At what point are we shifting from political commentary to laughing at someone with a debilitating mental illness?
There has been a great deal of dancing around the question of Donald Trump’s mental health, while it’s becoming increasingly obvious that he’s falling apart. He’s in worse shape than Reagan was, when the Alzheimers’ was starting to burn him up, and – everyone covered for him and kept him nodding in the meetings and got him through his second term in office. In other words, for better or worse, a president with debilitating mental health problems was marched through his final term and and treated with a modicum of decency and respect. It was ironic because Reagan famously gutted America’s public mental health capability, putting a lot of people who weren’t as badly off as he was out on the street. But, Reagan was a republican and we’ve come to expect that sort of thing from republicans.
One of my father’s colleagues suffered a severe stroke, which took out her Broca’s region. Other than being unable to assemble words into sentences, she was still sharp as a tack; one of the university’s top professors in the history of Jacksonian America. I used to sit with her and talk to her; I was fascinated by the way her sentences came out and she spoke as though the mechanism for assembling speech had been interrupted. If you imagine our speech center as a Markov-chain generator, it was as though the number of chains in her graph had been reduced to about 150 or so. Our neurological models of speech do not indicate that Markov chains are a good way to understand speech production; what we do is a whole lot more powerful and complicated, but it’s a model of speech production that AI researchers have used with some effect. Years later, when I first encountered Markov chain-based chat programs, I immediately recognized them as sounding like Professor R.
It was also painful and humbling to talk to her; she was furious, clearly, that her brain and mouth could not get the ideas out that she wanted to get out. Because I was interested, I finally asked her if it was OK if I asked her some questions about her experience – whether her impression was that she couldn’t form ideas, or whether she was forming ideas but not being able to get them to come out in words. She was fine at answering yes/no questions with a nod or a frown, so we had some interesting conversations about her experience. As you can imagine, she expressed a great deal of frustration. I tried to be respectful with my questions, and I hope I didn’t frustrate her too much. Unfortunately, people tended not to talk to her very much after her stroke, because it was hard to make out what she was saying – which just made it worse for her. It was humbling to see her pain and frustration, as if she was trapped in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
As much as I despise the man, I feel like we’re laughing at an invalid when late night comedians poke fun at Trump’s mental disorder.
He’s not just an asshole; he’s an asshole who’s experiencing what must be a scary and disorienting problem. Imagine if you were a hyper-fluent liar and spewing bullshit was what you did and who you were: and then the bullshit-valve begins to jam up and it’s not working properly.
It’s going to be a bit tricky to parse apart things that I think Trump says which are ignorant lies, and what are cognitive problems, likely products of a neurological disorder. I used to think that his problem was drugs (specifically amphetamine diet pills) but they don’t cause the kind of verbal looping and failure to construct sentences that Trump is exhibiting. He fixates on the few things that he does understand, like his hatred of Hillary Clinton, but he seems to have difficulty adopting ideas and forming new strings of words. His speech reminds me bigly of the Broca’s aphasic professor; he’s just not as bad, yet. She used to assemble a string of words, and once she had it together, it sometimes came out over and over again, like she couldn’t stop it once it started. I remember that one of her things she said a lot was “it’s a little thing.” It was as if when she tried to go “um”, that phrase popped out, instead. A lot of Trump’s verbal mannerisms seem to be heading in a similar direction.
There’s another thing about Trump’s speech which is unusual to me: he has adopted a very simple and inflexible rhythm and cadence, reminiscent of a revival preacher. It includes this sort of drawl-pause thing that revival preachers do. Why do revival preachers do it? To slow themselves down, so they’re able to still be emitting a solid stream of noises while they are thinking of the next thing to blurt out. Trump’s repetition and drawling sounds like he’s doing it for dramatic effect, but what if he’s doing it because his brain is damaged and that’s how his speech has transformed?
Here is a good brief on various types of aphasias [apha], such as:
Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a neurological syndrome in which language capabilities become slowly and progressively impaired. Unlike other forms of aphasia that result from stroke or brain injury, PPA is caused by neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease or Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration. PPA results from deterioration of brain tissue important for speech and language. Although the first symptoms are problems with speech and language, other problems associated with the underlying disease, such as memory loss, often occur later.
Another point from Wikipedia regarding the repetition of phrases, as Professor R did: [wik]
Severity of expressive aphasia varies among patients. Some people may only have mild deficits and detecting problems with their language may be difficult. In the most extreme cases, patients may be able to produce only a single word. Even in such cases, over-learned and rote-learned speech patterns may be retained – for instance, some patients can count from one to ten, but cannot produce the same numbers in novel conversation.
