As MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell said the other day, if the president of the United States is insane, it is the biggest scandal of modern times.
With what this president has been saying and doing, what’s with the “if”?
Iran “can take out a city. Let them take — let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego,” he told a cheering MAGA crowd in Nebraska.
This wasn’t, as his keepers said, a stern warning about the “imminent threat” justifying a war. It was a politically dripping, wholly irresponsible, utterly bonkers thing to say.
It fits, of course, with wholly impeachable acts of what analysts call “punitive federalism” — withholding funds from states whose electors he didn’t win, as if the taxpayers there ceased to exist.
Then there are the capital degradation projects about which he can’t stop talking and spending, and spending.
He is like the movie character who freaks out his family by constructing Devil’s Tower at the dinner table with the mashed potatoes.
Words and actions one can’t explain. Unless the man is insane.
Let’s speak of words first. An Axios story discussed how several observers think his increasing use of obscenities indicates declining faculties.
A man in his position who was in control of those faculties would never say of the coming election — as he did at a campaign rally at a Ohio high school (yes, a high school): “We’re going to win, and we’re going to win big, and we’re going to shove it up their ass.”
Consider it a teaspoon-full among mounds of evidence of mental illness from a number of psychiatrists alarmed enough to go on the record — like former Tufts psychiatrist Dr. Henry Abraham:
“As time goes on,” writes Abraham, our raving president “is becoming increasingly less inhibited. And that is a function of the prefrontal cortex, the front of the brain, which governs conscience, judgment, insight.”
Abraham is one of 50 psychiatrists and people who study the brain who make the case that our chief executive is mentally ill in a third-edition book published by the World Mental Health Coalition.
Yes, it’s the third iteration of a book first published in 2017 as “The Dangerous Case of . . .” — that guy. In it, 27 professionals raised alarms about the president’s brain. In 2024, that number grew to 40 experts with “The More Dangerous Case of . . .” — yeah, him. Now we have the 2026 compilation, “The Much More Dangerous Case of . . .” — with authorship from 50 mental health professionals.
The joint consensus: This president at minimum has psychopathic antisocial personality disorder, which drives him not only to behave in a narcissistic fury but to inflict harm on political enemies — ordering his Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against special prosecutor Jack Smith, former FBI director James Comey and more.
When he isn’t building monuments to himself, he is seeking to destroy other edifices in his Capital degradation campaign. It’s pathological.
In “The Much More Dangerous Case of . . .” psychiatrist Vince Greenwood and neuroscientist Seth Norrholm write that the rent-free tenant who calls the White House HIS house has the condition of psychopathic personality disorder.
That has lots of scary symptoms, but central to all is that of a clinical narcissist who, they write, “lacks moral reasoning” and is driven to “inflict harm and suffering on others.”
“Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” And in the meantime, let’s firebomb Norway for giving the Nobel to someone who actually works for peace.
If what has come from the mind of this man does not qualify as insanity, please provide another explanation.
Also, please examine the heads of those who cheered.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
