Abstract
Riding in a cab from Penn Station to the Waldorf Astoria for the 2017 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, my wife and I listened to our driver’s stories about himself; he claimed to be a powerful figure in local New York politics—such an outspoken, progressive activist that local politicians were afraid of him. When we asked what he thought of then newly elected President Trump, our driver seemed to shrink into himself. He explained that he didn’t feel comfortable criticizing Trump. Perhaps because of Trump’s alleged Mafia ties, we wondered to ourselves? Yes, Mafia ties. Although Justin Frank does not mention this in Trump on the Couch (2018), it has long been alleged that Trump actively sought ties with the Mafia, more than other New York builders did. In 2013 Trump said to David Letterman, of mobsters he had met, “They happen to be very nice people” (Bruney 2020).
That conversation in the taxi alarmed me, and made me worry even more about the future of free speech in our democracy. A couple of days later—on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration—my wife and I participated in the Manhattan Women’s March. Here, by contrast, we saw reassuring evidence that women and others were not afraid to protest against Trump. A woman from Eastern Europe told us she had seen demagogues corrupt democracy in her country of origin, and she was disturbed by all the similar warning signs that Trump intended to do just that in the United States.
On August 1, 2020, amid Trump’s deadly destructiveness, Roxanne Roberts reported in the Washington Post that Frank’s Trump on the Couch played a significant role in inspiring and guiding the Lincoln Project, an impressive effort by prominent Republicans to defeat Trump’s reelection bid by keeping him on the defense, digging himself an ever deeper hole as he furiously tweeted impulsive rebuttals to their ads, which kept confronting him and U.S. voters with the truth about Trump. I trust that as you read this, President Biden will be working to undo much of Trump’s damage to our country and its most vulnerable residents, so it is an excellent time for a fresh look at Frank’s influential book.
As most readers know, psychiatrists are allegedly forbidden by the ethics code of the American Psychiatric Association from commenting on the mental health of public figures (unless they have examined them personally and have their permission to make public comments). Yet Allen Dyer, M.D., Ph.D., a member of the APA Ethics Committee when the Goldwater “rule” was developed, clarifies that it was intended more as a guideline than as an absolute rule. Many mental health professionals have said our duty to warn the public about the dangers posed by Trump’s emotional disorders should supersede our usual reticence about such statements. Further, Frank clarifies that “the goal of this study has never been to diagnose but to observe, comprehend, and provide some context, to improve our understanding of the characteristics of Trump’s behavior” (pp. 235–236).
Frank uses the conceit of imagining Trump as a patient on his couch—hence the book’s title. For some of us, such a disturbing fantasy would bring to mind professional ethics, and even the restraining injunction of the sixth commandment. Frank, though, seems genuinely curious about what makes Trump tick. Frank is clear that “Trump is mentally unfit in ways that make him psychologically unsuited for the presidency . . .” (p. xviii). Alarmingly, Frank calls Trump “uniquely positioned to be coopted . . . by an authoritarian Putin to manipulate America’s voters and destabilize its democracy at home and influence abroad” (p. xv). One of the many reasons Frank wrote this book is to help the American public see Trump more clearly. To do that, we must overcome Trump’s rare talent for distracting us from the full picture of his disturbances, as “Trump conducts himself with an almost intuitive understanding of the limits of typical human perception . . .” (p. xxii). Trump thus resembles a predator that paralyzes its prey before consuming it. His manipulative strategy also makes one think of the classic schizophrenogenic double bind, with contradictory messages but also a powerful injunction not to notice or comment on the contradictions.
Naturally, Frank’s book relies heavily on the many previous books on Trump, which he reads through a psychoanalytic lens. One anecdote, though, is original. An acquaintance reported to Frank that she had visited the White House with her son, who was invited there by Trump’s son Barron. In a room off the Oval Office, she “discovered none other than the president, watching reruns of himself on The Apprentice” (p. 129). Frank provocatively suggests that Trump realized his reality show character “was far more successful than the man who was playing him on television” (p. 25).
