THE latest account of United States President Donald Trump’s increasingly chaotic presidency, titled Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, has super-sized the debate about his soundness of mind. And, whether he is mentally fit to command the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and its best-equipped army.
The book presents Trump as a petulant child who frequently walks back on promises and faces difficulty in staying focused during White House briefings. At 71, is he getting too old for the job? Or does Trump eat too much junk food (i.e. McDonald’s) that dulls the brain? Not so, wrote 27 mental health experts in a collaborative diagnosis published last year, titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. It was an indictment of his personality and warned of the imminent risk his presidency posed to world peace.
Among other worrying traits, experts concluded that Trump is a textbook narcissist and megalomaniac. And, admittedly, it is hard to imagine someone without delusions of grandeur calling himself a “stable genius”, or using the cuss-word “s***hole” to describe non-white immigrant countries. To avert the horrors of an accidental nuclear war that was on the cards the longer he stayed president, they strongly hinted his deputies invoke the 25th Amendment without delay to send him packing.
In the aftermath of both books, a swelling chorus from across American society demands Trump and all future US presidents — and this argument can be extended to every state with a significant army and nuclear weapons — undergo mental health screening before taking the oath for office. However, with self-serving sound bites from political and medical practitioners saturating the media, it is important to establish the core issues at the heart of this debate.
First, we must remember that Trump did not elect himself. It was irate American voters — primarily blue-collar whites — who powered him across the finish line. He is simply a placeholder for their pent-up frustration, a conduit that spotted and rode the cresting wave of discontent to victory against frontrunner Hillary Clinton. If future world leaders will be required to undergo mental health screenings before their confirmation, why should voters who elevate them to such heights get a free pass? Clearly, some form of testing to verify their sanity or intelligence is also necessary.
Second: while many political pundits seem smitten with these screenings as the next evolutionary step towards a democratic utopia — and the weight of history arguably supports this thesis — there is a serious trade-off. Some level of mental illness has proven to be of great value in past crises. In fact, the psychiatrist and academic Dr Nassir Ghaemi, in his bestselling book, A First-Rate Madness, asserts “when our world is in tumult, mentally ill leaders function best”. He cites Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln as manifest examples of this phenomenon.
Finally, even if these mental health screenings were rolled out tomorrow, they presuppose the individual undertaking the test has held, and will hold, the same set of beliefs through his or her life. If we agree to this definition, then the Trump of 10 years ago — who backed the Clintons and was a self-declared Democrat and party donor — would have aced any mental health exam. For, ordinarily, only when an individual’s behaviour and speech contradict the dominant sociopolitical narrative is he or she labelled mentally ill.
Democracies, we must recognise, take two to tango. We cannot demonise the consequence (Trump) without addressing the cause (American voters). And, this applies to all countries equally, as the framework for electing public officials is near universal. It rests on biologically irrelevant “age gating”— for example, at least 18 years old to vote and 30-plus to hold office — and surface evidence of civic-mindedness, i.e. not having a criminal record or defrauding the government.
Some countries like Austria and Japan, alarmed at the dwindling interest of young people in politics, have even lowered the legal age in hopes of boosting electoral turnouts. Still, there is no measure of moral conscience in most democratic countries that would qualify voters to filter out their nakedly divisive politicians like Trump. Moreover, proponents of the status quo insist any attempt to prevent legal age citizens from voting will be tantamount to treason.
Ultimately, it is one thing to identify gullible voters as the problem, another to remedy it. To employ a standardised mechanism for testing the intelligence or mental health of millions of people in the months preceding a national poll is folly in the most profound sense. For, even if we ignore the very tall hurdle of funding such an enterprise, this system will quickly fall prey to discriminatory practices.
Political parties and rich constituencies will scheme together to get early access to these tests and possibly cheat to obtain maximum electoral participation. On the flipside, this system will adversely impact poor neighbourhoods with low income and literacy. Residents may not only struggle to pass such tests, they will also have to wade through acres of bureaucratic red tape to access them. Many in such communities could be delaying mental health treatment for lack of funds and will face exclusion due to factors beyond their control.
We must acknowledge that foiling the rise of future demagogues requires taking the long view. It starts with introspection and asking the hard questions, such as why have we failed to convince global citizens about the dangers of tub-thumping and dictatorship? It bears repeating that add-and-stir fixes like mental health or intelligence screenings will only discriminate against the most disadvantaged sectors of society.
Most significantly, educating voters is an incremental process that requires patience. It will have to start with assessing how and how often we instil in secondary school-level children their civic and constitutional rights and responsibilities. And, teach them about the catastrophic turns nations take when hypnotised by glib, self-serving demagogues. Failing that, future societies will continue to seek false messiahs like Trump in times of socioeconomic turmoil at the expense of world peace.
S. Mubashir Noor is an Ipoh-based independent journalist