Psychologists From The United States

"These people were saying in effect that “I would be rational except that you are so irrational that I can’t be.” This stance makes the person who adopts it just as culpable as anyone who flat-out endorses irrationality."

"What causes the lunatic to demand that ideas not be subject to scrutiny—and in particular that they not be contradicted? No one knows. It may be part of a deliberate campaign to maintain power, an implicit admission of some semiconscious fear that the ideas might not be good, or just a common aspect of types of behavior that we associate with historical monsters. At least, the correlation is there."

"At the very least, irrationality per se can be challenged. In contrast, acting irrational because we believe that other people are so irrational that their irrationality cannot be challenged leads to no challenge at all."

"If we reject the idea of the “intrinsic rationality of whatever we do” (at least if we are not some sort of superb expert or monstrous political leader), then we must value scrutiny, which brings me to my final point: the necessity and value of a free society. When we scrutinize arguments, we often do so in a collective way…. If disagreement can lead to the presentation of one’s remains in a body bag to one’s spouse, this type of scrutiny is horribly constrained. Such constraint in turn implies that irrational conclusions will go unchallenged, and again because irrationality implies impossibility, that lack of challenge in turn implies belief in false conclusions. Such belief harms both societies and individuals."

"Thus, even if we accept that the people are deviously neurotic rather than outright irrational, we still must specify exactly how they believe that the rest of us can be fooled by them. Throughout the book, I will assert that they are urging us (and themselves) to “associate, but not compare.” This book is written in partial hope that the readers will end up making appropriate comparisons, rather than simple associations—which generally lead to a deficient specification of the categories necessary to reach a rational conclusion."

"There's a big difference between having compassion and understanding for what somebody went through as a child, but that changes once you become an adult human being. Plenty of people have had horrible childhoods, and grow up to have empathy for other people and to care about doing good in the world. Donald is not one of those people, and he needs to be held accountable."

"In administration after administration and across centuries and decades, crimes- against decency, against democracy, and against humanity- have been committed by presidents, legislators at all levels of government, the judiciary, and ordinary Americans without punishment, reprisal, or justice for the victims. Then Donald came along and left them all in the dust."

"[W]e've already seen... that he's capable of... either acting badly or refusing to act in a way that would be appropriate to protecting the country, and the people in this country. So... as we go, and maybe the worse he's doing in the polls or the more threatened he feels, and the more stress he's under... There are going to be consequences to that, unfortunately. I don't know what they are, but we need to be prepared."

"Donald was incompetent, but others in Donald's administration were anything but. What they built was a lean and ruthless machine for advancing fascism. With the help of some luck, complicit institutions, an unprepared media, and a party of willing converts, that machine largely succeeded."

"It boils down, really, to a simple message. Donald isn't going to get better... he's going to get worse. That should make people think long and hard about how they cast their next vote."

"I knew this simply because of my family knowledge, and as a . There is no bottom... to... how bad this can get, to how egregious his behavior can be."

"This is a man who bankrupted casinos, which is a hard thing to do, and then was given a TV show in the early 2000s that portrayed him as this real estate mastermind. So... every failure along the way has been met with more money thrown at him by the banks, more glowing media coverage about what a brash, brilliant guy he is. ...It's taken a lot of people to help him fail upward. ...[H]e may be useless, but he's got a lot of power. They're willing to put up with, or overlook, or ignore entirely his behavior, his crassness and his incompetence."

"Once my Dad was out of the family business and was branded a failure, he and anyone connected to him (which would have been me) no longer mattered. So there was this level of thoughtlessness around us. So luckily we were able to laugh about it, because it's really not very funny, although some of the presents were quite hysterical... to have your uncle and his wife, who were extraordinarily wealthy, give you a 3-pack of underwear for Christmas... was a bit beyond the pale... My mom... was even lower on the totem pole than I was... Donald didn't even recognize that they were presents that he had given me."

"I do feel that I have to do whatever I can to make sure that people are informed and understand exactly what's going on with this man."

"Money is the only currency in the family. ...It literally stands in for everything else: love, affection, respect. It's understandable that... my family members would cling to it so desperately, and want to acquire it."

"I was actually a bit surprised at how surprised people were by the SAT story when... the book first came out, just as I was surprised at the reaction to... his use of racist and antisemitic language because, look what he does... It shouldn't surprise anybody that it started that long ago,.. especially since my grandfather also believed that you do whatever you need to do to succeed: cheat, lie, work with the mafia, whatever."

