"Jesus of Mar-a-Lago", and the questions it raises for the media.

Why the press should speak out about more about the president's mental state.

The Goldwater rule is the edict handed down by the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1970s which stated it was unethical for psychiatrists to make diagnostic assessments of public figures without consulting them in person. The nomenclature, of course, comes from Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Senator, former Air Force pilot and godfather of the modern conservative movement, who became the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. During the campaign, Fact magazine conducted a poll of psychiatrists, which inquired about the mental faculties of a right-wing trailblazer who famously declared at that year’s GOP convention: “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice.” Almost half of the respondents reckoned he was psychologically unfit to be president.

Generally speaking, news organisations have also tended to follow the same Goldwater principle, and not encouraged reporters to engage in psychiatric portraiture. Journalists have probed whether elderly incumbents are showing signs of cognitive decline (Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden); whether they are morally fit to hold office (Bill Clinton) and intellectually capable (George W. Bush). But, other than in the dying days of Richard Nixon’s increasingly psychotic presidency, they have tended not to openly conjecture whether the world’s most powerful man has gone mad. Donald Trump has changed that, and evidence of manic beahviour is mounting.

“Trump’s Erratic Behavior and Extreme Comments Revive Mental Health Debate” was the eye-catching headline in the New York Times this week. Peter Baker, one of Washington’s most highly respected political reporters, penned the accompanying piece. “President Trump’s erratic behavior and extreme comments in recent days and weeks have turbocharged the crazy-like-a-fox-or-just-plain-crazy debate that has followed him on the national political stage for a decade,” read the lede. The slant of Baker’s reporting pointed towards the latter rather than the former. For instance, he noted how Trump’s recent threats (“a whole civilization will die tonight”) and “profane statements” ("Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!") “have left many with the impression of a deranged autocrat mad with power.” When journalists, trying to abide by rules of impartiality, use phrases such as “many think”, it usually means they think it too. So for Baker to use the phrase “a deranged autocrat mad with power” is noteworthy.

The New York Times published a similar, hard-hitting piece last week. Written by the paper’s exemplary diplomatic correspondent, Edward Wong, it was headlined: “Trump Revels in Threats to Commit War Crimes in Iran.” “The American president has been unambiguous in his disdain for international law,” noted Wong, which simply stated the bald truth. More major news organisations should compose the same strong headlines and use the same unflinching language.

Just as Trump’s authoritarianism often unfolds in plain view - his dangerous conspiracy-mongering after the 2020 election, and incendiary actions on January 6th, is the most obvious example - his mental state is there for all to see. This week he launched a crazed tirade against Pope Leo XIV, the most high-profile critic of the Iran war, addressing him as if he was running a municipality in the midwest rather than the world’s largest Christian denomination. “WEAK on crime,” he harrumphed, “and terrible for foreign policy.” Trump then followed up by publishing a meme depicting himself as a Christ-like figure. Jesus of Mar-a-Lago?

The president, following an outcry from Christian supporters, deleted the meme. Yet his explanation for publishing it in the first place was just as bizarre as the AI-generated Trump-slop image. “I did post it, and I thought it was me as a doctor,” he proffered. Previously, Trump has portrayed himself, among others, as Superman, Rambo and the Holy Father.

I first met Trump in the autumn of 2014. As I have written before, he was polite, lucid and more intelligent and reasonable than I expected. One doesn’t need to be a psychiatrist to notice his decline in the 12-plus years since.

Interviewing Trump in Trump Tower in 2014.

His narcissism is more pronounced. He is more bombastic. His social media posts are more crazed. He is more prone to verbal lapses and jumbled thoughts, such as talking of a peace deal between Cambodia and Azerbaijan (he has also confused Armenia with Albania).

Presidential power, rather than having the humbling effect it had on many of his predecessors, has fuelled his megalomania. Washington DC he seemingly wants to turn into a landmark to his greatness, hence the renaming of the Kennedy Center and the construction of the so-called “Arc de Trump.” The White House he wants to bedeck with gold. Cabinet meetings, where administration officials vie to come up with the most sycophantic encomiums to his magnificence, fuel his ego. Trump seems to thrive at being in the cockpit of history because it grants him omnipresence. My sense is that omnipresence is more important to him than omnipotence. It is doubtful whether he truly ever mastered the art of the deal, given his patchy business record and bankruptcy filings. But he has mastered the art of the attention economy, and how to parlay fame into political power.

For major news organisations such as the New York Times and BBC, my former employer, covering Trump is a tough journalistic challenge for sure. They are reporting on an abnormal presidency while trying to abide themselves by normal rules of journalistic engagement. Understandably, they want to maintain traditional standards of impartiality. Indeed, the compulsion to be impartial, and the fear of demonstrating a liberal bias, often leads to self-censorship. Punches are pulled. Softer language is used than is necessary, because strong language seems out of institutional character. The problem is that in trying to remain normal, journalists can often normalise him. Mea culpa, there were times I did it myself as a BBC correspondent.

Often amongst journalists, there is a tendency to tidy up his thinking, to make light of some of his crazier rants - it is Trump being Trump - and give him the benefit of doubt when his more outlandish statements are marginally ambiguous. Here again we see that in-built institutional disposition to normalise the abnormal.

