“Lawmakers briefed by Yale psychiatrist on Trump’s mental health: report” says a scary headline.
Frightened yet?
You won’t be. Not once you learn the absurdity of the specifics.
More than a dozen lawmakers last month met with a Yale University psychiatry professor for two days to discuss President Trump’s fitness for office, Politico reported Wednesday.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee reportedly met with the group of lawmakers on Dec. 5 and Dec. 6 and warned them the president is “going to unravel.” All of the lawmakers in attendance were Democrats, except for one Republican senator.
“We feel that the rush of tweeting is an indication of his falling apart under stress. Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency,” Lee told Politico.
Yes, the word “feel” is accurate. You can feel anything you want, but that doesn’t make it a valid and objective medical diagnosis. And psychiatric diagnoses are often subject to debate anyway.
The President of the United States tweets a lot. It’s a means of communication for millions of Americans. It would be strange if a modern-day president didn’t tweet, just as it would be strange for a 1930s president not to speak on the radio, or a 1970s or 1980s president not to speak on television.
Just as radio and television ushered in new eras of communication, so did Twitter and other social media.
Barack Obama tweets. Hillary Clinton tweets. Al Gore is tweeting about the impending end of the world due to “climate change”. Why is the mental health of none of these people questioned for their tweets, while President Trump’s is?
You don’t have to know the political party membership of “Dr. Bandy X. Lee” to know the dishonesty in the claim that Donald Trump is insane.
Mental health professionals don’t all agree on what constitutes mental illness. A few even question whether there is such a thing. What pretty much all of them agree upon is that true insanity consists of sensory hallucinations and/or cognitive delusions, i.e. false beliefs about obvious facts.
Frankly, there is so much deception and corruption in Washington DC that when someone speaks candidly and honestly, it seems insane to an observer. If you define insanity as the kind of bipartisan reality-evading that goes on daily in the nation’s Imperial City, then Donald Trump is actually the sanest thing to happen to that city for a very long time.
This report does not take it upon itself to evaluate President Trump’s mental status as it would any other patient because the authors of the report have not met President Trump, and will not do so. That’s why they’re left with fallacious “evidence” for mental illness such as “The President tweets too much” and, “It sounded (to some) like he was slurring at a recent press conference”, despite the fact the President reportedly had a cold.
Remember that dishonesty is dishonesty, and fraud is fraud, whether it has the name “Yale” next to it, or not. Wise intellectuals as well as less formally educated people understand the falsehood known as the argument from authority. Something is not true because an authority said so. It’s true because it’s true, and because the facts prove it.
Remember that these are the same people who issued the same ominous warnings for the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. To a lot of us, the President’s actions—while certainly not enough, because that’s impossible—have been mostly laudable. He has significantly reduced regulations, he has cajoled Congress into cutting taxes and he has turned the tide in the war against ISIS, for the first time, in America’s direction.
Human beings are prone to label as “crazy” anyone they think is wrong, or anyone with whom they disagree for any reason. But being wrong is not proof of insanity. Neither is the fact that someone else disagrees with you about tax policy, military policy or immigration policy.
President Trump and his supporters do not have to prove that Donald Trump isn’t clinically insane. The burden of proof is on those making the claim. They can’t prove it because they don’t even have any evidence to suggest it, beyond feelings of dislike. That’s why this report is not only false, but a sickening disgrace to anything remotely reasonable and rational about the field of psychiatry.
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