"Donald learned that you could never admit you're wrong. That was considered a weakness and we've seen that, starkly, with the Covid 19 situation. He didn't do anything right away, and then when it was almost past time to do the right thing that would have meant admitting that he hadn't done the right thing in the first place. ...[T]hat wasn't going to happen, so the situation got worse and worse... [C]losely related to that was this idea of the power of positive thinking, which my grandfather really bought into... [E]ssentially, he took it to such an extreme that it became a kind of toxic positivity."

"Donald learned that in order to be, not just protected from his father but favored by his father, he needed to be this larger than life, great, fantastic... Part of it was the toxic positivity, and part of it was just... having to convince Fred Trump Sr. that... Donald belonged on the planet and... should survive, and should succeed, and he needed to make it clear to Fred that Donald could be of use to him."

"Ms. Trump, who at 55 has long been estranged from President Trump, is the first member of the Trump clan to break ranks with her relatives by writing a book about their secrets."

"Through the French doors, I could see the meeting... Vice President Mike Pence... Paul Ryan... Chuck Schumer, and a dozen other congresspeople were gathered around Donald, who sat behind the Resolute Desk. The tableau reminded me of my grandfather's tactics: he always made his supplicants come to him... and he remained seated while they stood."

"[] thought that because [Donald Trump] was a man without principle, nobody would vote for him. She was horrified by the white evangelical embrace of his candidacy because she knew that he had no deep convictions about religion... and considered going to church a photo-op."

"Donald needed somebody to take the s when he was at Fordham in order to get into Penn. ...[I]n New York City, the name Joe Shapiro isn't exactly unique."

"To make it worse... for Donald, when he was very young, 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 approximately... his mother, who was really his only source of human connection and comfort... got very ill and was, to all intents and purposes, absent from his life. So he suddenly found himself, so young, basically alone in the world because my grandfather was incapable of filling the void left by my grandmother's absence. ...Because of the very vulnerable age he was [at] when she became sick, I think on some level he experienced that as a betrayal. She didn't have the capacity to heal the rift, even after she was [physically] able to, and I think that stuck with him..."

"[P]erhaps the final betrayal was when he was sent to the military academy because he was behaving so horribly and nobody could control him... [[w:Mary Anne MacLeod Trump|[M]y grandmother]] told me much later that she was relieved when he left."

"[] is the origin... the ground zero of all of the family dysfunction... I believe that he was a sociopath. ...He had no real human feeling for anybody, including his children, and was quite adept at using people to his own ends; and if he found them not to be of use, he had no compunction about discarding them. ...[H]e enjoyed humiliating other weaker people a great deal."

"He's a clown," my aunt Maryanne said during one of our regular lunches at the time. "This will never happen." I agreed. We talked about how his reputation as a faded reality star and failed businessman would doom his run. "Does anyone even believe the bullshit that he's a ? What has he ever accomplished on his own?" I asked. "Well," Maryanne said, as dry as the Sahara, "he has had five bankruptcies."

"It's forcing the media to have a conversation that they've never wanted to have, and never have had, which is about Donald's psychological health."

"He's dangerous because of the power that attaches to the office he holds... because he's so susceptible to powerful, smarter... people. It's very easy to get him to do your bidding. ...[W]e've seen a lot of evidence of that. You need just flatter him, and... whether you're Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin, he'll... stop the sanctions or he'll look the other way when you start building more nuclear missiles. It's quite terrifying, and in addition to that, we're talking about somebody who's quite unstable... [T]he more pressure he's under (because he's completely out of his depth here)... the more cornered he's going to feel and the more he's going to lash out... [T]hat's what we need to watch out for in the next few months."

"I can't speak to whether he hates women, but what I can say because I grew up with it, is that women were... considered second class citizens. ...[I]t explains his casual cruelty to women and... the ease with which he objectifies them. ...[H]e certainly doesn't seem to ever have had any real deep emotional connection with wom[en], or well I guess with anybody, quite honestly. But he objectifies women and uses them in a way he certainly doesn't do with men."

"Nothing Donald said during the campaign—from his disparagement... to his mocking... —deviated from my expectation... I was reminded of every family meal I'd ever attended during which Donald talked about... ugly fat slobs or... losers... [C]asual of people was commonplace at the Trump dinner table. What did surprise me was that he was getting away with it."

"We're talking about a man who has control of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. That makes him more dangerous than... other people, because he has the nuclear codes."

