When Donald Trump on Tuesday took time during the NATO summit in London to launch into a rant against Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, he was actually projecting, or subconsciously describing himself rather than the target of his comments, according to a leading psychiatrist in an MSNBC interview on Tuesday night.
Trump’s remarks toward Schiff came on the same day that the Intelligence Committee released a 300-page report detailing his alleged “scheme” to strong-arm Ukraine into announcing investigations into Democrat Joe Biden — as well as into the 2016 election — in an attempt to gain an advantage in the 2020 presidential election.
“He’s a maniac. I think Adam Schiff is a deranged human being,” Trump said, as quoted by Fox News . “I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he’s a very sick man, and he lies.”
But retired Harvard University Medical School psychiatrist Lance Dodes, while speaking to MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, said that the president was simply describing himself — the result of a psychological symptom called “projection” which is seen commonly in early childhood.
“But as an adult using it all the time, it is what we would call ‘primitive,’” Dodes said, as seen in the video below.
Dodes went on to say that because Trump is not capable of “a reasonable discussion of something he didn’t agree with,” or making a “logical case” about any subject, his brain instead “runs a simple program.” All that the “program” allows the president to do is accuse other people of “what he is being accused of, and what he actually is,” the psychiatrist added.
But his interview on Tuesday was only the latest in a series of warnings that Dodes has issued regarding the president’s behavior. Two years ago, he contributed to the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump , in which more than two dozen mental health professionals offered their opinions of Trump’s psychological state.
Speaking to the online magazine Salon , Dodes described the president in 2017 as “a very sick individual, someone with a lying, cheating and emotional disorder,” who suffers from a condition known as sociopathy. Individuals who are sociopaths, he explained, are incapable of treating others “as full human beings.”
As the impeachment proceedings against him gain momentum, Trump has drawn the attention of several mental health professionals. On November 23, the president gave a 53-minute phone interview to Fox News which Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee — lead author of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump — described as revealing his “declining cognitive functions.”
In the interview, Trump exhibited “blatantly abnormal signs that have raised alarms for psychiatrists and neurologists for years,” Lee said.