In this chapter of the seemingly never-ending saga of this year’s American election, J. BROOKS SPECTOR puts Republican candidate Donald J. Trump on the psychiatrist’s couch to peer into his motivations and machinations. Be afraid.

Amid all the political sounds and furies in both South Africa and America, one can easily be driven to the point of near distraction – or, worse, near existential despair – if it were not for occasional forays into activities unrelated to the electoral process, such as reading older literary classics. In honour of this, I am reading Stefan Zweig’s posthumously published biography of Honoré de Balzac, the French novelist best known for his vast fictional tapestry, Le Comédie Humaine.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, Zweig was one of the world’s best-selling authors with his novels, essays, short stories and his glittering autobiographical study of Central Europe’s cultural world before the Nazi era. In 1942, by then in exile, Zweig committed suicide in despair over the apocalypse that had descended upon the civilisation he had loved so much. Increasingly left behind after the war, an appreciation for his writing was resurrected after the release of Wes Anderson’s film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, based on Zweig’s writing.

Delving into Zweig’s book was supposed to relieve me of contemplating the sorry state of electoral politics, but things didn’t work out that way. On the very first page of Zweig’s study of Balzac, he had written of the French novelist:

“A man of Balzac’s genius, endowed with an exuberance of imagination which puts it in his power to establish and populate a universe of his own creation, is hardly likely to be a stickler for the sober truth in unimportant matters relating to his private life. He will subordinate everything to the despotic sovereignty of his creative will.”

Unlike most biographers of that period who had recounted the lives of the rich, powerful, creative or infamous, Zweig’s description of Balzac owes much to some relatively new insights gleaned – and applied – from psychology and psychiatry.

Now, substitute the name Trump for Balzac, and replace a demagogic running for high public office for the creation of a richly populated world on paper, and one gains some understanding of just what makes Donny Run (with apologies to Budd Schulberg, the author of What Makes Sammy Run? – that rags to riches story chronicling the rise and fall of Sammy Glick, a Jewish boy born in New York City’s Lower East Side who, very early in his life, makes up his mind to escape the ghetto and climb the ladder of success by deception and betrayal.)

Donald Trump’s erratic, fiery comet across the American political landscape, in just the few weeks since he seized the Republican Party nomination for the presidency, now seems to be shining an especially bright light on his character – and the result has been less than pretty. After the Democratic convention, among so many other things, Trump has pursued a personal, bitter, and increasingly intemperate public vendetta against Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of an American (Muslim) army officer killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004, after the parents had spoken out against Trump’s candidacy during the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

Simultaneously, Trump has been taking on leading Republican members of Congress in his own party, insisting he would not endorse their candidacies in this year’s election or even assist Speaker of the House Paul Ryan during a primary challenge. Following Senator John McCain’s denunciation of Trump’s remarks about the Khans and their son, Trump ramped up his criticism of McCain. A growing number of Republican strategists, staffers, funders, and even a few actual office holders, have started to announce their refusal to even work with him or support him in the coming election.

Then, at a rally the other day in Ashburn, Virginia, as a baby brought by one attendee was crying, Trump first announced he loved babies. Then he did a quick volte-face, telling the mother to get that kid “outa here”. (If there is one iron rule about political campaigning, it is never, ever show a profound distaste for babies and their antics. Instead, you kiss them and tell their parents how adorable the children are. Crying children usually have two votes attached to them, after all.)

And then there has been that extraordinary moment when a disabled veteran gave Trump his Purple Heart medal – the medal given for being grievously wounded in combat. Trump took the medal and told the astonished crowd that he’d always wanted a Purple Heart for himself. (And this is despite the fact of his staying out of the military during the Vietnam War because of a bone spur on his heel that hadn’t kept him off the squash courts. This whole incident was more than strange. Why would someone say how much they had always lusted for a medal that only goes to badly wounded military personnel. No real soldier ever wants to get wounded, after all.)

Or, as Elliot Hannon had written in Slate the other day:

“The Donald Trump post-DNC hit parade kept on keeping on Tuesday, when the Republican nominee for the president of the United States of America once again proved he knows very little about many things. Already bobbing and weaving through a self-created tornado of less-than-flattering news stories about his response writ large to Khizr Khan’s convention speech, and with news Trump was handed a handful of deferments during the Vietnam War, common sense would dictate the candidate should probably talk about something, anything, else for a while. Trump didn’t. Instead, he riffed about a Purple Heart he received from a supporter during a rally in Ashburn, Virginia.”

And along the way, too, Trump has been telling his audiences that the entire electoral process is fixed and he is the recipient of treachery and cheating, and that in any case, not surprisingly, his opponent, Hillary Clinton, is the Devil. Literally.

What all of this – and so many more comments from Trump – has done is begin fanning the flames of an argument that the candidate may very well be suffering from an actual mental defect of some sort that should almost certainly disqualify him for the big prize. This line of argument is even more serious than President Obama’s putdown of Trump the other day when he said that the candidate simply doesn’t have the knowledge, skills, experience or temperament to become the next US president and that his own party should disavow him.

Now no one would argue that none of the people who have populated the Oval Office in the White House over the past two centuries ever suffered from any non-physical ailments. Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest of them all, suffered painfully from depression – a condition that was, not surprisingly, accentuated because of his central role in leading a nation through a continent-wide civil war.

Then there was John Kennedy who had a variety of real physical issues that led his physicians to prescribe a range of potentially mood-altering medicines that surely would have been of concern, had they been known about more generally. Lyndon Johnson was well known for his Texas-sized mood swings and feelings, even towards his admirers and loyal staffers, that seemed to demonstrate that a deep, wounding sense of inferiority afflicted him.

