More than 230 psychiatrists and mental health professionals have signed on to an open letter declaring Donald Trump to be far too mentally unstable to be president as part of a new ad campaign from conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC.
The open letter will be published on Thursday as a paid advertisement in The New York Times, and states that Trump’s “symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder — malignant narcissism” have rendered him “deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous” as well as “grossly unfit for leadership.”
The mental health experts who’ve signed the letter also say the ex-president, who despite being the oldest ever person to seek a second term at age 78 has not released any meaningful medical records, “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently call for a full neurological workup,” including “a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait).”
“We suspect the results of such an evaluation would be disqualifying. If, as we suspect, Trump does have organically based cognitive decline, it will only get worse over time, grossly degrading his already impaired judgment, impulse control, memory, attention, reality testing, and capacity to process information, while dramatically exacerbating the symptoms of his toxic personality disorder,” they added.
Additionally, the Anti-Psychopath PAC is purchasing airtime on CNN, alongside NBC’s Meet the Press, and on cable systems in Palm Beach, Florida and Bedminster, New Jersey to air a new 60-second spot featuring four mental health professionals who lay out how Trump’s alleged symptoms make him unfit for office.
It opens with a clinical psychologist named Harry Segal telling viewers that they must understand that Trump “is a malignant narcissist” to understand why he is “a danger to the Republic.”
A second psychologist, Dr Vince Greenwood, says people with Trump’s condition “exhibit a grandiose sense of self import, derive pleasure from causing harm, and are incapable of caring about other people’s feelings.”
And a third, Dr Diane Pomerantz, continues the explanation by adding: “This explains Donald Trump’s pathological lies, misogyny, his admiration for dictators and his criminal behavior.”
The advertisement concludes with a psychologist named Dr John Gartner stating that Trump “has no choice but to be a malignant narcissist,” and adding that voters can choose whether to put him back in the White House — or not.
The ad campaign comes as Trump’s mental health has become more and more of an issue in the election due to his increasingly bizarre behavior.
At an event earlier this month, he drew scrutiny when he ceased answering questions and spent half an hour swaying while music from a playlist he’d curated was played over a public address system.
Additionally, he has increasingly been seen to slur his words and has often failed to make coherent points in response to simple questions.
Yet for decades, mental health professionals have been counseled not to make diagnoses of public figures under a 1973 American Psychiatric Association standard known as the “Goldwater Rule.”
It was formulated by an APA committee after 1968 Republican presidential nominee and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater filed a lawsuit against Look magazine for publishing a story in which psychiatrists opined that he was a “latent homosexual,” that he “hated and feared his wife,” and that he suffered from internal conflicts because his father was Jewish and his mother a Christian.
The rule banned offering diagnoses of people who had not been examined by clinicians, but earlier this week one of the rule’s authors, retired George Washington University psychiatry professor Allen Dyer said Trump should submit to a cognitive test in an interview with HuffPost.
He previously authored a Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association article in which he suggested that the Goldwater Rule and a 2017 interpretation of the rule by the APA may have gone too far.
Gartner, one of the professionals appearing in the advertisement, has previously criticized the rule as one that prevents professionals from offering informed opinions on public behavior.
In a 2018 British Journal of Psychiatry article, he said “blindly following Goldwater legalistically paints us into a logical corner ― a reductio ad absurdum” because Trump would never voluntarily agree to an exam of any kind.
A press release from the political action committee says the advertisement campaign “is crucial to make the closing argument that Trump is a malignant narcissist who should never hold power again.”
Conway, the conservative attorney who was once married to Trump White House aide Kellyanne Conway, said in a statement that making the case that Trump is “a narcissist and a sociopath” was the sole purpose of the PAC he launched during the Republican National Convention this year.
“If it wasn’t clear by his erratic, self-obsessed behavior, his pathological lying, his lack of moral conscience, his assaults of women, and his blatant disregard for the safety of others, more than 200 experts agree that he is unfit for office,” Conway said. “Voters need to recognize the threat we face electing this deranged man.”