In foreign affairs, journalists often try to articulate on his behalf a cohesive and all-encompassing Trump doctrine, an organising intellectual frame. In reality there are few solid pillars. Primarily, Trump has two core themes which have been stewing for decades: the belief that the United States has repeatedly been ripped off by its trading partners and the belief it has been taken for a ride by its defence partners. Also he has been consistently opposed to Iran becoming a nuclear power.

Commentators often go in search of his long-term strategy when Trump is making it up on the hoof, from day to day, from hour to hour, from minute to minute, from social media post to social media post. Take the so-called ‘reverse Kissinger’ theory: the notion that Trump is playing nice with Vladimir Putin to isolate China. I just don’t buy it. Trump plays nice with Putin partly because of his tendency to go weak at the knees in the company of authoritarian strongmen. Trump likes to encourage the idea that he is a grandmaster at four-dimensional chess, when the Iran war has exposed his lack of foresight. Why, he was shocked that Iran shut off the Strait of Hormuz, its most obvious strategic move.

Though we regularly use language such as “jaw-dropping”, “unprecedented” and “unorthodox,” mainstream correspondents have been reluctant to reach for stronger descriptors, such as fascist or, its diluted derivative, “fascistic”. Many are squeamish about using the word ‘lie’ to describe his thousands of falsehoods, because it implies we could read his mind, and be certain of intent. Similarly, there has been a hesitancy about labelling him ‘racist’, and even labelling his some of his racial slurs racist.

A case in point came in Trump 1.0 when he posted a series of tweets attacking four Democratic congresswomen of colour, known as "the Squad." He told them to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." To use the phrase “Go back to where you came from”, or a variant, is textbook racism. Yet the BBC decided at the time that individual programmes should determine whether it was racist or not. This created a ludicrous inconsistency. On the Ten o’clock News, I used the word racist to describe the tweets. BBC Online used weaker language. PM on Radio Four’s did not call his attacks racist. In my report on the Radio Four Six o’clock news which followed immediately afterwards, we did.

Within news organisations, institutional timidity is a factor. During the COVID pandemic, the BBC complaints unit, a body independent of its news division, found against me when I described the ten out of ten score that Trump awarded himself for his handling of the viral contagion as being amongst his “ridiculous boasts.” However, to say that it wasn’t ridiculous was ridiculous. This was a president who at one point, as the BBC’s own reporting put it, suggested “research into whether coronavirus might be treated by injecting disinfectant into the body.”

The complaints unit also ruled I had overstepped the mark in speaking of Trump’s “narcissistic hunger for adoration” and “mind-bending truth-twisting.” But, again, both were incontrovertible. Additionally, it found I had broken the BBC’s impartiality rules because my coverage of Trump was “not offset by the limited, and relatively restrained, criticism of the Democrats, Joe Biden and Congress,” in the words of the ruling. This was false equivalence gone mad: both sidesism taken to the point of absurdity. In order to speak of Trump’s “ridiculous boasts” was I expected to concoct equally ridiculous boasts from Biden, and to cite evidence that did not exist? Evidently, the BBC Complaints Unit’s definition of impartiality had become so warped that we could no longer draw attention to Trump’s flaws without suggesting a parity of wrongdoing from Biden. The news division, I am glad to say, backed me to the hilt.

Fearful of being seen as elitist and anti-populist, especially in the aftermath of Brexit, even as august a news organisation as the BBC was sometimes hesitant about telling the full truth. This I say out of a sense of dismay rather than bitterness. I am reluctant to levy criticism against an organisation I love, and whose correspondents I greatly admire. But often it meant we soft-soaped our coverage of Trump. Again, I know this to be true because I did it myself.

Personally, the low point came when BBC Online spiked a piece I had written on January 6th, an assignment, ironically, I was reluctant to take on because I found it so thoroughly depressing. “There was a dismal inevitability to the mayhem,” I eventually wrote, “the fruition of years of shrill anti-government rhetoric and vicious partisan animosity; the fatal flowering of misinformation and crazed conspiracy theories spread on the internet, aired on talkback radio and cable news channels, and promoted from the bully pulpit of the presidency.” Notice how I had bitten my lip, by not specifically singling out Trump or the Republicans. But that, seemingly, was not enough. In over a quarter century of reporting for the BBC, it was the first piece that I ever had spiked. I was not even given the chance to amend it. It was just killed. I’ll publish the full piece on History Never Ended at a future date, so you can judge its content for yourselves.

That piece came to mind last week, when BBC Online published the following headline after Trump announced the ceasefire with Iran. “Iran ceasefire a temporary win for Trump - but it comes at a cost.” A “temporary win”? In what way? That was an editorial lapse, which later on was amended. But it spoke of a mindset: a fear of violating conventions of impartiality which end up having a distorting effect on coverage. Here again, I am hesitant to be critical because so much of the BBC’s reporting of this war has been brilliant and exemplary. It also pains me that Britain’s greatest soft power tool is having to cut almost one in ten staff because of what it calls "significant financial pressures". Its news division has already been hammered. That it continues to do so much so well, after decades of rolling job cuts, is a marvel.

Often journalists are accused of Trump derangement syndrome. But we should never shirk from probing whether the president himself is deranged.