Headline: "You Elected a Psychopath"

If President Trump were a diagnosable psychotic – Paranoid Schizophrenia – shouldn’t that startling and meaningful fact be known to everyone? As he announced his candi­dacy, as he ran for president, as he served in the White House. It would be difficult to imagine living our daily lives as citizens where such a stupendous truth was hidden, or was known by some and suspected by many, but shushed in the national ether and kept out of the media.

It must be so: We are not a nation of blinkered slaves or pacified sheep. We are not a nation of delusional rally-attenders. We would need to know the worst, stigma be damned and burned away by stark reality.

So why, please tell me, shouldn’t it be broadcast everywhere that the president is a psychopath, a paragon of the extreme end of Antisocial Personality Disorder? The ruined-by-birth-and-childhood deformity without a conscience and with a need for destruction that cannot be quelled?

Many of us knew early on that Trump’s narcissism was just the ornate saddle on a shark-like, mindless predatory and corrosive force. Yet owing to a number of factors: allure, prestige, hero-worship, tradition, the eternal stage of countless people play-acting the adult – call human spuriousness what you will – we pushed our brains to settle on his gaucherie and eccentricity, his personality, his misdemeanors and felonies. We subdued ourselves to the taboo of ad hominem, declaring and reproaching “narcissism” and “sociopathy” but not screaming and stamping them into the people’s skulls. Only now, as it all ends and crumples in on itself, as more exposés are published and diagnostic truths re-, re-, reaffirmed, are our cognitive smog and our decorousness finally evaporating to reveal the monster in its full luridness.

I will admit that I have felt impotent before “the base,” those millions who use their blindness and sickness to destroy so many right things in our country. They may do it yet again: There is nearly endless power in projected pain. But at the very least they must know that they have elected a psychopath, a creature whose lair should be the psychi­atric unit, prison, or house arrest. They must know the word and its definition, hear and read it, then not be able to forget it. My wish is that some wealthy humanitarian would buy ads in every “red state” newspaper, journal and rag, stating in 72-point Helvetica Bold the insane truth. If the light can’t open their eyes, maybe the dark can.