In our February 2017 column, The Elephant in the Room, we shared our concern as mental health professionals about the dangerousness of Donald Trump as the recently inaugurated President of the United States. Then, in the first chapter of the book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, we detailed Trump’s bias toward extreme present hedonism, including his dehumanization of people he doesn’t like or cannot relate to, lying, misogyny, paranoia, self-aggrandizement, and narcissistic and bullying personality traits. We warned at the time that Trump was “‘chumming’ for war, possibly for the most selfish of reasons: to deflect attention away from the Russia investigation,” and we were worried that another unbalanced leader elsewhere in the world might take the bait.
More than two years later, his conduct has worsened and we teeter on the precipice of a potentially devastating war, not with North Korea as previously feared, but a different dangerous regime in Iran.