The book devotes an entire chapter to Trump’s lies. Frank speculates that children lie in order to separate from their mother, as they struggle with their conflicting feelings of need of and resentment toward her. “The first time the child’s lie is believed, he achieves a level of separation from the mother heretofore unexperienced” (p. 94). When a liar like Trump is confronted with a lie, he “must cling to his lies to retain the necessary illusion of omniscience, which would be jeopardized by any gesture of correction or apology” (p. 98).
We learn that Trump comes by his dishonesty honestly, so to speak. His paternal grandfather Friedrich made money by building brothels during the Klondike Gold Rush, sometimes on land he did not own. When he later tried to return to his native Germany, he was barred because he had evaded the German draft by leaving for the U.S. at the age of eighteen, in 1885. Friedrich died, ironically, of the Spanish flu at forty-nine, when his son Fred was twelve. Like Trump, his father Fred also seems to have lacked a conscience when it came to business. Avoiding military service himself (apparently a family tradition), Fred used every opportunity to exploit federal programs designed to provide affordable housing to veterans and other Americans. He cultivated close relationships with politicians who rewarded his campaign contributions with generous tax breaks and other favors. In another possible example of unconscious family dynamics, his father sent Trump to boarding school when Trump was twelve, the same age his father had been when Trump’s paternal grandfather died. Clinical experience demonstrates that having one’s child reach the age at which the parent experienced a trauma may lead the parent to identify with their own parent, inflicting the same trauma on the child, through identification with the aggressor. That is, Fred Trump foisted onto Donald the sort of parental loss that Fred Trump himself had experienced at the same age.
Frank is persuasive in speculating that Trump’s troubled relationship with his father plays a large role in his personality. Trump said the day his father was buried in 1999 was “by far the roughest day of my life” (p. 86). Trump spent his childhood witnessing his father’s emotional abusiveness toward their family, including Donald’s older brother Freddy, who was to die in 1981at the age of forty-two. Frank plausibly links Trump’s cruelty and bullying with his self-protective identification with the aggressor. Yet Trump was also left with profound “father hunger” (p. 87), which Frank connects with Trump’s fawning behavior toward autocrats such as Putin, Erdogan, and Duterte.
Frank speculates that Trump has identified with his mother’s remoteness and his father’s bullying. He interprets Trump’s repeated command, “believe me,” as a clue that Trump is probably lying. It is especially refreshing when Frank quotes Trump in some of his unguarded but on-the-record moments. For example, “That’s why I’m so screwed up, because I had a father who pushed me pretty hard” (p. 21). That brings to mind other such candid remarks, such as Trump saying that his brother Fred Jr. “was a much nicer person than me.” At a July 28, 2020, press conference, Trump complained that Anthony Fauci, his pandemic adviser, was more popular than he. He then added, “Nobody likes me. It can only be [because of] my personality” (The Hill video). Trump’s astonishing dishonesty raises the question of how well Trump even realizes he is lying. Frank describes Trump as living in “a chronic state of dissociation” (p. 83), which contributes to the prominent role of deceit in his behavior, and perhaps even in his self-image. William James (1890) persuasively observed that we all embellish personal stories to make them more interesting for our listeners. James believed that after telling such an embroidered anecdote six or seven times, we start remembering it the way we told it, rather than the way it actually happened.
Despite Trump oxymoronically referring to his pathological lying as “truthful hyperbole” (p. 225), he occasionally blurts out the unvarnished, unflattering truth. Frank links Trump’s notorious pattern of bullying “losers” with his “hatred of weakness in others,” since weakness reminds him of “his displaced self-hatred” (p. 35). He convincingly shows that Trump hinted at his own fraudulent core in Trump’s ghost-written 1987 The Art of the Deal—Trump likens the deal-maker to an artist, only to cite several dishonest “artists.” By the way, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghost writer, has described in his 2020 memoir, Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump and Me, his shame about contributing to Trump’s rise.