"My Dad was incapable of being what my grandfather wanted and needed him to be. So that was... a lesson that Donald took to heart. He understood on a deep level that to be like Freddy, my Dad, to be kind, to admit to mistakes, to have interests outside of the business and making money, was essentially to be destroyed."

"Everything's about money in this family, but I'm also different... [M]oney stood in for everything else; it was literally the only currency the family trafficked in... I knew that it was also about love, and to be disinherited... shut out entirely... was to be told quite explicitly that you don't count, and you are not loved."

"[T]here are so many parallels between the circumstances in which my family operated, and in which this country is now operating. I saw... what focusing on the wrong things, elevating the wrong people, can do... the collateral damage that can be created by allowing somebody to live their lives without accountability... continuing now, on a much grander scale."

"If I can do anything to change the narrative, and to tell the truth, I need to do that because I don't believe the American people had the entire truth 4 years ago."

"The full-page screed he paid to publish in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the Central Park Five to be put to death wasn't about his deep concern for the rule of law; it was an easy opportunity for him to take on a deeply serious topic that was very important to the city while sounding like an authority in the influential and prestigious pages of the Gray Lady. It was unvarnished racism meant to stir up racial animosity in a city already seething with it. All five boys... were subsequently cleared, proven innocent via incontrovertible DNA evidence. To this day, however, Donald insists that they were guilty—yet another example of his inability to drop a preferred narrative even when it's contradicted by established fact."

"To hedge his bets he enlisted Joe Shapiro, a smart kid with a reputation for being a good test taker, to take his s for him. That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records. Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well."

"By 2004, when The Apprentice first aired, Donald's finances were a mess (even with his $170 million cut of my grandfather's estate when he and his siblings sold the properties), and his... "empire" consisted of increasingly desperate branding opportunities such as , , and . That made him an easy target for Burnett. Both Donald and his viewers were the butt of the joke that was The Apprentice, which, despite all evidence to the contrary, presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon."

"Mary Trump’s father, Fred Jr.... died of an alcohol-related illness in 1981, when she was 16 years old. ...[S]he infuses the volume with her background as a clinical psychologist to analyze her uncle. ...Decades ago ...Trump asked her to help write his book The Art of the Comeback. She says she did research ...but ...the publisher eventually sought someone with more experience ...Mary Trump says, she was told that she was told that her grandfather’s estate was worth $30 million. But after being contacted by a reporter for the New York Times in 2017, she retrieved boxes of financial papers that she says showed the estate was actually worth $1 billion. She writes that she became a key source for the newspaper’s 2018 investigation of the family finances, which won a Pulitzer Prize."

"I needed to tell the [origin] story of the family because there's so much at stake."

"He learned to become the killer... who needs to succeed at all costs, who recognizes that other people are expendable, who does not need to take responsibility, who will do anything to get attention, financial rewards and "to win.""

"The DID problem is an example of arguing from a vacuum. The argument is basically that if one type of procedure (diagnosis, therapy, business venture, or whatever) does not work, then something else will. Well, perhaps nothing will work, or perhaps the only reason we observe that something did not work is that we were ignoring the cases in which it did—often because, for some very compelling social reasons, they never come to our attention. I have discovered this argument from a vacuum often in the context of various “critiquing” studies of statistical versus clinical prediction. There is one overwhelming result from all the studies: When both predictions are made on the basis of the same information, which is either combined according to a statistical (actuarial) model or combined “in the head” of an experienced clinician, the statistical prediction is superior."

"His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he's soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough."

"While [hundreds of] thousands of Americans die alone, Donald touts stock market gains. As my father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he'll facilitate it... then he'll ignore the fact that you died."

"Donald's need for affirmation is so great that he doesn't seem to notice that the largest group of his supporters are people he wouldn't condescend to be seen with outside of a rally."

"Prediction is not the same thing as understanding, but in the absence of prediction, we can certainly doubt understanding."

"Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information."

"[] had no empathy. He was... driven in a way that turned other people, including [family]... into pawns to be used to his own ends. If somebody could be of service... he would use them. If they couldn't be, he excised them."

"In my father's case, tragically, he was not of use."

"People treat reason as if it were the most minor and harmful aspect of a whole human being. It is as if a soldier standing guard were to say to himself: “What good would my rifle be I were now to be attacked by a dozen enemies? I shall therefore lay it aside and smoke opium cigarettes until I doze off.”"