Do Not Medicalize Trump's Behavior

Opponents of Donald Trump, as with opponents of other public figures, tend to medicalize his public behavior, viewing his utterances and policies as symptoms of mental disorders. When mental health professionals make such statements they are violating the ethics requirements of their profession.

In 1964, the Republican candidate for president was Barry Goldwater, a United States Senator from Arizona. Allegations that Goldwater was tetched began to crop up. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals began to go public with mental health diagnoses.

These unwarranted diagnoses led to the “Goldwater rule,” enacted by both the American Psychiatric and American Psychological associations.

Under this rule mental health professionals may publicize psychiatric or psychological opinions only after a personal examination and consent of the putative patient.

So no Trump cuckoo conclusions from professionals are ethical. And there are plenty of such conclusions out there. In 2024 more than 230 mental health professionals signed an open letter declaring Trump to be too mentally unstable to be president. In a paid ad in the New York Times, the signers said 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.” Although the mental health professional signatories didn’t say so, their action was prohibited by the ethics of their profession.

Assuming that you don’t like Trump and disapprove of him and that you wisely avoid medicalizing his behavior, how to describe him and how to think of him?

Literature and theater give us an answer. You think Trump is just a bad guy. Just no good. While criminal defense lawyers try to avoid the fact, there are people who are just plain bad. (A judge I know told me that he was trying a murder case. When I asked what happened, the judge told me that the defendant threw the victim off the roof. “Why,” I asked. “Because he didn’t like him,” the judge said. Just plain bad.)

So the word to describe Trump is “villain.” Significantly, the antonym of “villain” is “hero,” just the way Trump sees himself. Millions of Americans prefer that antonym!

I don’t. I prefer “villain.”