Frederick Longacre is a resident of Hockessin.
In this piece, I will argue that one of the reasons that Donald Trump is our president today is that certain crucial personal information about him and about a subset of his supporters was suppressed.
The hidden information about Trump as a person has to do with the conclusion of many health professionals before his first run for office that he had symptoms consistent with malignant narcissism. Unfortunately, around 1973, the American Psychiatric Association decided that it was unethical for a mental health expert to go public with a diagnosis of someone’s mental state without a formal study of that person and without his (or her) permission (the so-called Goldwater rule). Therefore, it was not until around 2017 that a group of mental health professionals, under the leadership of Dr. Bandy Lee, decided that Trump was too potentially dangerous not to be exposed and so decided to publish a book of essays based on their findings. Despite this and two follow-up publications, the information seems to be too little, too late.
The second piece of suppressed information is that a significant group of Trump’s supporters consider him to be chosen by God. These individuals call themselves followers of the New Apostolic Reformation. These people believe that God has chosen Trump to be their leader in much the same way that King Cyrus, despite being a pagan (the “flawed vessel” concept), was chosen to be the leader who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity in 539 B.C. Many of these folks believe it is their divine duty to support Trump, no matter what he does or says. In fact, according to Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., members of this group actually took part in the Jan. 6 insurrection. This information was subsequently quashed by order of Liz Cheney (see Jared Huffman’s July 31 interview with Joyce Vance on Substack).
Between knowing little of Trump’s psychiatric profile and the dangerous delusions of a significant portion of his base, lovers of democracy have a lot of catching up to do. Please find a short bibliography:
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
