Keith Olbermann (2:14)
If we all live through this, the subject that will surprise historians the most is for how long. It was clear this man was mentally incompetent and nobody did anything about it. Ordinarily, I would say my conscience was clear about this, because I first brought it up in June of 2016 on the Chelsea Handler show on Netflix? Yes, there was one. Look it up. Then the next month Vanity Fair published a piece I did called Could Trump Pass a Sanity Test? And we made a video of it. Apparently I didn't talk loud enough on the Chelsea Handler show, or the article wasn't long enough, or we didn't make enough videos. I'm going to take the Could Trump pass a sanity test? Article and read it again, now virtually unchanged, with a few notes. Because it's all still true, only way worse. But it was all there when this article came out 111 months ago. 111. Could Trump pass a sanity test? July 21, 2016? Probably not. First, several important caveats. There is little worse and nothing cheesier than questioning the psychological stability of a public figure, especially a candidate for president. Even in this case. Except that in his year of campaigning, Donald Trump has called Lindsey Graham a nut job, Glenn Beck a real nut job, and Bernie Sanders a wacko. Trump has insisted Ben Carson's got pathological disease and asked about Barack Obama. Is our president insane? He called Ted Cruz unstable, unhinged, a little bit of a maniac and crazy or very dishonest. He also called the entire CNBC channel crazy crazy. He called Megyn Kelly crazy at least six times. Respectful reticence about aspersions and cliches and mental health questions in a time in which mocking was seemingly slowly maturing into concern. That died a long time ago in this presidential cycle of 2016, and it died at Donald Trump's hands. Moreover, if the question is asked seriously and not gratuitously, just the examination of might explain how Trump has seemingly survived dozens of moments that might each have been campaign enders for almost anybody else. Why have we not asked if a given presidential candidate might be disqualified from office due to psychological reasons? Because we not only can't see this forest for the trees, but each time we try, there are even more trees blocking our view. In the 24 hour news cycle, each successive John Yerkes Iceland moment is not registered. Cumulatively, it merely supplants the one from last week or yesterday or this morning. This could also explain Trump's seeming imperviousness to his own mind bending campaign. Surely it must be exhausting to attack the Pope February 18 attack President Clinton, May 18 attack John McCain July 18 attack Mexicans June 16 attack Muslims December 8 attack Candidates who use a teleprompter May 26 just before you give a speech using a teleprompter May 26. It's got to be exhausting Unless, as the old joke goes, no pain, no gain. Also, no brain, no pain. Anyway, the actual sanity test I found for this article is called, by delicious coincidence, the Hair Psychopathy Checklist, Revised, introduced by a Canadian criminal psychologist named Robert d. Hare in 1980. And that's Hare. It's still in use in some quarters, though with ever more diffuse and specific mental health diagnoses. It is not without its critics, however. As a practicing therapist who walked me through it agreed it serves as a kind of triage device to separate the injured from the tripping from the psychopathic. And about that word we seem to have completely muddled up. Sociopath and psychopath. Sociopath. Think Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, living out there in his shack in the woods, feeling. Feeling nothing for other humans and unable to interact with them, literally mailing it in. Psychopath. Think Ted Bundy, feeling nothing for other humans, but having long ago learned how to expertly mimic relationships by being whatever he needed to be to whomever he needed to use, killing at least 30 women, serving as his own counsel, and cross examining a female witness, proposing marriage to her while she was on the stand, and getting her to say yes. For each of the 20 items on the Hair Psychopathy Checklist, you're supposed to assign the subject a 01 point or two. The highest and most dangerous score is thus 40. In the United States, the accepted minimum score for possible psychopathy, meaning you might be nuts, is 30. So those are the rules. Let's play the Freud. The test begins with an assessment of charm that is superficial. Forced charm, faked charm. May I dare say this Trump charm. I had interviewed Donald Trump as long ago as 1983, and I always thought he was a horse's ass. But after running into him when we both worked at NBC and then in the lobby of one of his apartment buildings in which I lived, I was stunned to encounter a quiet, succinct, seemingly sincere co worker and in essence, landlord. In one role, he described himself as an anti Bush, pro Obama liberal. In the other, he urged me to contact him personally with any problems or suggestions about the building in which I lived. And then he got on the campaign stage and boom. He was America's newest Mussolini impersonator.