We learn that Trump’s choice of the name Barron for his youngest child may be illuminating. “John Barron” was the name Trump invented for himself in the 1980s when he promoted himself in phone calls to journalists. Some of Trump’s deceit unraveled in 2018, when it was revealed that he “had lied his way” onto the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. Trump also wanted the character based on himself for a proposed NBC series to be named Barron. Curiously, Trump’s fascination with the name seems to date back to 1979, when Conrad Hilton died, having disenfranchised his children and grandchildren. Trump, who seems to have manipulated his own father into leaving the bulk of his estate to him, wrote, “When Conrad died in 1979, he totally screwed [his son] Barron. . . . Conrad believed very strongly that inherited wealth destroys moral character and motivation” (pp. 77–78). Frank plausibly speculates that Trump became so obsessed with the name Barron because his story hit too close to home, as Trump tried hard to convince the public that his own inheritance was far less than it actually was.
Frank makes several comments about Trump’s apparent use of dissociation as a defense. He links it with Trump’s lack of remorse over his cruelty and dishonesty, as well as his lack of empathy. He thinks dissociation also leaves Trump with a false self, and an incapacity to integrate dissociated parts of himself or to reconcile fact and fantasy. Frank conjectures that influential Republicans might avoid confronting Trump “out of an unconscious sense of his fragility,” and the possibility that he “could collapse into multiple personality fragments” (p. 46).
What impact has Trump had on the collective American psyche? One can make a case that Trump has severely damaged our reflective capacities, and our ability to think objectively about him and about his rampant lies. For example, we may not have pondered the possible connection between Trump’s Senate impeachment trial in the first two months of 2020, and his failure to act responsibly during that time to contain the Covid-19 pandemic in its early days in the U.S. Trump never forgets injuries to his ego, even minor ones. He is pathologically vindictive. So it’s conceivable that his gargantuan rage about being impeached made him decide to let Americans die of the novel coronavirus.
As Frank points out, Trump’s countless breaks with precedent have gradually reset our expectations of what is “normal” conduct for a president. Trump never stops campaigning, due to his adulation addiction. Rather than seek objective counsel from his cabinet, he makes it clear that he expects them to compete with one another to ingratiate themselves with him by hyperbolic accolades. No matter how often and how outrageously Trump lies, journalists who point this out are treated as the “enemy” by Trump supporters, who seem to be living in a truly alternate “reality.” Trump is crazy-making. Trump’s former adviser Gary Cohn has memorably quipped, “Trump is less of a person than a collection of terrible traits” (p. 131).
Frank periodically comments on the psychology of Trump’s supporters. One factor may be their propensity for joining Trump in his denial of uncomfortable realities. For example, demographic changes suggest that whites will eventually become a minority in the U.S. and, collectively, minorities the majority. Like every demagogue, Trump inspires loyalty by fanning the flames of fear, then promising his followers that he alone can protect them from the fear he has induced in them. So Trump encourages his white followers, who want to pretend he can keep them in the majority. Trump’s abysmal leadership on the Covid-19 pandemic suggests that his supporters took comfort when he denied the seriousness of this threat. Apparently, only the demagogue gets to say what is a serious threat (e.g., hard-working, law-abiding Mexican immigrants) and what is not (e.g., a deadly virus). Further, a 2020 book (Dean and Altemeyer) describes research suggesting that roughly half of Trump’s supporters score disturbingly high on measures of authoritarianism and racism. Its authors label Trump “a very flawed authoritarian leader” (p. 141), adding that “the drive to dominate everyone around him is a hallmark of an authoritarian leader” (p. 622). So when we wonder how in the world anyone could support such a racist demagogue, we have an answer, unwelcome as it is.
Frank skillfully explores the role projection plays in Trump’s attacks on others: “Donald Trump is a clear illustration of what projection looks like in an adult who has never learned to temper it as a primitive tool he acquired in infancy” (p. 147). Examples are too numerous to list. As a rule of thumb, every criticism Trump makes of anyone else might be considered a projection, until proven otherwise. Trump seems unaware of the transparency of his projections. “Trapped in a narcissistic character organization that requires him to deny weakness, Trump maintains his false sense of omnipotence and keeps his [internalized] father’s judgment at bay by blaming others for anything that goes wrong . . .” (p. 159).