And, of course, to add to that list there was Richard Nixon and his willingness to suspend belief in the country’s rule of law when it suited him, or his mental stability as his tenure in office was about to come crashing down. There is also the question of Senator Thomas Eagleton. He was awkwardly dropped from George McGovern’s 1972 presidential ticket as the vice presidential candidate when it became public knowledge that, years before his candidacy, he had undergone electro-shock therapy for depression. (The bitter rejoinder of his admirers when he was dumped from the ticket was that among all the candidates, Eagleton was the only one with a doctor’s note pronouncing him “sane”.) Perhaps even the incipient Alzheimer’s that some believe began to threaten an eternally sunny-dispositioned Ronald Reagan by the last months of his second term also belongs on this inventory.

Now, while unlike those omniscient police psychologists Liz Olivet or George Huang on Law and Order who, at least fictionally, were sometimes asked to provide an evaluation of a potential criminal suspect without examining him or her, globally, the shrink’s professional ethics canons prohibit public release of evaluations of individuals carried out from a distance (or releasing data in medical records without the express approval of the suspect).

Nevertheless, some politicians or journalists are beginning to speculate openly if Donald Trump is really okay in that upstairs department. For example, “Donald Trump is not of sound mind,” conservative Stephen Hayes had written two weeks ago in the Weekly Standard. And liberal columnist Ezra Klein had noted, “Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?” on Vox. Meanwhile, conservative columnist for the New York Times (a paper Trump increasingly has denigrated and dismissed as a failure), David Brooks, added that Trump “appears haunted by multiple personality disorders”.

And Stuart Stevens, chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, tweeted, “We can gloss over it, laugh about it, analyse it, but Donald Trump is not a well man.” Stevens, the most prominent political figure, so far, at least, to persistently raise this topic, admitted he isn’t a medical specialist. Nevertheless, in a widely reported interview, he went on to say the available evidence leads to two possible conclusions: either Trump has a substance abuse problem, something that appears unlikely, or “there is something definitely off about him…. [And] At best, this is a very damaged person. And there’s probably something more serious going on.”

Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, wrote the other day, “During the primary season, as Donald Trump’s bizarre outbursts helped him crush the competition, I thought he was being crazy like a fox. Now I am increasingly convinced that he’s just plain crazy. I’m serious about that. Leave aside for the moment Trump’s policies, which in my opinion range from the unconstitutional to the un-American to the potentially catastrophic. At this point, it would be irresponsible to ignore the fact that Trump’s grasp on reality appears to be tenuous at best.”

Brookings Institution senior fellow Robert Kagan, who studies international security policy, has added:

“One wonders if Republican leaders have begun to realise that they may have hitched their fate and the fate of their party to a man with a disordered personality. We can leave it to the professionals to determine exactly what to call it. Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s response to the assorted speakers at the Democratic National Convention has not been rational.”

And so, as a public service, Daily Maverick contacted a real mental health professional, with the assurance of total, strict confidentially, in order to solicit an opinion about Donald Trump’s emotional stability. Particularly important in this regard would be any circumstances that might well make him entirely unsuitable for the presidency, beyond the obvious. Just incidentally, one should keep in mind that this individual would, just incidentally, be the keeper of those nuclear missile launch codes, and thus the man with his finger on the doomsday button so beloved of political thriller scriptwriters.

In response to our query, our confidential consultant explained that Trump almost certainly suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Classical scholars will recall the original Narcissus of Greek mythology was so enamoured of his physiognomy that he spent his days gazing into the waters of lakes in order to observe his countenance, until, on one fateful day, he looked so long and hard and so admiringly at his own face that he fell headlong into the deep waters of the lake that he drowned. NPD is not, obviously, a key to a long and entirely happy life.

Setting the scene, the consultant’s observation was that there remains a big debate in the field as to “whether people suffering from NPD are thus [that way] through nature or nurture. They are regarded as having extremely fragile egos and therefore rigid defence mechanisms. So very quick to respond, usually aggressively, to comments perceived as critical – or in fact critical.” So far at least, that sounds rather alarmingly like The Donald’s public presence, now doesn’t it?

Hedging bets just slightly because of distance from the subject, our confidential consultant added that without personal, close-up, direct evaluation, as opposed to all those relentless bombardments via the media of Trump’s wild and crazy bombast, the consultant could not be 100% clear if Trump “suffers from an [full-blown case of] NPD – or whether he is just hugely self-centred”. Then, the consultant went on to describe another aspect of NPD, as it also seemed to apply to the Donald. The clinician added, “Another aspect of NPD is inability to empathise with others. That term comes from Freud who regarded a specific developmental phase as the narcissistic one. When we are around two and three years old, [we] still perceive others as objects – of gratification or frustration – until we mature beyond this phase and start understanding the reality of others, emotionally in particular. Some seem physiologically, psychologically to grow beyond that phase.” But others don’t manage the transition, apparently just like our Donald.

This clinician’s troubling observation about people suffering from true NPD was particularly telling. The specialist noted it is “impossible to have rational conversation with true narcissists, if it triggers one of their defence mechanisms. Irrational, absolutely beyond ‘normal’ exchange.” Hmm. another box ticked.

So, even if Trump doesn’t have a full-blown case of NPD, he is, at the very least, an outrageously self-centred man with almost no regard for the autonomy and independence of others, beyond their roles as his tools or objects of his gratification – or the cause of his torments and frustrations. In the latter case, that would be about where the kicking, screaming, and biting begins.

Now, I ask you, oh members of the American electorate in this year of a national presidential election:

“Is this really the kind of person you want to give the authority to launch those missiles, or pick a fight with other world (or even domestic political) leaders who have less than obsequious, flattering opinions about the Trumpster and his ideas?”

Thought not. DM

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Briar Woods High School in Ashburn, Virginia, USA, 02 August 2016. EPA/JIM LO SCALZO