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Election 2020

Harvard Psychiatrist: Trump Is A Predator Who Lacks Empathy Or A Conscience

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Last fall, a retired psychiatry professor didn’t hold back on his professional opinion of President Donald Trump, calling him “essentially a predator” and a “successful sociopath” during an interview.

Like so many of his colleagues, Lance M. Dodes, MD, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, questions Trump’s state of mind. And his responses are even more relevant today as we continue to face down a deadly pandemic and a country roiled in racial strife.

“His focus on his personal benefit at any cost is why he’s a successful sociopath,” Dodes told Salon writer Chauncey DeVega on October 29, 2019.

That’s really coming into play right now as we watch Trump freaking out over his plummeting poll numbers and his never-ending attacks on the “fake news” media. Witness his little Twitter conniption fit early Monday:

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for a boring president after what this country has been through over the past four years. Separating innocent children from their parents and putting them in cages, constant whining about “fake news,” continually objectifying women and openly encouraging racism. Enough already!

This isn’t lost on Dodes, who notes that most people because people unconsciously put Trump on the same level as themselves. When he is clearly not.

“It’s very hard to get this across to the public because every time people talk about him, they start out with the unspoken unconscious assumption that he is basically like the rest of us,” Dodes said.

“But in order to explain and predict Trump’s behavior, you have to begin with awareness that he is essentially a predator,” he added. “Once you keep in mind that Trump lacks a conscience and lacks empathy, he becomes very easy to follow. Unlike normal people, who are complex, he’s basically running on a very simple and very disordered program.”

Writing in a similar vein the week before, John M. Talmadge MD, a physician, and professor of psychiatry at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center noted in a series of tweets that Trump’s “mental impairment means he cannot think strategically or in abstract terms.”

“Trump does not have a vision or a plan, because he can only think in concrete, elementary, childlike, one-dimensional terms,” he wrote. “He does not process an abstract idea like American forces stabilizing a multilateral conflict with geopolitical implications.”

“This Trumpian brain failure is hard for normal people to understand because for normal people, abstract thought is natural, baked in, largely unnoticed. Normal people see the consequences, assess risk, make rational decisions most of the time.”

Does anyone remember the last time Trump made a rational decision? I don’t either. It’s a Monday and he’s complaining about the “lamestream media” again on Twitter. Seriously, it will be nice when this man goes away.

Megan Hamilton
meet the author

Megan has lived in California, Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida and she currently lives in Central America. Living in these places has informed her writing on politics, science, and history. She is currently owned by 15 cats and 3 dogs and regularly owns Trump supporters when she has the opportunity. She can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GaiaLibra and Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/politicalsaurus

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