach to governing. If the watering-down of the Mueller investigation and the acquittal following evidence-heavy impeachment proceedings was akin to the arrest and subsequent release of a criminally abusive spouse, a return to office would indicate zero accountability for, and an acceptance of, physical and emotional abuse from our leadership; a trend that has been gathering steam for some time now.
It all sounds so familiar. So right. It is just put together better than we non-experts could articulate it.
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