Frank wonders if Trump’s verbal and cognitive deterioration is “the cumulative result of a lifetime of lying” (p. 106). But what about the possibility of brain disease? In a chapter on Trump’s language, Frank examines this issue. He concludes that Trump has suffered from dyslexia since early childhood, and he speculates plausibly about the psychological damage this may have inflicted on him. Frank adds that “there’s certainly no reason to rule out cognitive decline” (p. 211). However, Frank does not pursue other possible causes of cognitive impairment, and the complexity of Trump’s various psychological maladies makes it challenging to identify patterns that may reflect comorbid brain disease. Vanity Fair reported that “linguistic decline is . . . obvious in two interviews with David Letterman, in 1988 and 2013. . . . In the first, Trump threw around words such as ‘aesthetically’ and ‘precarious,’ and used long, complex sentences. In the second, he used simpler speech patterns, few polysyllabic words, and noticeably more fillers . . .” (Bess Levin, May 24, 2017). Such evidence of progressive impairment is vitally important in distinguishing psychological from organic pathology.
It is an error to regard all forms of dementia as similar to Alzheimer’s disease in causing prominent, progressive memory impairment. Ten percent or more of patients with progressive cognitive impairment instead suffer from frontotemporal dementia. Roughly half of them have the “behavioral variant” of the disease (bvFTD), with symptoms such as progressively decreased judgment, poor problem-solving skills, worsening impulsivity, hypersexuality, lack of empathy, binge-eating, decreased attention span, mental rigidity, perseveration, and language problems such as impaired syntax, leaving out words, and a preference for partial phrases. Accompanying neuromuscular disease can lead to weakness in the arms and legs, and tremor (one thinks of Trump’s June 13, 2020, struggle to walk down a ramp at West Point, then holding a glass he was drinking from with two hands). To make matters worse, victims lack insight into the fact that they are impaired. Such a lack of insight might help explain the otherwise bizarre fact that in July 2020 Trump boasted about how well he allegedly did on the Montreal Mini Mental Status Exam. As some experts noted, the test is administered when the physician suspects dementia. Importantly, bvFTD is not always rapidly progressive.
More than five hundred books have been written about the attention-craving Trump. If you don’t have time to read them all, I recommend you start with Frank’s.
And now for something completely different: A retired psychoanalyst, Sheldon Roth, has written a contrasting book about Trump. Its title gives it away—Psychologically Sound. Its goal is to refute allegations that Trump is psychologically unsound. Taking no notice of Frank’s book, the dust jacket claims that Roth’s hagiography “is the first analysis of President Trump’s mental health that draws on science, not politics.” I include Roth’s book in this book essay not because I respect it, but to inform readers that such a book by a psychoanalyst exists, for those who view Frank’s book as overly critical. My review of Roth’s book includes many direct quotations, since readers of this review might suspect I was exaggerating were I to paraphrase too much. I have had to suppress the urge to insert “sic!” after nearly every quotation.
Roth begins his introduction by telling us his goal is “to demonstrate the soundness and humanness” of Trump’s mind (p. ix). He promises to help us “bear the mysterious” fact that Trump can be “as human as anyone,” but also “so different from the rest of us” (p. ix; emphasis added). Roth knows the reader will be surprised to learn that “Trump values love and marriage above wealth” (p. x). Surprised indeed, when Trump has done so much to publicize his love of wealth, and when he measures other people by their wealth. If Roth is correct, Trump has certainly done a good job of keeping his true values hidden from us.
Roth is shocked that the media have neglected “the immense importance” of Norman Vincent Peale’s influence in forming a correct “spiritual picture” of Trump (p. x). Trump’s niece Mary has not “neglected” Peale, whom she calls “a charlatan” who was “very fond of successful businessmen” (Mary Trump 2020, p. 37). Trump, however, liked Peale’s sermons, and said, “He would instill a very positive feeling about God that also made me feel positive about myself” (p. 27). If there’s a hint of a grandiose identification with the deity here, Roth doesn’t see it. No, instead he writes that “the leader miraculously fulfills the desired role of the followers” (p. 35; emphasis added).
