President Donald Trump has crossed from grandiosity into full-blown psychosis, psychologist Dr. John Gartner has warned.
Gartner, a former professor at Johns Hopkins University, told The Daily Beast Podcast that the 79-year-old president is engaged in “magical thinking,” as evidenced by his belief—as reported by Dr. Mehmet Oz—that Diet Coke kills cancer cells.
“It’s something that, again, we associate with psychosis. We also associate it with young children. Freud called it ‘primary process.’ It’s kind of the most primitive type of thinking, where if you imagine it, it must be true. But this is just magical thinking. Anything that occurs to him—any stray, crazy thought—is true,” Gartner told host Joanna Coles.
Gartner, who said a few weeks ago that Trump’s mental “deterioration” was accelerating, then mentioned several of Trump’s fanciful social media posts: his since-removed depiction of himself as Jesus Christ, his mock-up as the pope, and his Truth Social post calling himself the “acting president of Venezuela.”
“His grandiosity is so extreme that not only does he want to be the pope and Jesus and the president of Venezuela and the Mullah of Iran—he wants to be all of these things at once. He wants the world to worship him, and he wants to erect massive monuments to praise himself,” he said.
Gartner then turned to some of Trump’s capital-area vanity projects as further evidence, like the planned ‘Arc de Trump’ across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial and the White House ballroom that he will reportedly name after himself. Trump also put his name on the Kennedy Center and the U.S. Institute for Peace, and is planning on appearing on gold currency.
“The ways in which he’s been pressuring various states to rename their airports and their train stations and their tunnels after him,” Gartner continued, were signs that Trump “wants the world to worship him as a god.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, the political situation for Trump—bad polling on the economy and Democrats having a real chance at regaining both the House and the Senate in the midterms, for instance—makes him like a “wounded animal,” Gartner said. But that isn’t great for anyone.
“A cornered, wounded animal is the most vicious and dangerous kind of animal there is, and that’s where he is right now,” he said. “So what I’m worried about is, even if we win both houses of Congress, he’s still the commander in chief, and he’s still getting off on the omnipotent destructiveness and power of blowing things up.”
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