The Charlottesville Terrorist, aka the Pittsburgh Terrorist; aka the El Paso Terrorist, etc.
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BY Harper West, MA, LLP, Psychotherapist | January 25, 2021
The following are excerpts from an earlier version...
Four years ago, psychiatrists and authors Dr. Robert Jay Lifton and Dr. Bandy Lee, among others, felt a duty to warn the country about dangerous possibilities stemming from a man who lacked the mental fitness to be president. With Dr. Lee as editor, they joined with other experts to publish The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President.
The book went on to become an instant number one bestseller in 2017 and a second edition added ten additional chapters. The authors have also written hundreds of articles and spoken out in the news media about the continuous crisis that was the Trump presidency
World Mental Health CoalitionAs a bookend to the Trump era, one of the book's contributors, psychotherapist Harper West, compiled excerpts from each of the essays in the original book. Even these brief selections show that at a time when few were speaking out about Trump's pathological personality, these experts were extremely prescient in their predictions about a wide range of aspects of Trump's behaviors, including the psychological impact on the country.
As you read these, remember the authors were writing four years ago and yet their statements sound as if they could be describing Trump's most recent behaviors. Clearly, he did not become more "presidential." In fact his behaviors all worsened, as was predicted. We can take heart, however, that the authors offer not only a roadmap to preventing future authoritarians, but also words of advice for moving forward past Trumpism.
Foreward: Our Witness to Malignant Normality, by Robert Jay Lifton
"[Trump] has also, in various ways, violated our American institutional requirements and threatened the viability of American democracy. Yet, because he is president and operates within the broad contours and interactions of the president, there is a tendency to view what he does as simply part of our democratic process - that is, as politically and even ethically normal. In this way, a dangerous president becomes normalized, and malignant normality comes to dominate our governing (or, one could say, our antigoverning) dynamic." (p. xvi-xvii)
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