Skeptical yet? Just wait. Roth seems to praise Trump’s “ease of fabrication” (p. xi), as if it were a virtue. He seems to accept at face value everything Trump has said, with the exception of Trump’s boasts that lying is part of his business tactics. The dust jacket promises that Roth will ignore “fabricated media stories that are placed by critics to embarrass the president” and will instead rely on “Trump’s own words.” He also uses ghost-written books to which Trump may have contributed little indeed. Roth asks, “What of misogyny? Long before it was politically correct . . . Trump . . . was a champion of women” (p. xii). He admits he has had many misgivings about Trump, but he asks us to continue “maintaining support” of Trump despite our misgivings (p. xiii). Roth promises to refute the “riotous circus” of psychiatric diagnoses that have been proposed for Trump (p. xiii). Roth, by contrast, tells us he stands in awe before the mystery of Trump, apparently joining his subject in dismissing all criticism as “fake news.”
To his credit, Roth devotes chapter 7 to his disagreements with Trump. I so much wish it had been his first chapter that I will discuss it here, before venturing further into the adulatory parts of the book. He lists several examples of Trump’s behavior that have “induce[d] an upsurge of exasperated anger with him” (p. 155). First, he voices his disappointment with Trump’s role in the “inept, duplicitous venture of Trump University” (p. 55). Roth then devotes several pages of trenchant criticism to Trump’s appointment of his relatives to positions of responsibility in his administration, starting with Jared and Ivanka Kushner, whose “qualifications for these missions are highly debatable” (p. 157). Roth also condemns Trump for the unprecedented ways he has personally profited from his presidency. Yet he then forgivingly claims Trump believes he is doing nothing wrong. But that is precisely the point of Trump’s critics: Trump’s consistent ethical blindness, as he consistently pursues his self-interest.
Despite his approval of the border wall, Roth supports humane policies toward illegal immigrants, pointing out that the vast majority of them are not criminals. He condemns Trump’s appointments of Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, Ryan Zinke, and Scott Pruitt to cabinet positions, calling them completely unqualified. He cannot understand why Trump has allowed the State Department to “decay,” with so many unfilled positions. He cites Trump’s habit of depending on loyalty as an explanation of his horrible record on presidential appointments. Roth believes that Trump’s poor record on gun control and on LGBTQ issues is based on politics, and does not reflect Trump’s own positions.
Despite his efforts to understand and excuse Trump’s flaws, Roth is refreshingly and uncharacteristically harsh in condemning Trump’s dishonesty. He was distressed by a Washington Post article that reported Trump made 125 false or misleading statements in only 120 minutes. And not because he felt the article was “fake news.” Roth asks rhetorically, “How to tolerate such insupportable conduct?” (p. 180). Improbably, Roth then hopes that “Trump’s consistent outbursts of linguistic aggression help maintain his mental balance” and will allow “Trump the necessary mental balance to achieve greater goals for the nation” (p. 180). Really?
What are we to make of Trump’s deeply disturbing flaws? Roth implies that we must not confuse Trump’s flawed public persona with his private self, arguing that “you can’t judge a person by their persona” (p. 126). Trump is said to protect his private self “with legal and contractual agreements” (p. 53). Improbably, Roth believes Trump’s comments on the film Citizen Kane reveal his more respectable private self, one that contains “precise empathy” (p. 7), “psychological intuitiveness” (p. 9), and “self-reflection” (p. 10). Roth is full of admiration for Trump’s ostensibly sage advice to Citizen Kane: “Find yourself a different woman” (p. 14). Roth is aware that not everyone shares his view of Trump, but he reassures us, “Concern about President Trump’s public persona being volatile and impulsive must recognize the stabilizing framework of Trump’s values of love and respect for loss” (p. 16). For those who believe Trump repeatedly contradicts himself (sometimes claiming he was just joking), Roth reassures us that “consistency is the hallmark of Trump’s personality” (p. 58). Trump’s good friend Richard LeFrak is enlisted for his insight into Trump’s private self: “LeFrak has . . . said ‘He’s the kind of guy who likes throwing hand grenades in the room’” (p. 121). Another friend reassured an interviewer that Trump is absolutely not a racist. So that settles it?
