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Harvard Psychiatrist Breaks Down Trump’s ‘Severe, Continuous, Mental Disturbance’

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“If you consider the 7 traits that define Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSM-5, he meets every one of them.”

This week, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee about his role in facilitating Trump’s potential crimes and misbehaviors.

At the same time, Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The summit failed to secure a de-nuclearization deal and Trump drew criticism when he said that he believed Jong Un’s claim that he hadn’t been aware of Otto Warmbier, the American student imprisoned in North Korea, who died soon after his release to the US.

Raw Story spoke with Dr. Lance Dodes, a Training and Supervising Analyst Emeritus with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He recently retired as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Dodes is a contributor to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. His chapter makes the case that Trump suffers from a dangerous sociopathic disorder.

Tana Ganeva: Following what was largely seen as a failed summit with Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump said he believed the dictator when he said he hadn’t known about Otto Warmbier. Do you see strains of Trump’s sociopathy in this?

Lance Dodes: Mr. Trump is a sociopath, in that he meets every diagnostic criterion for the official diagnostic term “Antisocial Personality Disorder.” The fact that this is a personality disorder, rather than simply a single symptom such as anxiety or depression, means that all his actions are signs of this severe, continuous, mental disturbance.

To understand his actions, it is essential to keep in mind that sociopaths have only one goal: to enhance themselves, and that in pursuing their self-interest, they lack both normal human empathy for others and a normal human conscience. Cheating, conning, lying, stealing, threatening are all done with no remorse.

When stressed with facts that would require them to admit failure, or even that others know more or are more capable than them, sociopaths lose track of reality, becoming delusional with insistence on the truth of what they psychologically need to maintain their superior view of themselves. Indeed, nobody matters except to the degree they can serve the sociopath’s personal needs.

That’s why loyalty is demanded, but as soon as an associate disagrees, the sociopath turns on them with a fury; there was never a real relationship to begin with.

Mr. Trump’s denial of the facts about Mr. Warmbier is consistent with his sociopathy. He ignores reality, is unremorseful about lying and does not hesitate to sacrifice the feelings of others such as Mr. Warmbier’s family. We don’t know exactly why he lied in this case, but one possibility is that Mr. Trump has heavily promoted his relationship with Kim as evidence of his superior ability to manage world tensions and thinks that confronting Kim would interfere with that, hence personally diminishing Mr. Trump. In any case, Mr. Trump’s absence of feelings for Mr. Warmbier or his family is the same as his absence of feelings for the disabled reporter he mocked, for religious and racial minorities, for children separated from their parents at the border and on and on.

Tana Ganeva: What made you first consider that Donald Trump is a sociopath?

Lance Dodes: Mr. Trump has a long history that proves his diagnosis. If you consider the 7 traits that define Antisocial Personality Disorder in the DSM-5, he meets every one of them:

1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors.
2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying … or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
4. Irritability and aggressiveness
5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others.
6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations
7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

Tana Ganeva: What’s the danger of having a sociopath in charge of the US?

Lance Dodes: Sociopathy is the most serious mental disability possible for the President. Other conditions do not lead to continual disregard for the welfare of others, lying, cheating, and repeated loss of reality under stress.

The bogus argument made by some that Abraham Lincoln is known to have suffered with depression, so Mr. Trump is not different, fails on this point. Lincoln’s depression did not make him cruel or indifferent to the feelings of others, cheat, lie, lose track of reality when stressed, or have a need to be an absolute ruler over everyone.

There are two major risks from Mr. Trump.

First, there is a serious risk that he will start a war to distract the country from his multiple failures and his attempts to become a one-man ruler. This is most likely to occur as he is stressed by challenges to his position as President. Other tyrants have plunged their nations into war, sometimes by creating an international incident as an excuse, to avoid internal disputes and solidify power.

Second, there is a serious risk of his destroying democracy in this country. He has already eroded it by attacking the principle of balance of powers, attacking the judicial system and the Congress, attempting to gather all power to himself. He has tried to destroy our free press by claiming that its criticisms of him are “fake news” and that a free press is the enemy of the people. These are well-known tactics of would-be tyrants, and are signs of sociopathy with his single-minded concern for himself and absence of conscience or concern for the feelings or lives of anyone else.

 

Image by U.S. State Dept. via Flickr 

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News

Vance Demands Fact-Check on ‘Pet-Eating’ Lie Despite Knowing Truth Pre-Debate

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22 hours ago

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September 18, 2024

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Ohio’s freshman Republican U.S. Senator JD Vance knew his claim “20,000” Haitian “migrants” were stealing the cats and dogs of Springfield residents and eating them was a lie before Donald Trump spread it to tens of millions of Americans in last week’s widely-watched September 10 presidential debate. Despite that knowledge, the vice-presidential nominee is now demanding reporters “fact-check” the falsehood.

