Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump

Psychiatrist Frances is unwilling to join fellow mental-health professionals in assigning a diagnosis to Donald Trump. Instead, Frances views the 45th president’s election as reflecting deeper dysfunctions in modern American life. Unfortunately, he cannot stop fulminating against the president, whom he calls “an irremediable creature of Stone Age emotions and medieval beliefs.” Frances offers some good insights about societal delusions, but hurts his overall case with factual mistakes, such as claiming that “the U.S. has the greatest wealth inequality in the world,” and hyperbole, such as stating that the U.S. is “deeply immersed in its most dystopian dark age.” (More so than the Civil War or the Great Depression?) In making recommendations on how to counter Trump, he advocates support for such progressive grassroots groups as MoveOn and for global solutions to environmental problems, but with few or no specifics. Finally, the author doesn’t do himself any favors with hackneyed sentences such as the following: “It has never been easy being human and our current challenges, difficult as they may seem, pale in comparison to the Black Plague or the 30 Years’ War.” Frances clearly has thought long and hard about Trumpism’s many roots, but this attempt to analyze and respond to them never coheres. (Oct.)