One must admire Roth’s ability to rationalize some of Trump’s grotesque failings, attributing them merely to Trump’s “public persona.” While admitting the latter “makes grandiose demands with an uncompromising demeanor” (p. 113), Roth somehow knows that the real Trump has an “ability and capacity to compromise with respected, powerful personalities” (p. 113). We get a glimpse of the inner, loving Trump in his seemingly bizarre negotiations with Kim Jong-un: “Initially President Trump talked in terms of ‘nuclear buttons,’ which then amazingly faded into pronouncements of ‘love’ for the North Korean ruler” (p. 113). In one of Roth’s rare concessions, he admits that only time will tell if Trump’s habit of making impulsive decisions based on instinct is appropriate for the presidency.
Roth’s awe seems to extend to Trump’s 40,000+ tweets, perhaps agreeing with Trump that he is “the Ernest Hemingway” of tweets (p. 23). Even Trump’s misspellings “maintain his image of ‘a man of the people’” (p. 24). His tweets provide a “powerful social psychological caretaking embrace of Trump’s followers . . . [with] desirable, hard-to-come-by affective undertones” (p. 36). Roth is eager to defend Trump from “psychiatric slander,” whereas Roth feels Trump’s references to “radical Islamist terrorists” and “illegal immigration” make him “an appreciated campaign country doctor” who releases the “stifled feelings” of his followers (p. 37). What about the 20,000+ lies Trump has told as president? “[T]hese fact checkers are missing the key point of Trump’s strategy—eliciting the emotions he wants from his audience” (p. 41). Emotions like uncritical hero-worship of Trump the demagogue? Emotions like racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia? Emotions like demonizing and threatening violence against those who disagree politically? Yes, apparently Roth supports Trump’s appeals to nationalism, with the rationalization that his supporters have felt marginalized, so we need to view diversity as a threat.
Roth uncritically accepts Trump’s claim that he used to read books, before he became too busy as president (watching television?). Roth naturally ignores the possibility that if Trump’s claim is true, the decline in his reading might be among the plentiful indications that Trump is suffering from progressive cognitive impairment. Trump’s White House staff reportedly became so exasperated with his failure to read even brief summaries of their reports on crucial policy issues that they resorted to leaking their advice to Fox News. Trump would then learn from Fox what he refused to learn by reading his staff’s memoranda.
Similarly, Roth views Trump as a father uncritically. While Frank plausibly identified Trump’s identification with his father’s cruel, domineering behavior toward his wife and children, Roth admiringly quotes Trump as saying “I love relating to [my kids] just the way my father related to me—through a passion for work well done” (p. 90). With a curious arachnid trope, Roth tells us “Trump has a fine cobweb of business ties to all his children” (p. 90). Ignoring what Frank reported about the seamy side of Trump’s forebears, Roth instead claims “the Trump family is now in their fourth generation of greasing the family wheels of love, loyalty, and attachment” (p. 90). Roth’s description of the atmosphere of Trump’s childhood home as “relaxed, tension-free” bears no resemblance whatsoever to the subsequent account of Trump’s niece Mary.
Are you concerned about Trump’s pattern of rapidly hiring, then firing, White House staff? Not to worry, since Roth reassures us that Trump has had a long friendship with the “billionaire” Thomas Barrack Jr. (p. 114). Roth acknowledges that Trump’s “attack dog” (p. 119) Roy Cohn had an “undeniably powerful influence on Trump” (p. 116). But the good news is that he was never a “mentor” to Trump, since only his father and Peale played that role.
When Roth lists what he thinks will be Trump’s best achievements, he includes a wall on the border with Mexico; “splintering of the Democratic and Republican parties”; “stunning ‘supply-side’ economic success due to tax cuts”; and “a shift in the federal judiciary toward conservativism” (p. 129). In a section on “loyalty and power,” Roth says Trump values loyalty above all else. Characteristically, Roth is silent on Trump’s notorious disloyalty to so many who have worked for him. Perhaps Norman Vincent Peale never quoted the Prayer of St. Francis, which includes the words, “Lord . . . grant that I may not so much seek . . . to be loved, as to love, for it is in giving that we receive.”