“City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield,” The Wall Street Journal reports Wednesday.

“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the staffer. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

“By then,” WSJ noted, “Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.”

READ MORE: New GOP Strategy: Skyrocket the Cost of Health Insurance and Prescription Drugs

A day-and-a-half after the Trump campaign knew the racist and dangerous allegations were a lie, Donald Trump stood on stage and told 67 million Americans, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there.”

As of Monday, Springfield, Ohio had already received 33 bomb threats. Among the targets: elementary schools and hospitals. Those threats forced the evacuation, search, and closure of at least 22 government facilities.

“Over the summer,” The Journal adds, “outside neo-Nazi groups—which specialize in exploiting local controversy to foment outrage about migrants—had seized on a local controversy and fanned the narrative of pet-eating Haitians.”

“Then the Trump campaign blasted those rumors to the world—and kept pushing them even after they were exposed as lies. The Trump campaign continues to run hard at the controversy. Trump last Friday said he planned “large deportations” from Springfield—whose Haitian community is overwhelmingly in the country legally. Trump campaign surrogate Vivek Ramaswamy plans to host a town hall in Springfield this Thursday. Vance said on Tuesday that Trump would like to visit Springfield, too, at some point. ”

READ MORE: ‘Huge Problem for Trump’: Joe Rogan Gushes Over Kamala Harris

On Sunday, Senator Vance told CNN he was willing to “create stories” to advance his and Trump’s agenda, a boast his opponent, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz ran with Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, Vance dug in his heels. At an Eau Claire, Wisconsin rally, Vance said it was the responsibility of the media, and not him, to “fact-check” his claims.

The Guardian reports Vance’s Sunday comments to CNN, “in which he appeared to say that politicians can brazenly lie, drew immediate rebuke. But during his rally, Vance defended them and claimed that numerous constituents had told him ‘they’d seen something in Springfield’.”

“On top of it, if there are certain people who refuse to listen to them, who refuse to take their concerns seriously,” he said, “that’s when it’s my job as United States senator to listen to my constituents.”

But those claims from Vance’s constituents have been debunked and proven false.

Among them, most recently, as The Independent reported, “Vance used a police report about a stolen cat to justify pet-eating rumors. ‘Miss Sassy’ was hiding in the basement.”

The woman who filed the police report apologized to her Haitian neighbors. Senator Vance has not.

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’

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New GOP Strategy: Skyrocket the Cost of Health Insurance and Prescription Drugs

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24 hours ago

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September 18, 2024

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House and Senate Republicans and the Trump campaign are looking to repeal parts of President Joe Biden’s highly-successful Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and President Barack Obama’s highly-successful Affordable Care Act (ACA), with a sharp focus on the provisions that protect access to health insurance and have lowered health care costs and prescription drug costs for millions of Americans – and will do so even more next year.

Republicans this week have been discussing plans to repeal the protections that require private insurance companies to provide the same coverage, and at the same cost, to people with pre-existing conditions as it does for those without them. They are also looking to repeal the hard-fought right the federal government now has to negotiate prescription drug prices for Medicare.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, turned 14 this year. Some Americans, especially those who came of age after it was enacted, may not be aware that before the ACA, insurance companies could and often did deny coverage based on “pre-existing conditions.” ObamaCare made that practice illegal.

“GOP healthcare plans, per the last 24 hours,” reports DC journalist Todd Zwillich, include “repeal pre-existing conditions protections in private insurance,” and “repeal Medicare’s negotiating power for Rx drugs.”

U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) called the provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that allow the federal government to negotiate prices for Medicare drugs, “the worst legislation I’ve ever witnessed in 10 years in Congress and 10 years in the state legislature.” He said he “absolutely” wants to repeal them, according to Axios. “No congressional Republicans asked by Axios argued for keeping the IRA drug pricing talks.”

READ MORE: ‘Huge Problem for Trump’: Joe Rogan Gushes Over Kamala Harris

“Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he ‘100%’ wants to repeal the negotiation provisions, while other drug pricing sections of the law would need to be evaluated based on whether they have ‘a positive impact on business.'”

Axios also reports that “multiple high-ranking Republicans told Axios they want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s Medicare drug price negotiations next year if they prevail in the elections.”

“This isn’t some wild accusation or scare tactic,” remarked Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. “Republicans are admitting they would side with Big Pharma and gut the Biden-Harris law that lets Medicare negotiate drug prices, if they win. They are literally, openly, for higher drug prices.”

During last week’s presidential debate Donald Trump admitted that after years of vowing to “repeal and replace” Obamacare and after numerous promises he would release his healthcare plan soon, often in “two weeks,” all he actually has are the “concepts of a plan.”

