Never-Trump lawyer-pundit George Conway again questioned the mental health of former President Donald Trump this week after Trump unleashed a series of enraged social media posts targeting one of his myriad legal foes, E. Jean Carroll. The series of posts appeared on Trump’s Truth Social network and represented a high volume attack even for Trump, who posts often but rarely with such a singular focus on one topic or antagonist.
Responding to lawyer Ron Filipkowski‘s assertion that Trump had posted “47 times” about Carroll, Conway said on X: “Can anyone explain to me exactly why we’ve never had a serious national discussion about Donald Trump’s mental health?”
Can anyone explain to me exactly why we’ve never had a serious national discussion about Donald Trump’s mental health? https://t.co/Meh5FUFpJh
— George Conway (gtconway3 on Threads—try it!) (@gtconway3d) January 5, 2024
[NOTE: Trump’s tirade was evidently triggered by the U.S. Court of Appeals rejecting his request to delay a new Carroll defamation trial against him, adding to Trump’s multiplying court appearance requirements. His reaction, as Carroll’s lawyers assess it, only adds fuel to the fire.]
But Conway’s rhetorical question about Trump’s mental state isn’t accurate, at least in that Trump’s mental fitness and psychology have been very much part of national discussions.
The topic of Trump’s mental fitness has been reignited of late not only by his Carroll-focused posting compulsion but also by the former President’s misstatements on the campaign trail, such as confusing Joe Biden with Barack Obama, which he says he does purposefully.
But long before this election cycle, indeed since Trump first burst onto the political scene, many armchair psychiatrists have diagnosed Trump from their great remove as afflicted by “Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)” as well as other real psychological conditions.
Those in the psychiatric profession, however, are generally more circumspect in dishing out Trump diagnoses. This is in part because they don’t want to violate the Goldwater Rule of the American Psychiatric Association, which is in place specifically to prevent the partisan misuse of psychiatric diagnoses to influence an election.
(The rule’s name originates with a poll of 12,356 psychiatrists who were asked in 1964 if Barry Goldwater, running for President against Lyndon B. Johnson, was “psychologically fit” to be commander-in-chief.)
But there is another reason mental health professionals don’t diagnose Trump the way Conway thinks they might — and that’s because there is, regrettably for some, a “method to his madness” and the notion that Trump is “crazy,” but only “crazy like a fox” as one headline has it.
One of those professionals who has lamented Donald Trump’s rise and conduct, but who nevertheless would not diagnose him with any mental disorder is Dr. Allen Francis, who in 2017 wrote that Trump’s “disagreeable traits in no way indicate that he is mentally ill. Instead, they reveal him to be the ruthless self-promoter he has always been, now poorly cloaked in fake populist clothing.”
Francis, who helped edit the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) — the so-called bible of psychiatric disorders — added that “confusing Trump’s behavior with mental illness unfairly stigmatizes those who are truly mentally ill, underestimates his considerable cunning, and misdirects our efforts at future harm reduction. And the three most frequent armchair diagnoses made for Trump — narcissistic personality disorder, delusional disorder, and dementia — are all badly misinformed.” (Note, this was seven years ago.)
The dangers of misdiagnosing Trump, Francis wrote, include the way such unhelpful and misinformed stabs at him distract from other efforts that might better mitigate the harm he is capable of. Conway wants to have a discussion that won’t help, in other words. (Francis warned that psychiatric innuendo gives Trump the opportunity to practice the art of misdirection.)
The issue of any candidate’s mental fitness takes on not just electoral import (is the candidate fit to vote for?) but also legal import (could a President be removed from office?), as some argue that the 25th Amendment provides an avenue — never tried — for the removal of a mentally unfit President who cannot properly discharge his duties.