A few weeks ago I was listening to an episode of the Trump, Inc. podcast, and one of the things they had in it (I think it was that, or it might have been Intercepted) was a very brief audio clip of Trump being deposed. The speed with which he assembled sentences was completely different from how he speaks now. The complexity of his sentences was significantly higher, and they made sense; there was much less repetition. What if Trump’s off-topic outbursts about Hillary Clinton are rote-learned phrases leaking through the fog of a damaged mind?
What if one of the reasons he lies so much and so pointlessly is because he can’t remember what the truth is? He seems to be coming unglued about where his father was born; it seems like he’s confabulating – he’s under pressure to continue to make sounds with his mouth, but perhaps he can not call the facts to his memory fast enough and just reflexively blurts something out. It makes me wonder when one reads about Alzheimer’s patients demonstrating “behavioral changes” whether it’s this sort of thing: memory failures and speech failures might manifest in a person sounding quite different, and appearing to act quite different because they can’t remember how they thought and acted before.
Since I have been thinking about Trump in this way, I have begun to feel that Colbert and Seth Meyers, etc, are making fun of a person who is suffering from a severe, progressive, disorder. I’m 100% behind making fun of the evil and ridiculous policies of the Trump administration, or the antics of his sidekicks and frogspawn, but I’m starting to get uncomfortable with just mocking him for being stupid. It could be he’s not just a moral cripple.
To be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with just mocking him for being stupid – it doesn’t really do any good, and there’s too much splash damage to perfectly nice, harmless people who are nevertheless not very bright. Somebody around here wrote a thought-provoking post a while back about how “stupid” is problematic and ableist and why we should try to retire it from our vocabularies, which I found myself largely in agreement with.
Well, he may be a crippled neurodegenerate, but it’s not official until Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution is invoked.
Basically, if he’s well enough to be POTUS, he’s well enough to mock, IMO.
Oh yeah, it was Nate: https://freethoughtblogs.com/natehevens/2018/06/17/lets-talk-about-ableism-and-intelligence-part-1/
When he gives up his political power, which hasn’t happened yet.
Over and over and over again we are exhorted NOT to attempt to diagnose mental illnesses, even if we have the expertise (which I don’t), of people we’ve seen on TV.
Well, that cuts both ways. Until there’s an official and public announcement of Trump’s diagnosis with an illness, I feel just fine calling him a brain-damaged fuckwit in a spirit of legitimate political criticism.
Once his illness is officially public knowledge then yes, fine, give him all the dignity appropriate to a human who is suffering. Until then – he’s in the White House by choice, and that’s ground-zero for satire. Fuck him.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap. He didn’t just recently start being a lying asshole. It’s literally all he’s done for his entire life. He may be impaired in his ability to bullshit, but, man, fuuuuck him. I hope he dies the way Fred Phelps did, hated, abandoned, and alone.
mikey@#6:
As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Yes, I think it’s approriate to critique him for the things he does and his horrible politics and racism. Because they appear to be consistent with his life-long sociopathy.
But, if I even want to call him a “sociopath” I am making a medical diagnosis of a psychological condition. Am I implying that he has a disorder he cannot control? Would we be justified in making fun of a president with Tourettes? Or who had a nervous breakdown?
I’m mostly musing aloud here; as a guy whose grandparents both died with severe dementia, I don’t think it’s a look I want to wear, making fun of people with dementia.
Reginald Selkirk@#4:
When he gives up his political power, which hasn’t happened yet.
Fair enough. That may be a good yardstick: at the point where he becomes less dangerous to civilization.
sonofrojblake@#5:
Once his illness is officially public knowledge then yes, fine, give him all the dignity appropriate to a human who is suffering. Until then – he’s in the White House by choice, and that’s ground-zero for satire. Fuck him.
Perhaps some day we will learn (as we did with Reagan) that he is a mere shell of a person, held together with fox news and a teleprompter – and that none of this is something that he can honestly be said to understand. Reagan was extremely checked out at the end of his term, to the point where he basically napped while his cabinet ran the country. If it turns out that something like that is going on here, then we ought to heap a great deal of contempt on the republicans who are knowingly propping up a repulsive meat-puppet so they can have an icon of power. Of course, my contempt-tank is pretty much on “Empty” all the time when I think of the republicans. There’s no more contemptuous I can get.
I believe that we are justified to keep on laughing about Trump.
Firstly, we are not qualified to diagnose him with anything. I’m not a mental health professional. Neither are you. Non-doctors speculating about what disease some public figure might have is problematic for obvious reasons. Moreover, even a doctor should never diagnose a patient without seeing him in person and properly examining him. We only see Trump’s public persona. We don’t know how he acts when he’s away from TV cameras. Until Trump’s doctor discloses that Trump really has some illness, I mustn’t make any assumptions of my own.
