In case anyone missed the three videos to be added to “Trump Unhinged” (a still developing encyclopedic odious odyssey of malevolent and delusional psychopathology) check this out:
Trump’s “double negative” Tweet, "Anybody that doesn’t think there wasn’t massive Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election is either very stupid, or very corrupt!", was widely covered (in Slate for example) but this isn’t really diagnostic. It may just show he is grammatically challenged.
This is how HuffPost put it:
A sputtering Donald Trump, furious about what he baselessly claims was presidential election fraud, ended up including himself among the “very stupid” — or “very corrupt” — in the mangled syntax of a message he shared Saturday.
Trump used a double negative in a sentence posted by his paid aide Liz Harrington on her Twitter account, twisting the message into something likely the opposite of what he intended to say.
This is from News Corpse’s diary today: “Deranged Trump Declares that 'I Developed the Vaccine' in a Lie-Riddled Twitter Tantrum 😜 :”
If that isn't a demonstration of someone tweaking on meth, then nothing is. Trump can't seem to concentrate on a single subject for more than a nanosecond. There must be a medical diagnosis for this psychotic compulsion to enumerate every screwball thing that pops into his head. Never mind that he manages to get everything he's ranting about wrong.
Trump’s rambling at the wedding presents fodder for amateur and professional therapists. There are two mutually exclusive possibilities when you look at what he says: he believes it and is clinically delusional or he doesn’t believe it and is deliberately gaslighting his audience.
I suppose there’s an in-between explanation involving his vacillating between both of these. He could be slipping in and out of a delusional state. Another explanation is that he could be like a method actor believing his words while he is uttering them but knowing this following a script.
Note the last sentence (from Wikipedia) in this list of signs that a person has a delusional disorder:
The following can indicate a delusion:[17]
- The patient expresses an idea or belief with unusual persistence or force, even when evidence suggests the contrary.
- That idea appears to have an undue influence on the patient's life, and the way of life is often altered to an inexplicable extent.
- Despite their profound conviction, there is often a quality of secretiveness or suspicion when the patient is questioned about it.
- The individual tends to be humorless and oversensitive, especially about the belief.
- There is a quality of centrality: no matter how unlikely it is that these strange things are happening to the patient, he/she accepts them relatively unquestioningly.
- An attempt to contradict the belief is likely to arouse an inappropriately strong emotional reaction, often with irritability and hostility. They will not accept any other opinions.
- The belief is, at the least, unlikely, and out of keeping with the patient's social, cultural, and religious background.
- The patient is emotionally over-invested in the idea and it overwhelms other elements of his/her psyche.
- The delusion, if acted out, often leads to behaviors which are abnormal and/or out of character, although perhaps understandable in light of the delusional beliefs.
- Individuals who know the patient observe that the belief and behavior are uncharacteristic and alien.
Additional features of delusional disorder include the following:[17]
- It is a primary disorder.
- It is a stable disorder characterized by the presence of delusions to which the patient clings with extraordinary tenacity.
- The illness is chronic and frequently lifelong.
- The delusions are logically constructed and internally consistent.
- The delusions do not interfere with general logical reasoning (although within the delusional system the logic is perverted) and there is usually no general disturbance of behavior. If disturbed behavior does occur, it is directly related to the delusional beliefs.
- The individual experiences a heightened sense of self-reference. Events which, to others, are nonsignificant are of enormous significance to him or her, and the atmosphere surrounding the delusions is highly charged.
However this should not be confused with gaslighting, where a person denies the truth, and causes the victim to think that they are being delusional.
For those of you who read my opinion about Trump and his love of McDonalds burgers yesterday, in case you are wondering, I don’t think his thinking a Big Mac is the best hamburger one could ever eat is a delusion. I wrote:
What does this (love of Big Macs) say about his personality? As a therapist who has written about Trump’s malignant narcissism I’d like to shoehorn this “culinary” habit into the list of indictions he has this dangerous disorder but I’ll be generous and chalk it up to merely a personality quirk rather than pathological rigidity or even paranoia about being poisoned or sickened by food.
Hmmm….
On the other hand, Trump’s psychopathology is so multifaceted that he may merit a diagnosis that isn’t in the current psychiatric manual, that it is.
I wrote about this a year ago.