During an interview with Vanity Fair , former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci blasted Donald Trump and attacked his mental faculty. Although Scaramucci has often supported his former boss following his firing, his criticism of Trump’s recent visits to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, following two back-to-back mass shootings has started a war of words between the pair.
“I think the guy is losing it, mentally,” he said. “He has declining mental faculties; he’s becoming more petulant; he’s becoming more impetuous. Okay, you see just by the way he’s sweating, his body’s not doing well.
“It’s obviously not a guy that takes care of himself, right? And he doesn’t listen to anybody. And just think about this, okay?” he asked.
“There’s no one—there’s no Jim Mattis; there’s no Gary Cohn; there’s no one to check him anymore. Whatever my differences were with General John Kelly, after he left, this thing has completely unspooled.”
It’s not the first time that Trump’s mental capacity has been questioned. Per The Inquisitr , David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making Of Donald Trump , said Trump has “no capacity for empathy” and is “deeply mentally ill.” Newsweek reports that Johnston made the comments following Trump’s visit to Dayton and El Paso, echoing Scaramucci’s criticism.
“He has declining mental faculties; he’s becoming more petulant; he’s becoming more impetuous” https://t.co/AneKE9Cc7H
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) August 16, 2019
Johnson also said it wouldn’t be a surprise to have a president that is mentally ill, highlighting that millions of Americans suffer with them.
In addition, a group of psychiatrists used a conference at Yale University to warn against the president’s supposed delusions and paranoia. John Gartner, a practicing psychotherapist, said that it is the group’s ethical responsibility to warn the public about Trump’s purported mental illness.
But others have questioned the benefit of attacking Trump’s mental capacities. The psychiatric establishment claim’s that doing so violates the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) “Goldwater rule,” which prohibits psychiatrists from giving opinions on people they haven’t personally examined.
Still, that hasn’t stopped criticism. Newsweek reports that Bandy Lee, a Yale psychiatrist, claims that a longtime Trump family friend and two administration officials approached her to speak about concerns with Trump’s well-being. Lee claims that she is concerned that the American public is witnessing an unraveling of Trump’s mental state, highlighting the increased frequency of his reported lying and the growing intensity of his rallies.
Lee also claims that Trump’s supposed mental challenges could push him to make potentially dangerous decisions, in particular as a response to distract from his legal problems.