Secondly, people who suffer from various illnesses ought to be responsible and don’t apply for jobs where their illness can cause harm for other people. If a person with trembling hands attempted to perform a surgery and accidentally killed their patient, we wouldn’t feel sorry about this person who has an illness that makes their hands tremble. Instead we’d blame them for being irresponsible and killing somebody else. In conclusion: a mentally ill person shouldn’t run for presidency. If the candidate is so crazy that he cannot even comprehend that he’s ill, then his family, party members or doctors ought to stop him. Trump’s current antics are hurting millions of people in the world. He has ruined lives of many people, some even died because of his decisions. My sympathy is reserved for Trump’s victims. I have none left for Trump himself even if he’s mentally ill and suffering.
Thirdly, Trump has behaved like an asshole for his entire life. If some person had been a good an honest human being for years and then they acquired some illness that changed their behavior, then I would feel sympathy for this person who couldn’t be blamed or held responsible for their current (illness-induced) misbehavior. This is not the case for Trump. Also when he was young (and presumably not mentally ill) he mistreated other people and behaved like a jerk.
My experience trying to speak in foreign languages that I don’t know well is exactly the same. I always think in the same language that I’m speaking. I know that some other people, when speaking in foreign languages, think in their native language and then they translate their thoughts into the language that they are speaking. I cannot easily do this. I’m really bad at switching between languages. In my mind every single language I know is a separate entity, and I struggle to use two of them simultaneously. I cannot form a sentence in one language and insert words from another language into that sentence. In my mind there are partitions between each language. I could compare each language to a separate program, and running two of them at once isn’t possible. For example, right now I’m typing in English, so I’m running “English.exe,” and words of any other language simply aren’t present in my conscious mind, I cannot boot up “German.exe” without first stopping to think in English and switching to German. If I needed to recall some German phrase, I’d have to switch to thinking in German. Of course, like most polyglots, I have worked as a translator and a language teacher. I handle situations where I need to use two languages simultaneously by constantly switching between the two. I would say a sentence in one language, then I would switch to thinking in the other language, and say a sentence in that one.
Whenever I have to speak in some language that I’m only learning and don’t know that well, I struggle to form ideas themselves. It’s like my thinking itself is semi-paralyzed and reduced to a much more primitive and simple state, because I don’t know a sufficient amount of words in the language in which I have to think. It feels like my thinking is reduced to a state like that of a child. My thoughts themselves become simpler in order to accommodate the short sentences that I’m capable of putting together. In the back of my mind I would get some abstract idea, one that’s not yet expressed in any verbal form, and then I’d attempt to further develop this idea, make it clearer and put it into words. But the problem is that I don’t know the language well enough, I don’t know that many words in it. Thus whatever idea I had surfaces in my mind in a crippled form that is simple enough to accommodate my limited vocabulary. As you might image, that’s extremely frustrating. It’s not just that I struggle to verbally express some idea, even my ability to come up with some clear and coherent thought itself is impaired.
Of course, whenever I start feeling stupid, I can always simply switch to thinking in another language that I know better. That solves the problem immediately. But I’m really not looking forward to becoming old and senile and becoming unable to think clearly in any language at all.
Difficult question. I abhor people who make fun of disabilities. Trump does that and he did it before he sat in the big chair. Does that make it alright to mock him? No, but…(Insert karma here)
Mental health problems are not well understood among the general public. I’m not sure they’re well understood by mental health professionals either. Most people are somewhat afraid of what they don’t understand and laughter/ mocking are one way to mitigate that fear. That doesn’t make it right, just human nature. It’s also difficult for people to deal with the frustration, anger and incomprehensible behaviour and speech of people with acquired brain injury. Many ABI patients are notoriously difficult and unrealistic about their own behaviour.
As for Trump specifically, he has no diagnosis and a long-standing history of being a braggart, a liar, and a cheat. He is known to be unkind, cruel and manipulative. None of those are psychiatric diagnoses and whatever current problem he has is overlaid on this personality. He is becoming a cartoon of himself. Thus, the mocking seems aimed at him as President of The United States of America, not as Donnie with the personality disorder who may be ill.
Whatever it is, would you guys please sort it out. The rest of the world is worried.
I have no problem with calling him an arsehole, a bully, or a useless, hate-filled waste of human skin. Those are behaviours he’s chosen. Stupidity and mental illness aren’t choices, they’re afflictions, and I don’t think people should be mocked for their afflictions.
