AMERICAN HITLER

By Mickey Skidmore, AMHSW, ACSW, FAASW

“When a clown moves into a palace he doesn’t become a king, the palace instead becomes a circus.”

-Turkish proverb

The focus of this month’s “Perspective” will target mental health arguments for Trump’s unfitness to be president. While we should be cautious in making psychiatric diagnosis without a formal evaluation process, I submit that there is substantial evidence that he has demonstrated in his public capacity for the past 20-30 years.

It has been suggested as early as 2017 that Trump suffers from “malignant narcissism.” So, the reader can weigh in on this themselves. Individuals with this disorder are usually characterised by a profound sense of entitlement; manipulation; grandiosity; pathological lying; the absence of empathy and conscience; and sadism which results in a sadistic psychopathology. (This disorder is actually not in the DSM, but rather a historical diagnosis introduced by Erich Fromm — who himself escaped the Nazi’s — in an attempt to explain the psychology of Hitler and other murderous, paranoid, grandiose dictators like him).

Trump’s second term has ushered in a sense of “malignant normality.” In the mentally disturbed world of the malignant narcissists, once they have gained power, their mad world becomes the unconventional wisdom for the whole society. This malignant normality highlights another key feature of this characterologal condition: Omnipotent Destructiveness. This is feeling powerful in an excited way because you’re destroying things or people or institutions. There is a sadistic glee taken in from all of the harm, uncertainty, chaos add fear being generated.

Let’s briefly consider his intellectual capacity. Trump would have us believe his business acumen  in particular, is in a class unto himself — essentially superior to anyone, anywhere in the world (does that meet the definition of grandiose?). Recently his misguided paradigm regarding tariffs have roiled global financial markets, upended the world trading system, and may even have been a factor in Australia’s federal elections. Yet it is nearly impossible to find a credible economist who will say there is a sound economic logic for his calculation. You don’t need to be an economist or a rocket scientist to see this simply bad math on steroids. 

Trump idealises a time in American history before the establishment of the income tax system when tariffs were the primary source of federal income. However, the primary reason this approach was abandoned was due to this system being highly vulnerable to corruption. Fast forward to today, Trump’s tariff scheme seems to operate solely on his petulant whims on any given day rather than a well thought out policy — a dynamic highly consistent with a corrupt process. 

Of course, there is another potential rationale that can also explain some of this. Despite the GOP’s successfully hammering on the narrative of Biden’s age, there is absolutely no doubt to argue that Trump has dementia (in addition to his questionable intelligence and obvious personality disorder) as evidenced by his ongoing deterioration in memory, thinking, behaviour and motor skills. When Trump was younger in the 1980s, he was actually quite articulate. He spoke in polished paragraphs; now he has difficulty even finishing a sentence and degenerates into literal “word salad” incoherence, where no one can tell what he is trying to say. Thoughts that were once logical and related are now increasingly tangential. He goes off on ramblings where he confabulating things — weird things, like sharks and batteries; shower faucets; or Hannibal Lector (a fictional character no less). It all makes sense in Trump’s mind but these are really random associations. And there is a noticeable, accelerating rate of decline.

This decline is observable in several respects. He is increasingly losing his capacity for coherent speech. There are dozens of Trump’s phonemic parphrasias, in which he uses sounds in place of an actual word (a hallmark symptom of brain damage and dementia) — as in “the oranges of the situation: because it rhymes with “the origins of the situation.” This is not within normal limits; his basic ability to use language is breaking down. Beyond his verbal deterioration there is also his physical deterioration. He used to be quite graceful, and now he uses a wide-based gait typical of frontotemporal dementia. Sometimes he swings his right leg in a semi-circle. Like Biden, he too has trouble getting up the ramp; he has difficulty doing many physical things (that don’t involve golf). And finally, there is deterioration in his behaviour. He is much more impulsive and erratic now. He blurts things out; he makes impulsive decisions that he has to then reverse — like his many reversals on tariffs.

Some may think that because of Trump’s dementia that the effectiveness of his administration might falter. However, the entire Project 2025 team behind him will make every effort to ensure that the chaos of the hostile takeover of the federal government; attacks on the Constitution; dismantling of the economy; undermining Social Security and the administration’s sadistic war on immigrants are nothing more than strategic distractions — cultural war candy or red meat for the MAGA base to ensure that they successfully establish their culture of corruption as the foundation for this administration moving forward — with the sacrosanct complicity of the GOP.

Given his worsening dementia, Trump has outsourced his brain to Elon Musk, who is a mental health study in and of himself. It is well known that Musk is on the spectrum. Like Trump he is hypomanic,  and like Trump he is clearly also a sociopath. He feels no remorse in inflicting pain on people; in fact, he too feels a sense of glee and mastery in do it. Musk has been called a monster, just as one might view Trump as a monster, thus it would seem that Trump attracts monsters (or travels in circles with some questionable or undesirable people). For example, many major Trump supporters are sexual predators. Trump himself is a convicted sexual predator. Both Hegseth and Kavanaugh are [alleged] sexual predators, and we continue to hear about other Republican congressmen or big contributors who are sexual predators. It’s incredible.

Trump has successfully selected a cabinet and populated much of the entire government with people who have some version of his personality disorder — who are more or less equally sick — or sick in a similar way even if they are not as sick. 

There are a range of frightening outcomes that could result from Trump’s mental illness — many impacting foreign policy. International shock waves crossed the globe during Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recent White House visit, which essentially upended 80 years of US foreign policy. It was as if during World War II we had brought Churchill into the Oval Office and humiliated him and then joined Hitler. Aside from emboldening Putin and putting Europe in danger, what it means is the safety switch is off. 

Some hold the view that comparing anyone or anything to Hitler is dubious. However, I assert that Trump has become the American Hitler, and immigrants are the new Jews. He is demonising and persecuting immigrants the way that Hitler persecuted Jews, and we are watching society do little to nothing to protect them — the way Europe did nothing to protect its Jews. It is totally being replayed. America is heading towards a constitutional crisis as Trump disregards the orders of Judge’s. Even Al Gore has recently compared Trump’s “ongoing attacks on liberty” to Nazi Germany — where there is a rapid conversion of all ‘questions of truth’ into ‘questions of power.’ Once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to abide by the orders of the judicial branch, then it’s game over (for democracy) in the US. And the way Trump is going to defy court orders isn’t always going to be open defiance. I predict a lot is going to be covert defiance.

If nothing else, these observations warrant a moral autopsy of the grand American experiment. The Trump administration seems to be on the path to facism — or at least some version of authoritarianism. Hitler seized complete power with the Reichstag and all legislative powers vesting him in matter of 53 days. Trump has imparted several substantial blows to democracy and the constitution in the first 100 days of his second administration. There appears to be two thin reeds in the Supreme Court on which any possible survival of the Constitution rests. The rise of ongoing protests across America reflects what most major polls (regardless of political persuasion) show — that Trump is underwater on virtually every issue/policy that he supports or campaigned on.

Trump continues to be an anomaly. None of these perspectives have gained much traction over the years. Some have suggested that the mainstream press have been “sane-washing” Donald Trump, which has normalised the abnormal. Things that are crazy, destructive and not normal — if homogenised enough, then people will accommodate to it. Suddenly that becomes the new normal. When we consider Trump’s dangerous dementia and mental illness as well as the psychopathology of his cabinet, Musk and DOGE’s hostile takeover of the federal government, and the administration’s brazen war on immigrants, perhaps the press has indeed ignored the signs of Trump’s dementia and mental illness for far too long. 

REFERENCES

  1. Shrinking Trump Podcast
  2. Real Time with Bill Maher (25 April 2025)