Couldn’t he have just called Trump “crazy” and let it go at that?

Apparently, no. The former chairman of the Psychiatry Department at Duke University, Dr. Alan Frances, said on CNN it was an insult to the mentally ill to call Trump crazy.

“Well, I think ‘medicalizing’ politics has three very dire consequences. The first is that it stigmatizes the mentally ill. I’ve known thousands of patients, almost all of them are well-behaved, well-mannered good people. Trump is none of these. Lumping that is a terrible insult to the mentally ill and they have enough problems and stigma as it is,” he said.

I’m sure they’re “well behaved” and “good people” — until some voice in their head tells them to shoot up a mall or a bar. Patients who go off their meds are wildly unpredictable. Not all become violent, of course. But the number of mass shooters who had no business walking the streets and ended up bringing tragedy to communities is more than we can bear.

So, rather than “stigmatize” mentally ill people, it’s better that they murder a few people rather than hurt their feelings.

But don’t call Trump “mentally ill,” said Dr. Frances:

“Second, calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist,” Frances went on. “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, Mao in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.”

For the record, Mao murdered at least 45 million in his “Great Leap Forward” that included the “Cultural Revolution” where tens of thousands of students and workers blanketed the countryside holding drum head trials of those they considered insufficiently devoted to the cause.

The body count for Stalin is still being toted up. It’s believed that about 20 million Kulaks died as a direct result of “forced collectivization” of farms and prisoners in labor camps. Purges of the military and Communist Party resulted in tens of thousands of more deaths.

Hitler murdered another 11 million while being solely responsible for starting a war that killed 50 million more.

Wow. Trump must have been busy these last few years.

The ease with which Dr. Frances casually dropped the “many million deaths” charge is astonishing. And CNN host Brian Stelter let him get away with it.

Stelter later apologized claiming he never heard the comment, but he was “distracted by tech difficulties.”

I agree that I should have interrupted after that line. I wish I had heard him say it, but I was distracted by tech difficulties (that's why the show open didn't look the way it normally does, I had two computers at the table, etc). Not hearing the comment is my fault. — Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 25, 2019

I’m sure that if Stelter actually heard what the doctor said, he would have cut off Dr. Frances immediately and forced him to back that claim up with facts. Aren’t you sure too?

Later, Frances tweeted out an “explanation”:

Terrible damage Trump is doing to world climate at this global warming tipping point may be irreversable/could kill hundreds of millions of people in the coming decades. Many of them our children & grandchildren & their children. This is an existential crisis for humanity. https://t.co/Ca6M5rgE0n — Allen Frances (@AllenFrancesMD) August 25, 2019

It appears that in the case of Dr. Frances, the lunatics are running the asylum.