Powerless to dislodge the duly elected 45th president from office, desperate left-wingers and their media allies are borrowing a page from Soviet Communism by dishonestly portraying President Trump as mentally unfit.
This is a coup attempt in progress and there is no indication it will go away anytime soon. In an earlier age, it might have been called high treason. The difference is that in the Soviet Union it was the government doing the smearing in order to maintain power. In America today, it is the opposition that is doing the smearing in the hope of removing its enemy from power and becoming the government.
Decades ago Moscow set the example that Trump-haters are now following. (Former Soviet propagandist Oleg Atbashian wrote an excellent piece at FrontPage last week on Soviet-style psychiatry.)
“The Soviets devised a system that allowed for political figures — especially those who posed a threat to party leaders — to be declared mentally unfit for office,” Jordan Schachtel writes at Conservative Review.
To combat unsavory political opinions, Soviet leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Yuri Andropov called on friendly psychiatrists to diagnose dissidents as mentally incapacitated. Some dissidents were then sent to a psikhushka (mental hospital), where they were imprisoned and removed from political life. The pseudo-psychiatry establishment — which in effect acted as an ideological policing agency — continued until the fall of the Soviet Union.
Pseudo-psychiatrists, along with some actual psychiatrists and psychologists, now smear President Trump daily. “Without evidence that there is anything [in] particular wrong, CNN’s Jake Tapper, NBC’s Chuck Todd, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, and other media figures are now regularly asking about the president’s mental health,” Schachtel writes.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), who wants the 25th Amendment invoked and Trump impeached, tweeted Jan. 9: “We have a president who is intellectually ill-equipped for the job. … He is the antithesis of what we should have as a moral leader in our country.”
Left-wing bloviator Keith Olbermann tweeted Jan. 11:
This man has to go. Now. I don’t care if it’s the 25th Amendment, Impeachment, Arrest, Resignation, something “coming up” at his physical tomorrow, General Strike, or we all crash the stock market by selling off. We must Make America AMERICA Again. #MAAA
It’s not that Trump is actually mentally ill. His true failing is that he doesn’t see things the way they do and they cannot handle it.
Leftists are psychiatrizing, stigmatizing, and gaslighting to make sure the Trump presidency is never, in their words, “normalized.” When Trump does things that presidents normally do, like firing the U.S. attorneys appointed by his predecessor, he is treated as a threat to the republic.
Democrats have done the same thing to all modern Republican presidents to varying degrees, labeling, for example, both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as dimwitted or sociopathic depending on their propaganda needs, but they have never attacked any Chief Executive with the ferociousness they reserve for President Trump. To them, Trump is a singular evil devoid of any political legitimacy whatsoever. The 63 million Americans who voted for him were deceived, they claim, so their votes don’t count.
Casual character-assassination is easy for the Left. They have to lie to others and themselves in order to remain left-wing. Reality is not kind to so-called idealists who deny human nature. The leftist worldview is a funhouse mirror view of reality, or as the recently popular saying goes, facts don’t care about your feelings, and feelings are the glue that holds their twisted belief structure together.
Those on the Left seem to be realizing that the ridiculous Trump-Russia electoral collusion conspiracy theory manufactured and paid for by Democrats isn’t going anywhere. The Obama-orchestrated Deep State attacks on Trump that began even before he was inaugurated, and which overlap to an extent with the conspiracy theory, can only move the ball forward so much. All-too-convenient allegations of sexual impropriety, many of which have been underwritten by left-wingers, bounce off Trump thanks in part to the Left’s long-running defense of sexual predator Bill Clinton which set a precedent of sorts. This is hardly an exhaustive list of the deceitful, malicious campaigns the Left has waged thus far against Trump.
Those on the Left watched the hour-long live televised briefing Tuesday on Trump’s health in horror as it failed to culminate in a finding that he was mentally or physically unfit to be president of the United States.
Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, personal physician to both Presidents Trump and Obama, gave Trump a clean bill of health that reporters present and leftists online could not accept. Reporters at the White House asked 22 questions about his mental state and repeatedly pressed Jackson to just come out with it and say Trump was nuts, a “fact” reporters know already.
As Schachtel writes:
It’s unclear why these questions are warranted in the first place. Sure, the president has a unique personality and has a flair for drama, but he has shown no signs of any type of mental illness that would stop the duly elected president from carrying out his executive duties. Time and again, Dr. Jackson had to repeat himself in declaring that President Trump was fully fit for office, both cognitively and physically.
But Jackson patiently indulged the media at length.
He told the world that Trump’s brain, eyes, lungs, muscles, arteries, bones, genitals, and intestines were healthy and functioning normally. The briefing was exhaustive and exhausting, as Schachtel notes, especially because an exasperated Jackson had to keep telling reporters the same facts over and over again. On the positive side, with all the personal information released, Trump, whose “overall health is excellent” Jackson said, continues his streak as the most transparent U.S. president in modern times.
That Trump is mentally well was hotly disputed. It was as if Jackson’s statement that Trump scored 30 out of 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which screens for Alzheimer’s and dementia, fell on deaf ears.
That Trump is 75 inches, or 6 feet and 3 inches tall, was disputed. That Trump weighs 239 pounds was disputed, leading to a fun neologism – girthers – to describe doubters like logorrheic leftist Matthew Yglesias of Vox. That Trump, who is 71 years old, has a healthy heart was disputed. That Trump only sleeps a few hours each night was disputed.
But how could a man who eats fast food and “never exercises” be “in as good as shape as you say he’s in?” asked one shocked-sounding reporter.
“It’s called genetics,” said Jackson, who added that lifelong abstinence from tobacco and alcohol have also contributed to Trump’s well-being.
I don’t know. Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old. I don’t know. He has incredible genes, I just assume. I mean, if I didn’t watch what I ate, I wouldn’t have the cardiac and overall health that he has.
Meanwhile, returning to the topic of Soviet Communism, retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) delivered his much-hyped speech absurdly comparing Trump to a mass-murdering dictator Wednesday to a near-empty Senate chamber.
It is a fact that Trump has referred to the media as the “enemy of the American People.” Except for the descriptor American, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin used the same phrase in his time. The Romans used it about 2,000 years before that.
But only Stalin’s use of the expression counts, according to Flake, and Trump is therefore similar to one of history’s most prolific homicidal maniacs even though he hasn’t sent anyone to a gulag or had secret police liquidate his opponents.
“It’s a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Joseph Stalin to describe his enemies,” the senator said.
Flake, who spoke nary a nasty word about Obama during his presidency, didn’t bother to acknowledge that the 44th president came close to the same phrasing, calling Republicans “enemies.”
When you’re a Trump-hater, you don’t have to make sense.
This article by Matthew Vadum first appeared Jan. 18, 2018, at FrontPageMag.