EMPATHY AND ILLNESS: He's a moral pygmy, one analyst said!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2025

The moral over the medical: Oof—but also, world without end! Last evening, sure enough, there he went again:

Trump Lashes Out at ‘Dead Man Walking’ Stephen Colbert, Demands CBS ‘Put Him to Sleep NOW’

President Donald Trump lashed out at Late Show host Stephen Colbert on Tuesday evening, branding Colbert a “dead man walking” and urging CBS to “put him to sleep.”

“Stephen Colbert is a pathetic trainwreck, with no talent or anything else necessary for show business success,” wrote Trump in a Truth Social post. “Now, after being terminated by CBS, but left out to dry, he has actually gotten worse, along with his nonexistent ratings.”

He continued, “Stephen is running on hatred and fumes—a dead man walking! CBS should, ‘put him to sleep,’ NOW, it is the humanitarian thing to do!”

And so on from there, again and again. World without end, amen!

In the face of this endless conduct, we've been suggesting that you pity the child. But what could we mean by that?

Let's return to Monday, December 15—one day after the murder of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner. President Trump took to Truth Social and voiced his reaction in the unusual manner, as shown:

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!

That was the president's latest "truth." That afternoon, he doubled down on what he had said as he responded to a question right there in the Oval Office.

That was an extremely strange reaction to this vicious murder. That said, the reaction that night on MS NOW also struck us as strange. 

The president's peculiar behavior was almost wholly unmentioned on that network that night. But at 4 p.m., on Deadline: White House, Nicolle Wallace and a trio of guests stated their views about the president's conduct in a pair of opening segments.

We were struck by what they said. The four are all good, decent people—but none of the four suggested that the sitting president might seem to be mentally ill.

(Just our luck! Even as we type, the invaluable Internet Archive reports that it's "currently offline." For that reason, we can't give you clips of what each of these four people said. Later, you'll be able to watch their full discussion simply by clicking here. For today, we'll work from the notes we took in real time.)

We were struck, but not surprised, by what the four people said. They treated the president's bizarre behavior as a moral failure, not as the possible effect of an actual "illness."

"The man is a pygmy, unsuited for the office" / "He's morally vacuous, intellectually insipid," Michael Feinberg said. The four people didn't intend to "lower ourselves to Trump's level," Nicolle Wallace understandably said.

We were struck, but not surprised, by this approach to this extremely unusual conduct. It's been a rule for a very long time:

Our journalists will refer to "mental illness" when discussing types of violent street crime. But any such discussion must stop at the water's edge when it comes to the major figures who people our national politics.

Like many rules, this was a very good rule—until such time as it wasn't. In the case of the current president, two different best-selling books had put the word "dangerous" in their titles as medical specialists offered such assessments as this:

Prologue: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (Mary L. Trump, 2020)

[...]

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as “malignant narcissism” and “narcissistic personality disorder” in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.

[...]

Does Donald have other symptoms we aren’t aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

He could be a "sociopath," the president's adult niece said. She had known him when she was a child, but also as an adult. She had even worked with him on a book-writing project when she was 29 years old.

She was a doctorate-holding clinical psychologist, and she viewed her uncle as dangerous in the extreme. Along the way in her best-selling book, she noted the fact that so-called "sociopathy" can be bred in the blood—can be passed on from parent to child. 

According to current medical science, so it can go with tragic examples of body-based "mental illness"—with illnesses which rob the afflicted party of normal levels of human functioning.

Is President Trump "mentally ill" in some such way? Astoundingly yet not astoundingly, major journalists cling to the rule in which such questions can't be asked—in which bizarre behavior can be discussed by members of their own guild, but not by medical specialists.

It's often said that "sociopaths" are robbed of empathy by their illness. So it almost might seem to be when the sitting president engages in the peculiar behavior he now displays on a daily basis. 

We'll offer this small bit of context:

Under prevailing rules of assessment, those of us who qualify as "good, decent people" also have obvious limits on the extent of our empathy. Very, very few of us normal people ever decide to push our own power of empathy to the limit:

We don't venture off to save the world's suffering children, as a handful of highly unusual people actually do. We don't relocate to smaller houses so we can support our favorite charities to a greater extent.

That doesn't mean that we're bad people; it simply means that we're people people. And at present, when we normal people are confronted by someone who (plainly) seems to be "mentally ill," we're inclined to say so in certain contexts—but we'll doggedly stick to the rules of the guild in the most dangerous circumstances.

That's simply what we the people are like. Disastrously, those of us afflicted with ASPD will have access to even less empathy than that!

To our eye and to our ear, the president's conduct has been screaming "mental illness" for a very long time now. 

We don't mean that as an insult. We mean it as a tragic statement concerning the loss of human potential.

In 2017, then again in 2020, medical specialists in best-selling books offered warnings about this state of affairs. The key word "dangerous" sat right there in the title of each of these books.

Even in the face of those assessments, our overpaid corporate journalists have insisted on sticking to the long-standing rules of their guild:

The moral insults flow thick and fast. The possible or apparent medical perspective is uniformly disappeared.

In Mary L. Trump's book, she savaged the disordered conduct of her "dangerous" adult uncle. She also allowed us to "pity the child," through her account of the way she says he became the dangerous person he is.

In her book, Mary L. Trump cites the possibility that her uncle's possible "sociopathy" could have been bred in the bone—could have been passed down from his father, "a high-functioning sociopath." But she also tells us this:

Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.

Children of sociopaths grow up in great danger. In the general area of mental health, the sitting president seems to have grown up with all the disadvantages found in a family like his.

For some time, we've suggested you "pity the child"—but with respect to a figure like President Trump, no such thing will occur in our lifetimes. Somewhere ages and ages hence, we Americans may have evolved to the point where we can conduct intelligent discussions of "mental illness," even when major public figures are involved.

At some point, we may be able to do so empathetically, even saying such things as this:

"There but for fortune! There but for fortune go we."

We aren't up to that task today. In the case of President Trump, our angry insults in Blue America—our attempts to criminalize his gruesome behavior; our attempts to get him locked up—may have greased his skid back into the Oval Office. 

We still refuse to give voice to a fairly obvious fact about his possible medical condition. Sadly, we'll tell you this:

History remembers the good and decent people—the people who knew how to forgive. History remembers Nelson Mandela, but also our own Dr. King. 

The families of Dylan Roof's murders in Charleston were admired all over the world.

President Trump is a pygmy, we Blues were told on Deadline: White House that day. It was a pleasing "cable news" moment—but is the president simply "ill?" And what exactly is keeping us from letting the old frameworks go?

Briefly, let's be honest. We the "good, decent people" aren't perfect fountains of empathy ourselves. We humans aren't built for that.

There's a limit on the amount of empathy which takes shape even within such people as us. Tragically, people afflicted with certain types of "mental illness" are built to be even worse!

Do you believe in mental illness? At this site, we continue to ask.

ADDENDUM: Professor Brabender's great anthropological finding helps explain the impulse under discussion:

"Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit."

Brabender voiced his finding all the way back in the 1960s. Anthropologically, it helps explain the history of the species:

War without end, amen.