WaPo: When is it okay to say the president might be nuts?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/05/02/when-is-it-okay-to-say-the-president-might-be-nuts/?tid=sm_fb&utm_term=.53a07d3aa60eWhen is it okay to say the president might be nuts?
By Jennifer Rubin May 2 at 9:00 AM
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Is Trump nuts, ill-informed or a liar — or all three?
Until now, people who could have shed light on a president’s mental state were professionally hindered from doing so. The so-called Goldwater Rule — named for the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, whom some psychiatrists took to calling crazy because of his foreign policy views — admonishes medical professionals not to opine on the mental health of people whom they had not examined. In the context of Trump, however, there has been some buzz about doing away with the rule on the grounds that psychiatrists should be able to give their best medical judgment to “warn” the public.
Evan Osnos in the New Yorker waded into that debate in a piece questioning whether Trump might be removed under the 25th Amendment:
Like many of his colleagues, Dodes speculates that Trump fits the description of someone with malignant narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, a need for admiration, sadism, and a tendency toward unrealistic fantasies. On February 13th, in a letter to the (New York) Times, Dodes and thirty-four other mental-health professionals wrote, “We fear that too much is at stake to be silent any longer.” In response, Allen Frances, a professor emeritus at Duke University Medical College, who wrote the section on narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—IV, sought to discourage the public diagnoses. Frances wrote, “He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder. . . . The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.”
Well, as the letter to the New York Times illustrates, mental health professionals can challenge or defy the Goldwater Rule. It’s up to medical associations to enforce professional ethics. We are going to hear a lot more from such people, I suspect, as Trump displays his temperament in high-pressure situations.
There are myriad problems with diagnoses by doctors not treating a patient. We saw during the campaign how unfounded speculation about Hillary Clinton’s health got out of hand. Supporters and critics of an incumbent president (not to mention psychiatrists) are unlikely to agree. And in any event, it is not clear that a finding that “the president is suffering from a narcissistic personality disorder” can be used to invoke the 25th Amendment.
There are, however, a few points on which many Americans can agree. First, there is a fundamental difference between calling someone “crazy” because of his views, for example, on the Vietnam War and questioning someone’s mental stability based on his behavior, speech and other observable factors. Second, Congress could try to pass a law requiring an annual physical and mental checkup for the commander in chief, although it would have to get past a likely veto. Congress would also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement and tackle the issue of doctor-patient confidentiality. All of that seems a bit much to overcome. Third, in an era when anyone has access to social media, we are going to see professional and unprofessional voices eager to assess a president whose behavior seems out of the ordinary.
From our vantage point, the issue, we think, is not about getting a medical diagnosis. Assessing the president’s mental, temperamental and physical fitness is what voters do. They judge for themselves based on all the evidence they wish to consider (they can look up the DSM-5 for themselves). It’s perfectly valid for them to look at Trump’s short attention span as well as his lack of coherence, self-control, rationality, steadiness and ability to process information. In 2016, enough voters thought he passed muster. However, in 2020, they will have to make that judgment all over again unless Trump chooses not to run. This time they will have witnessed how he functions, listened to him speak and observed how he makes decisions. They may well conclude that he’s too erratic, self-absorbed, dishonest, confused and ignorant to be president. They won’t need a doctor to tell them that.
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DAYUM 
Who cares if we have a crazy loon as POTUS whose campaign may very well have colluded with a foreign government to influence an election in a way that favored them? At least, Trump didn't own and operate a private e-mail server while serving as a government official.
It literally KILLS me that, not only was what we are seeing now of Trump was OBVIOUS to most Americans (3 million more Americans than those whom voted for Trump) but despite of that (or maybe even because of it), just enough Americans had absolutely no problems pulling the lever for him, even some people whom had to have known better.
What - what? He is our president?
How many times did you see a Clinton ad or one of her advocates (Obama, Biden, a myriad of others) say "Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president"? About a thousand or more? They weren't talking about policy positions being crazy: they were saying the man is temperamentally unbalanced. And that he was dangerous because of this.
Look, Trump's behavior today is no different than it was during the campaign--or, indeed, what it has been for decades. He would say crazy stuff like my building is 68 stories high when it was objectively verifiable that it is only 58 stories high. He acted unhinged during the debates ("nasty woman"
. His knowledge was non-existent but his wacky bluster off the charts high.
Was it the hope that the presidency would change him (which it hasn't) that has brought his craziness up all of a sudden? By now, everyone should understand that it will never change; and it's not something new. Only now he has his finger on the nuclear code.
Thanks, all of you who stayed home or voted for someone else.
