EXPERT ON CULT MOVEMENTS: TRUMP’S FALSIFICATION OF REALITY ‘NAZI-LIKE’

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a noted psychiatrist who spent years studying Nazi Germany, has called for mental health professionals to speak out about President Trump’s “falsification of reality” ahead of the election, warning that his attacks on the truth echo those of the Nazis, Igor Derysh wrote for Salon.

Lifton recently published a book entitled “Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry” and was one of the 27 mental health experts featured in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” the bestseller edited by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee in which mental health professionals assessed the president. “It’s rather observing public behavior and giving commentary on psychological conflicts and vulnerabilities on the part of Trump, including in my case, my emphasis on what I call solipsistic behavior, or solipsistic reality. Reality consists for Trump of only what the self needs and wants, as opposed to the large-scale experience of others or the nature of evidence. So I feel it’s really a requirement on the part of those of us who can look at these matters to speak out,” he said.

“People point to his hypocrisy and there’s plenty of that, but I would also add that I’ve learned in my work that a person can hold two antithetical, opposite views at the same time. And in the case of Trump, he’s particularly prone to do that through his solipsistic reality. At some point, the self needs to take in the full brunt of the pandemic. And at another moment the self needs to take in or respond with the idea that it’s a hoax, it doesn’t exist. So this extreme dichotomy, this contradiction, in Trump is very much part of his solipsistic reality,” Lifton argued. “In Trump’s behavior toward the virus, there can be a combination of manipulating truth and lying directly, on the one hand, and actually believing through his solipsistic reality, on the other, that it’s no big deal and will go away. He can vary between conscious manipulation, which is lying, and solipsistic reality, which brings falsehoods. And they blend. There’s plenty of both in him.”

Lifton said Trump also follows another pattern of the Nazis. “In German, it’s called Gleichschaltung. The Nazis didn’t destroy professions. They attacked them, got rid of independent people, put their own people in place to head them. And then in that way the professions were not destroyed, but Nazified. Not only the professions, but all institutions,” he argued. Thus, Trump has Trumpified institutions and professions, installing political hacks into groups that are supposed to keep a close scientific view on the virus and its dangers and how to combat it. “We are faced with politicized versions that are false and have to do with Trump’s seeing in them some electoral advantage. So Trump’s attack on medical and scientific institutions both inside and outside of government is part of a larger process. And again, that’s part of the malignant normality he seeks to impose on us. That is really unfortunate because it’s really at the heart of American lives, and is a fulcrum for causing so many American deaths,” Lifton concluded.

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