Trump is said to have trusted only a few of the hundreds of contractors he hired as a builder. We read nothing here of Trump boasting that he regularly refused to pay his contractors, telling them to sue him, then offering them a small fraction of what he had promised them. Roth somehow takes comfort in Trump’s “robust identification” with the widely reviled President Andrew Jackson (p. 142).
Roth takes pains to deny that Trump has any psychiatric disorder. He praises Allen Frances for publicly stating that Trump is not a narcissist, and has no mental disorders. And Roth agrees with Trump that Trump is actually “very stable” (p. 146). Not only that, but in excellent physical health, since Roth has “noticed the total lack of any medical report . . . in which Donald Trump was reported ill” (p. 147). The book was published before Trump was diagnosed with Covid-19. Again, though, Roth seems unaware that at least one of Trump’s glowing medical reports was written by Trump himself.
Roth heaps scorn on those who have speculated about what is wrong with Trump psychologically. However, inconsistently, he seems to have no problem using his own credentials to give Trump a clean bill of mental health. In case we had any doubt about it, Roth admits he is a “Trump supporter” (p. 155).
Roth’s final chapter, “Insufficient Awe,” seems to chastise us for considering Trump awful, rather than awesome. Roth is not at his most tolerant, or even most consistent, in this chapter. He seems determined to foment Islamophobia, while also condemning rising anti-Semitism. This amounts to the sort of destructive tribalism that bedevils our world. He pays lip service to allowing some Muslim immigration, as long as this is done in a way that respects the “social psychological capacities of our nation” (p. 193). Capacities that Roth attempts to constrict by his many shameful slanders against Muslim immigrants—Europe is said to be “overwhelmed by Muslim immigration” (p. 190); this “invasion” leads to “frightening events”; there are “increasing episodes of jihadist . . . violence”; there is a “cultural clash between Islam and the West”; “Few Westerners are comfortable with importing polygamy, childhood marriages, misogyny, female genital mutilation, the grooming of adolescents for sex trafficking, and Sharia Law” (p. 191). Among Roth’s many references, he omits Akbar Ahmed’s splendid, scholarly, widely praised treatise on Islamophobia, Journey into Europe. Any religious or ethnic group has its unsavory members, but should not be characterized by them. It is unforgivable to join other bigots in characterizing Islam by its worst outliers. Judaism has the wonderful ethical ideal of Tikkun Olam, redeeming the whole world. It applies to all human beings, and all religious groups.
Roth finishes his book by claiming yet one more time that Trump is “psychologically sound.” He argues that “each of us has foibles” (p. 199). That is a pathetic defense of the worst president our country has ever had. Roth deflects legitimate criticisms of Trump by attributing them to “today’s oppositional media” and by asking us to wait to learn how his policies are “ultimately judged by history” (p. 201), not by the likes of you and me.
When we encounter a book such as Roth’s, we naturally wonder “Who published this?” It was Bombardier Books, whose website says it “largely places its focus on conservative political nonfiction works. Its mission is clear: In a time when the media . . . tries to limit and stifle debate . . . now more than ever we need writers with courage and conviction . . . sometimes you need to drop rhetorical bombs from 40,000 feet to get people to hear new ideas . . . occasionally you need a tailgunner to defend your comrades-at-arms from sneak attacks.” Notice the violent, militaristic metaphors. You could hardly miss them. If you’re wondering how you could hear a damn thing while a bomb is exploding, perhaps you just suffer from too much “political correctness.” But I will confirm that, while reviewing Roth’s book, I very much felt my capacity to think rationally was under attack, perhaps by that tailgunner.
Having known Justin Frank for forty-fve years, I can attest that he did indeed write the book published under his name. I greatly admired Sheldon Roth’s book on psychotherapy (1987). I struggle to believe the same person published this book on Trump. Again, I included Roth’s book in this essay in an effort to create bipartisan balance, but I cannot pretend I came away with a balanced opinion of his book. Instead, my previous opinion of Roth was replaced by a disturbing Trump transference toward him.