John Kelly Used A Mental-Health Guide Book To Handle T-Rump’s ‘Crazytown’

September 15, 2022

Another T-Rump White House tell-all book offers up the starling news the Orange Turd is a horrible, horrible human being and way-fucking mentally disturbed.
Surprised? Of course not.

Yet it’s still way-unbelievable that this mean, nasty, unhinged asshole was the most powerful man on earth for four years, and how we all dodged any number of bullets. The latest crazy T-Rump-Oval-Office narrative comes from “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.” by Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker (to be published next week), and depicts the former chief of staff John Kelly using a guide book written by 27 mental health professionals which warned T-Rump was ‘crazytown bannapants‘ and way-way-unfit for office:

Martin Pengelly at the Guardian this morning reviews the book and relates the horror of Kelly and the rest of the White House trying to deal with a psychotic thug — some snips:

The book Kelly bought, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, was a bestseller in 2017. In January 2018 its editor, then Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee, described its aims in a Guardian column.

She wrote: “While we keep within the letter of the Goldwater rule — which prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without a personal examination and without consent — there is still a lot that mental health professionals can tell before the public reaches awareness.

“These come from observations of a person’s patterns of responses, of media appearances over time, and from reports of those close to him. Indeed, we know far more about Trump in this regard than many, if not most, of our patients.

“Nevertheless, the personal health of a public figure is her private affair — until, that is, it becomes a threat to public health.”

Kelly, a retired general, became Trump’s second chief of staff in July 2017 — after Trump fired Reince Priebus by tweet — and left the job in January 2019.

His struggles to impose order on Trump and his underlings and his virulent falling out with the president have been extensively documented. According to Baker and Glasser, who interviewed Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general bought a copy of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump as he “sought help to understand the president’s particular psychoses and consulted it while he was running the White House, which he was known to refer to as ‘Crazytown’”.

“Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.”

The authors report that Kelly’s view was shared by unnamed senior officials, quoting one as saying: “I think there’s something wrong with [Trump]. He doesn’t listen to anybody, and he feels like he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The 25th amendment, which provides for the replacement of a president unable to meet the demands of the job, was seriously discussed at the end of Trump’s presidency, after the Capitol attack he incited.

Baker and Glasser say the amendment was tentatively discussed by cabinet members “within months of Trump taking office”. However, its flaws – if Trump opposed its use he would be all but impossible to shift – precluded further action.

Trump regularly dismissed claims about his mental health and his staff’s worries about it. In January 2018, after the publication of Michael Wolff’s tell-all book Fire and Fury, Trump memorably told reporters he was “a very stable genius”.

In May 2020, Lee lost her job at Yale, in part, she said, over tweets about Trump. This month, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit in which Lee said she was wrongfully fired.

A good take on Lee in the latest issue of Mother Jones — a vindication of Lee’s spot-on pronouncement of the horror of the T-Rump:

And yet Lee’s Cassandra-like warnings turned out to be remarkably prescient.
On the morning of the insurrection, as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson revealed in sworn testimony to the January 6 committee, Trump had no compunction about unleashing armed loyalists on the Capitol, and was furious when told he could not accompany them.
Two days later, as Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book, Peril, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seemed to channel Lee when she told General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “This unhinged president could not be more dangerous. And we must do everything we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country.”

According to Lee, Trump’s extreme dangerousness puts him in a completely different category from previous Republican presidents, who merely endorsed a set of harsh economic policies that are associated with increased violence.
In contrast to past presidents with likely personality disorders, she believes, Trump has a psychological profile that is common among violent offenders.
“There is typically a developmental arrest caused by early trauma or abandonment,” Lee says.
“As adults, they still act like children in the playground; convinced that might makes right, they often can’t stop bullying others. “Trump’s mother, Lee points out, became chronically ill when he turned two, and his father was cruel and emotionally unavailable, repeatedly urging his son to be “a killer.”

Go read the whole piece, does paint a mental-health horror of why aren’t there steps to get rid of someone like T-Rump. Well, shit, maybe because too many assholes are Republicans, and the rest of the country doesn’t matter..

And to finish off the episode, crazytown bananapants is actually just ‘batshit crazy,’ oh well:

Unhinged in the worse way, yet once again, here we are…

Image out front is my favorite of the T-Rump mugs, though, ‘favorite‘ does not mean in any form or fashion, as in, ‘my favorite movie,’ or ‘my favorite song.’ It’s more of an anti-appreciation/like.

And aptly titled, ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong (and found here), it’s an image that displays the elemental form of a purloined sociopath — a bloated profile of flatulent bile and arrogant ignorance.

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