I’m with Reginald at #4. We’re not mocking a mental illness, we’re aghast at the behavior of the so-called ‘leader of the free world’. When he stops putting children in cages and criminalizing melanin and trying to start a nuclear war then maybe we should consider the underlying causes for his atrocities. Doing it now just provides cover and excuses.
But are they really? We’re all well aware that past experience can affect future behaviour (from Psychological trauma to PTSD to …) often in ways that the person exhibiting that behaviour doesn’t like. Do you really think that someone who grew up with cold manipulative parents who constantly threatened to abandon him is just as much to blame for an inability to trust people as someone who grew up with warm, loving parents? That the level of trust he gives in the rest of his life is a conscious choice, uninfluenced by his upbringing? That his desperate need for apparent affection and love is a choice?
No, but they are certainly expected symptoms of someone with, say, a narcissitic personality disorder.
I take well and agree with Marcus’ point that it’s not nice to mock people with a disorder of some sort, but I would extend that to everything Trump has done through his entire life, unless we can find some very strong difference between what he’s doing down and what he’s done in the past.
This is always a problem when somebody’s condition aligns with harmful behaviour.
Take addicts, for example. Addiction is an illness, hey are people who suffer from it, it is not in and on itself a moral failure, yet addicts will also cause tremendous harm and pain to other people.
Saying “this person is not responsible” is both removing agency from people with mental illnesses but also used to exonerate them for the harm they cause.
Can we please stop with the armchair diagnoses?
Or can we agree that armchair diagnosis is fine?
Pick one.
“A mentally ill person shouldn’t run for presidency.”
This is precisely the sort of splash damage that results from mocking a person with a mental illness. Flippant mockery encourages casual ignorance, which perpetuates prejudice and discrimination.
Donald Trump doesn’t have the mental acuity to leverage his position for the benefit of the American people or the world, if that were what he wanted to do. That doesn’t bother Republicans, who don’t think the president of the United States should serve the American people at large.
Ok, fine, if you prefer overly long and convoluted sentences that sound like they were crafted by a lawyer, then I can do that, I can rewrite my initial sentence into something longer that I assume you will like better:
“A person with a severe mental illness that results in him having symptoms that impair his ability to think clearly or speak coherently to a significant degree shouldn’t run for any public office if his mental illness makes it impossible for him to actually do the job at least to a reasonably adequate quality standard.”
Are you happy now?
I’m not casually ignorant about mental illnesses, nor am I discriminating people who suffer from them. I just expressed an opinion that ought to be basic common sense—if somebody is so sick that he cannot possibly do a specific job, then he shouldn’t apply for that position. For me this seems just common sense. Or are you seriously suggesting that a person with a severe mental illness ought to be allowed to do a job that gives him access to the nuclear weapons’ button?
By the way, I know that there are various mental illnesses—some of them severe and debilitating, others less so. I also know that most people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness can lead mostly normal and fulfilling lives and have jobs. I never suggested that every person who gets diagnosed with any mental illness ought to be prevented from having a job.
I strongly suspect that most of his current condition is simply the result of a lifetime of narcissism, willful ignorance, arrogance, and never being corrected or facing any consequences.
As to making fun of him, I kinda feel he has it coming. Not only for the horrible things he has done, is doing, and will continue to do, but also, his ignorance is completely his own fault. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t seek out actual advisors, because he beleives himself to be the top expert on everything. Remember when he said something about not needing intelligence briefings because he has a very smart brain? I think that’s more ignorance then lack of intelligence.
In some ways, I’m less concerned with how smart he thinks he is, than I am with how smart his followers and sycophants think he is, I’m utterly baffled by that.
I’d rephrase that as: He’s not just an asshole; might be an asshole who’s experiencing what must be a scary and disorienting problem AND he is unfit to be in a leadership position where his actions jeopardize the lives of thousands of people.
He’s unfit because he is an asshole.
He may also be unfit because his is ill.
One doesn’t exclude or excuse the other.
Honestly, we have enough to mock in his anti-intellectualism and demonstrated callousness. It is disconcerting to listen to his demand the oranges of the Mueller Report, but that doesn’t excuse his border policy or the evil opportunists who are propping him up.
*he
*him
Sorry about that.
I am generally sympathetic to what Marcus is saying, but also wonder how it would apply in a broader context. Just look at people like Devin Nunes or Jim Jordan. Aren’t being delusional and out of touch with reality also signs of mental disorders? Yet look at their conspiracy theories, their complete inability to recognize reality and to address their manias. OK, they’re not yet at Trump-level ranting, but where’s the line?
