It all began 60 years ago. A now-defunct magazine called Fact ran a long article in 1964 with the headline: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!”
None of these 1,189 psychiatrists had actually treated (or even met) Sen. Barry Goldwater, who was the Republican nominee for president. Nonetheless, Fact magazine printed the story as gospel, with the clear intent to damage him before the 1964 presidential election. It was a long story, too: The hit piece ran from pages 24 to 64 in their September-October edition, which was the last issue they published before Election Day.
Sen. Goldwater sued Ralph Ginzburg and Warren Boroson, Fact magazine’s editor and managing editor — and won. Not a huge amount of money; just $75,000 (the equivalent of $623,000 today).
But it was a landmark legal case because it established “The Goldwater Rule” in psychiatry. This rule prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures from afar, because such a diagnosis should require a personal examination and the consent of the patient. Currently, The Goldwater Rule is Section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics.
Of course, that all went out the window with Trump. He’s been diagnosed, critiqued, judged, labeled, psychoanalyzed, and deemed “unfit” by every hack with a psychiatry diploma (and quite a few without). You name the ailment, he’s got it:
Narcissism? You betcha! Vanity Fair thinks so. The psychotherapist they dug up, Charlotte Prozan, actually said, “He’s very easy to diagnose.” (Even though they never met.) Mary Trump, his estranged niece, agreed. So did a “leading” psychoanalyst.
Sociopath? You betcha! Vanity Fair thinks so (they added that he’s a “violent sociopath,” in fact.) Mary Trump, his estranged niece, agreed. (Are you noticing a trend?)
Psychopath? You betcha! The New York Daily News thinks so. Mary Trump agreed — and so did her fellow psychologists.
Pathological? You betcha! Rolling Stone thinks so. Mary Trump, his estranged niece, agreed. “The most important thing is his behavior, which is clearly pathological,” she told the press.
God Complex? You betcha! Rolling Stone and CNN think so.
Megalomania? You betcha! Salon magazine thinks so.
Inferiority Complex? You betcha! CNN thinks so. So does MSNBC.
If the echoes of Goldwater weren’t evident enough, just four days ago George Conway’s PAC released an open letter of 230 psychiatrists and mental health “experts” who all agree that Trump is unfit for office due to his “symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder — malignant narcissism,” which has left him “deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous.”
(Strange how 230 medical experts all chose four “D” words in a row for their medical analysis. Doesn’t seem very medically sounding to me. Almost sounds like something a PR guy might’ve put together, eh?)
Question: Why has the media dedicated so much time, energy, and effort into psychoanalyzing Trump from afar, yet seem so oddly disinterested in Kamala Harris?
As we noted earlier, the relationship between Kamala and her father is downright bizarre:
Did you know that Kamala and her father, Stanford professor Donald J. Harris, live just a mile apart in D.C., but never speak?
Did you know Professor Harris is her only living parent, but didn’t even appear at the Democratic National Convention to watch his own daughter accept her party’s nomination for president? (The New Yorker describes them as estranged.)
Did you know Professor Harris was a trailblazing economist and the first black scholar to earn tenure at the Stanford Department of Economics?
Did you know that the Economist described Professor Harris’s work as “more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics”?
Did you know the Stanford Daily (Stanford’s student newspaper) described Professor Harris as a “Marxist economist” and said he’s teaching “radical political economics”?
Did you know that the last time Professor Harris said anything particularly noteworthy about his daughter, it was to condemn her for perpetuating the “all-Jamaicans-are-potheads” stereotype?
And it’s also patently obvious that Harris is not being truthful with the American people about her upbringing. As she said at the DNC:
“My early memories of our parents together are very joyful ones, a home filled with laughter and music… My mother would say, stay close. But my father would say, as he smiled, run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.”
As The New York Times summarized: “In her convention speech, Kamala Harris told of being inspired by her father, a prominent economist…”
But her parents had an ugly, bitter divorce when she was only seven, so I suspect that cute, adorable anecdote of “Run, Kamala, run!” was fabricated by speechwriters. And if it’s true that she was “inspired” by her estranged father, it almost certainly wasn’t the cheery, triumphant, Disney-esque kind of inspiration that she detailed in her acceptance speech.
More likely than not, it was the “I’m gonna prove that SOB wrong!” kind of inspiration.
I’m not condemning Harris for coming from a broken home: You can’t blame a seven-year-old for her parents’ marriage ending. But a bitter, angry divorce, where the husband leaves and everyone’s lives are uprooted, almost certainly produces psychological scarring in a small child.
Even a blind man could see there’s more to the story than what we’ve been told. There’s something deeper going on.
Donald Harris is her only living parent. After retiring from teaching at Stanford, he moved to D.C. and lives within one mile of his daughter. And they never speak? He didn’t even bother attending the DNC to watch his own daughter be nominated for president?
Yet how does Kamala Harris describe her childhood? C’mon, guys, say it with me: “I come from a middle-class family!”
It’s already a cliché. Long after Election Day comes and goes, that line will linger. Years from now, when someone asks you a difficult question, you’ll be able to generate the guffaws with a well-timed, “I come from a middle-class family!”
If anyone is suffering from profound, untreated psychological issues, it’s probably Kamala. And it wasn’t her fault; she was the victim. I feel sorry for her and sad for her family.
But I’m outraged by the media and their lack of journalistic curiosity. Potentially, this could be a huge feature and/or political story — and it’s staring them in the face! If Trump’s 5,384 psychiatric “conditions” were all worthy of intense media coverage, why isn’t Kamala’s? She literally can’t even mention her childhood without inventing a bogus story!
She didn’t come from a middle-class family; she came from a broken family. And today, her family is still broken.
And here we are, one week from Election Day, and we still don’t know the truth about the Democratic nominee for president.
Guess the Washington Post was right after all: Democracy really does die in darkness.
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