Has Donald Trump Lost His Mind?

Deeply Delusional or Stoking Fascism?

Norm Ornstein is worried about Donald Trump. “We are seeing serious mental deterioration on his part,” he said on a recent episode of the Words Matter podcast.  The American Enterprise analyst told host David Rothkopf that it is “because they are closing in on him from multiple venues,” citing the five or six major court cases he is likely to face in coming months.

This, of course, is not the first time people have called Tump insane. But his Easter Sunday social media post seemed to be even crazier than usual. His greeting to his fans on one of the holiest Christian holidays was a screed against “all those weak & pathetic RINOS, radical left Democrats, Socialist, Marxists, & Communists who are killing our nation.” He moved from ideology to pathology.

I am not a psychiatrist, although I do have a degree in psychology from Boston College and worked for two years in a locked psychiatric ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston. I also wrote a chapter on the risks of an unstable president with unfettered sole authority to launch nuclear weapons in a book authored by psychiatrists deeply worried about Trump’s mental stability, Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump,

I argued in that 2018 book, “The greatest nuclear danger to America does not come from a foreign threat or a terrorist group but from our own president.” So, while I cannot say for certain that Trump is mentally unstable, it does appear to be a valid explanation for his behavior.

There are, however, other possible explanations. It could be that with the current press of news stories - from mass shootings, to climate disasters, to Putin’s war on Ukraine - Trump feels he must escalate his rhetoric simply to claim his share of media attention. He could also believe that this is his best defense to the crimes he has committed. That he must discredit the entire American judicial system in order to discredit the charges and verdicts he is likely to face.

It is also possible that Trump is just keeping pace with the rising far-right movements in America. You can call them racist, misogynist, gun-nuts, Christian nationalist or simply hate groups. President Joe Biden last year warned, “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something — it’s like semi-fascism.” A scholar of fascism, Dr.Federico Finchelstein, said at the time that Biden’s term “actually reflects the most recent iteration of a global fascist playbook that has sought to undermine democracy in the United States, Brazil, India and Hungary today.”

The acceleration of this movement warrants dropping the “semi.” I believe we are experiencing the rise of an American fascist movement unlike anything we have seen since the 1930’s. Trump appears to be stoking these movements, escalating his rhetoric, developing or just echoing fascist frames to organize an armed, white minority who believe our diverse democracy reduces their power and privilege.

In her brilliant podcast, Ultra, Rachel Maddow documents the America First movement of the 1930’s and the pro-Nazi politicians and operatives who fueled it. Then, like now, some Americans aligned with dictators in other nations and sought to undermine democracy in our country. Maddow concludes her eight episode series with this warning:

One of the uncomfortable truths that you find in the dark corners of our history is that fascism happens. Recurrently. Movements and demagogues and media figures and elected officials promote elements of fascism, anti-semitism, hatred of minority groups and immigrants, worship of strong-man leaders, wishing for the end to elections, the end to rule by law.

It comes up repeatedly. It has a certain appeal to a certain percentage of the country in a fairly dependable way. And seeing that history of recurrence in some ways, of course, it’s horrifying, but it can also be instructive and practical. Because previous generations of Americans have confronted this same type of threat before us. And learning what they did gives us some lessons learned about what works. And what might not work.

The threat of today’s fascist movement goes far beyond Trump himself. The attacks on women’s reproductive rights, on LGBTQ people, on immigrants and on voter rights, the book bans and the gun worship are different manifestations of a unified extremist movement. Madeleine Albright did not explicitly call Trump a fascist in her book, Fascism: A Warning, but she came very close. “In the book I write that there are people who say this is alarmist. It is. That’s the purpose,” she told The Guardian. “I’m concerned about complacency about it. This is a very deliberate warning.”

We need not all agree on the precise term, but we should all recognize the threat. David Pepper, the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party and the author of Laboratories of Autocracy, told Ali Veshi on MSNBC Monday night.

In our state houses, we’ve been ringing the alarms bells, saying, “You are losing your democracy.” The gerrymandering, the attacks on voters, the nonsense we are seeing in Tennessee, the total lawlessness in Ohio where they violate the Constitution again and again and again…There are hundreds of people just like Marjorie Taylor Greene in state houses across the country…This has become the far-right’s front line on their attack on democracy.

He could have added Texas and Florida and Idaho and Montana and others.

Donald Trump may be crazy. He may also be a fascist. The two are not exclusive. The complementarity may even be required.