It’s official: Donald Trump is mentally foregone and must be removed from office. So claims an army of mental health specialists bent on saving the country from the once-again president and his supporters. 

During the 2024 presidential campaign, John Gartner, a clinical psychologist and a leader in this effort, asserted that Trump suffers from three distinct mental disorders: malignant narcissistic personality disorder, hyper manic temperament, and dementia. Gartner said Trump is just an id (in psychoanalysis, the part of the unconscious mind driven by instinctual needs) “with no cortex to direct it, and think how dangerous that could be.” 

Welcome to the New Therapeutic Regime, where public service and coercive counseling operate in tandem. Paul Gottfried recognized as much a couple of decades ago in his book Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy. “Social ideologues working hand in glove with the state, have been able to depict unfashionable thinkers and retrograde views as ‘pathological,’” Gottfried wrote. “Those who express ‘prejudice,’ or who try to open questions that the political class has decided to close, do so presumably because they are ‘sick.’”

This mission has a long pedigree. Soviet-era Russia made a science of it right to the end. The orders came from the top. As Nikita Khrushchev stated back in 1959:

A crime is a deviation from the generally recognized standards of behavior frequently caused by mental disorder. Can there be diseases, nervous disorders among certain people in Communist society? Evidently yes. If that is so, then there will also be offenses that are characteristic for people with abnormal minds… To those who might start calling for opposition to Communism on this basis, we can say that…clearly the mental state of such people is not normal.