The Man With A Very, Very Big Brain

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters
cannot be trusted with important matters.
Albert Einstein

Trump On The Couch, the new book by Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Dr Justin Frank is a deep dive into the mental and emotional state of Donald Trump. No President in the history of the United States has inspired more alarm and confusion than Donald Trump. As questions and concerns about his decisions and qualifications for office have multiplied, they point to one primary question: Does Trump pose a genuine threat to our country? In his book, Dr Frank answers this question by observing Trump’s actions through a psychiatric lens, using years of study to connect Trumps’s actions to the psychosis of narcissism, misogyny, pathological deception, racism, and lack of empathy. While for years the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule has precluded psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not patients, Dr Frank feels the actions of our President are too destructive for him to remain silent. According to Dr Frank, Trumps’s Presidency caps a lifetime of dysfunction and disorder, stemming from his childhood. His mother was known for riding around Queens in a rose-coloured Rolls Royce with vanity plates to collect the change from laundry machines in her husband’s buildings. His ruthless father and grandfather made their fortunes in dubious ways – brothels during the gold rush, seedy housing deals during the Great Depression – and took financial advantage of government-funded programs originally meant to benefit WW11 survivors. Cut to the present, Dr Frank observes that we find ourselves with a President whose verbal idiosyncrasies range from deception to hyperbole, and a whose inability to experience empathy permits him to express misogyny and racism/sexism toward anyone he sees as a critic. Norman B interviewed Dr Frank the day after Trump’s aberrant press conference where he told the world “The Chinese like me because I have a very, very big brain”.

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