#1
In a natural language, there will always be a word for ‘a tendency to make poorly reasoned / uninformed decisions’ (or however you want to define it), and at present, ‘stupid’ serves that purpose.
Welcome to the life of a severe stutterer.
Holms@#23:
In a natural language, there will always be a word for ‘a tendency to make poorly reasoned / uninformed decisions’ (or however you want to define it), and at present, ‘stupid’ serves that purpose.
There’s probably a better word for it. Perhaps “rash”, “unwise” or “ignorant.” (all of which apply to Trump) Calling him “stupid” is an invidious comparison because for all the smoke and mirrors, he’s probably not. He’s no genius but he’s cunning.
lochaber@#19:
As to making fun of him, I kinda feel he has it coming. Not only for the horrible things he has done, is doing, and will continue to do, but also, his ignorance is completely his own fault. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t seek out actual advisors, because he beleives himself to be the top expert on everything.
I don’t think anyone would argue that calling him “ignorant” is inaccurate or inappropriate.
What I’m concerned with is making fun of his mental slips, which may indicate a serious neurological condition.
Obviously, he should be getting diagnosed by experts – and probably is. Reagan’s cognitive decline was well known to the white house physician, it was covered up for political reasons. They probably just want to get him re-elected so that they can turn things over to Pence without the electorate having any say.
Marcus Ranum @ 26
Thanks for the response.
This is probably a poor analogy at best, but I feel like it’s having a coworker who constantly brags about how strong they are, makes outlandish claims like being able to pick up a car, and constantly belittles other coworkers for being weak. And then you come into the workplace a bit early from lunch break, and you see them struggling with the water cooler. And it’s not even a 5 gallon bottle, it’s one of those little 2 gallon ones, and they still don’t manage to get it on until they’ve spilled half the contents. And then they turn around and yell at someone and start berating them about being weak for using a forklift to move a pallet of gravel.
I have to think about this a bit, but I feel like it’s more about making fun of his hypocrisy and absurdly false claims than it is about merely making fun of someone for not being a super-quick learner (or however else you want to define intelligence).
I feel like most reasonable people, if they found themselves in a situation like his, would shut their mouths, and do their best to surround themselves with advisers, speech writers, and PR coaches.
He claims he is more knowledgeable on military strategy than any of his generals, despite not knowing the nuclear triad. He still seems to be under the impression that Puerto Rico (and the U.S. Virgin Islands) are controlled by a foreign government. He’s stated that black people didn’t vote for him because they are “too stupid”. He doesn’t seem to understand that throwing someone under the bus might negatively affect their loyalty towards him.
I don’t know… but, I think it does make a lot of sense that the right wing wants to keep him as the figure head, with all of his idiotic, racist appeal, while letting Pence drive the bus.
I think he’s more like an out of control brat who is abysmally ignorant and just isn’t good at speaking. If there’s a medical diagnosis that is made public, then I’ll change my mind. Let’s see what happens in his second term.
#25
That may be so in the specific case of deciding which word is most applicable for a specific person or behaviour (though I still think ‘stupid’ is very applicable to Trump), but it does not address the more general point I made, i.e. that there will always be a word to describe ‘lacking in good reasoning / consistently making poorly reasoned decisions’ as a descriptor for a person. Stupid, or a word with essentially identical meaning, is all but inevitable in any natural language.
I don’t watch the late night comedians with any regularity so I mostly see clips when some person or algorithm recommends them. And not all of those either.
Generally speaking, I think Trump might be an easier target, but I don’t feel like there’s more ridicule directed at him than there would be of any other president who was pushing the same agendas. No matter who you are if you’re pushing racism and divisiveness you’re going to either earn yourself slavic devotion and fear or contempuous mockery. There are some types of jackass a person can be and still have a middle ground about how everyone else gets to respond to them but I don’t think the issues Trump is pushing are among them.
Personally I think I tend to impatiently brush aside Trump criticisms that are all about the way he speaks in the same way I brush aside criticisms of females that are all about how they look. I’m well past caring about the guy or getting angry about anything he or his various con artist hangers-on do. I’m just waiting for an opportunity to correct the problem.
Trump is the product of a lot of enablers. He’s essentially so out there as to be utterly harmless on his own. He’s only doing the massive damage he is because so many people desperately want him to do exactly that. The responsibility for that goes all the way up and down the republican side. From Mitch McConnell who doesn’t really care about anything except getting more power down to the few Trump voters I personally know who swore during his campaign that he did not go back and forth on issues, spoke normally, and wasn’t openly racist. They all suck and they’re all getting the dysfunctional shit storm they deserve but we’re getting it with them. And if we let them have their way and don’t vote in someone else, they’ll give us at least 4 more years of it, too.