Trump’s running mate, U.S. Senator JD Vance (R-OH) on Sunday revealed what some of those concepts are.

Journalist Brian Beutler highlighted Vance’s remarks on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” where the GOP vice-presidential nominee said, “we want to make sure everybody is covered. But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.”

Pointing to Vance’s interview (above), Beutler writes: “When Vance here says he wants to put the healthy and sick in different risk pools he’s saying he wants to make pre-existing conditions protections impossible. His claim to want to maintain them is a lie.”

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’

“One of the ‘concepts’ of the Trump-Vance plan is to screw over people with pre-existing conditions, specifically,” he adds, pointing to his “Off Message” Substack. “Step one of the plan is to lie about it—say it covers pre-existing conditions. Step two is to kick out the regulatory tentpoles that make covering pre-existing conditions possible.”

Journalist Heather Parton Digby writes that Vance’s plan “would take us back to the time when I was denied health insurance because I had periodontal disease. (I’m not kidding.) When I finally found a health insurer who would cover me ( I was otherwise completely healthy) it cost well over a thousand dollars a month and it had a gigantic deductible. That’s the market we were living in if we didn’t have employer or government insurance. Vance wants to take us back to that and people really should know that.”

If Republicans are successful in eliminating protections, insurance companies could be able to determine what a pre-existing condition is, and whether they want to deny a policy to any individual who has a pre-existing condition, or to deny coverage for that condition and any related issues.

Up to 50 percent of all non-elderly Americans – up to 129 million Americans – have a pre-existing condition, according to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“A medical illness or injury that you have before you start a new health care plan may be considered a pre-existing condition. Conditions like diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, and sleep apnea, may be examples of pre-existing health conditions. They tend to be chronic or long-term,” according to Cigna, a healthcare and insurance company. “The ACA made it illegal for health insurance companies to deny you medical coverage or raise rates due to a pre-existing condition.”

The list of what could be considered a pre-existing condition is long, but after the coronavirus pandemic, it has grown longer and encompasses more Americans: An estimated 43 million Americans have had long COVID, and about 17 million Americans currently do still.

Near the end of the Trump administration, in 2020, KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation published a report: “Mental Illnesses May Soon Be the Most Common Pre-Existing Conditions.”

Also in 2020, House Democrats published a massive 197-page report: “Shortchanged: How the Trump Administration’s Expansion of Junk Short-Term Health Insurance Plans is Putting Americans at Risk.” It concluded these plans “present a significant threat to the health and financial well-being of American families. STLDI plans include limited protection for both catastrophic medical costs and routine medical care, and it is unclear what kind of value consumers are getting for their premium dollars, other than a false sense of security.”

Democratic former U.S. Congressman and Obama State Dept. official Tom Malinowski weighed in earlier this week:

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Remigration’: Trump Continues Attacks on Immigrants With New Vow of Forced Deportations

 

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‘Huge Problem for Trump’: Joe Rogan Gushes Over Kamala Harris

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2 days ago

on

September 17, 2024

By

Populist podcaster Joe Rogan, the highly-influential commentator whose audience reflects a strong segment of Donald Trump’s MAGA base gushed over Vice President Kamala Harris in his latest episode.

“She’s nailing it,” exclaimed Rogan, who has 14.5 million followers on Spotify.

A “dudebro” with a predominantly male audience in the 25-44 range that spans the partisan divide, Rogan heaped praise on Harris’s team.

“They did an amazing job from the moment Biden drops out, forcing Biden to drop out, whatever they’re doing, whoever’s writing those speeches, getting her to deliver them, coaching her, she’s nailing it,” Rogan said.

READ MORE: ‘Megaphone for Hate’: Vance’s Slam of Dem ‘Rhetoric’ Backfires in ‘Streisand Effect’

“Whoever’s helping her. Whoever’s coaching her. Whoever’s the puppet master running the strings…” he said, serving up a “chef’s kiss” gesture, as NJ.com reported.

“The difference in that debate was not a difference in who’s going to have better policies, who’s going to be better for the country,” Rogan observed. “The difference in the debate, in my opinion, was who was better prepared.”

Rogan did not quite endorse Donald Trump in 2020, although he did tell listeners he would rather vote for Trump than Joe Biden.

“There’s a moment here when Rogan imitates Trump in the most cartoonish way imaginable, and that, I think, tells you a lot. For many people, Trump made them laugh at politics. But now they’re laughing at him,” remarked John Stoehr of the Editorial Board.

“This is a huge problem for Donald Trump,” commented digital marketing strategist and Obama campaign operative Tim Fullerton. “If Joe Rogan turns on him and starts praising Kamala Harris like he is here – Trump is toast.”

Watch below or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Remigration’: Trump Continues Attacks on Immigrants With New Vow of Forced Deportations

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