(liquid pours)
(clink)
(eerie music)
(gentle piano music)
- In the armed forces,
there's a nuclear weapons program
called the Personnel Reliability Program.
Do you have personal defects?
Do you have financial problems which could compromise you?
Do you have a problem with infidelity?
This is the program where they screen you
to see if you can be trusted
to hold an M16 to guard the truck
that might carry a nuclear weapon.
Not that it will, that it might.
That also is the program where they determine
whether you're an Air Force missile flight officer,
whether you can go down into a bunker
and be responsible to turn the keys on
a Minuteman-III missile.
- [Announcer] The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- That is an entire scaled evaluation program
that shows your personal reliability
to carry out your orders and to do the highest risk things
like fly a B-52 bomber or B-2 bomber
and drop a nuclear weapon.
The President of the United States
doesn't have to meet any of these parameters,
none of them whatsoever,
because the electorate choosing you
clears you into all of these programs.
(crowd cheering)
We have a president of the United States
who was duly elected, he was put into office,
given the great faith of the people who voted him in.
- I Donald John Trump do solemnly swear.
- I Donald John Trump do solemnly swear.
- And if we look at the great presidents
of the United States,
there's one unifying thing:
they maintained the continuity
in how the Constitution was upheld and defended.
- [John] So help me God.
- So help me God.
- Congratulations, Mr. President.
(crowd cheering)
(upbeat music)
- At first, it was just political name calling
and insults suggesting Donald Trump was a lunatic.
- This man is a pathological liar.
- Guarantee I have a vocabulary better than all of 'em,
I know I have an IQ better than all of them.
I'm very highly educated.
I know words.
I have the best words
but there's no better word than stupid.
Oh, I don't know what I said.
I don't remember.
I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters, okay?
- [Man] But more recently,
the conversation about the president's mental state
has taken a more serious tone.
- I can't explain this crazy behavior,
but I can call it crazy.
- [Donald] We've taken this big, beautiful ship
and it's being turned around very quickly.
- [Man] I'm not a psychologist or a psychiatrist
but the guy needs therapy.
- USA!
USA!
I am the chosen one.
- [Man] Almost everyone seems to have an opinion.
Could Donald Trump be unfit for office?
(chattering)
- Good evening.
Thank you guys for coming.
I know our first official press briefing
is gonna to be on Monday
but I wanted to give you a few updates
on the President's activities.
But before I get to the news of the day,
I think I'd like to discuss a little bit of the coverage
in the past 24 hours.
Yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world
was watching the peaceful transition of power,
some members of the media were engaged
in deliberately false reporting.
Photographs of the inaugural proceedings
were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet,
to minimize the enormous support
that had gathered on the National Mall.
No one had numbers.
This was the largest audience
to ever witness an inauguration, period,
both in person and around the globe.
Even the New York Times printed a photograph.
- Why put him out there for the very first time
and utter a falsehood?
Why did he do that?
It undermines the credibility
of the entire White House press office on day one.
- No it doesn't.
Don't be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck.
You're saying it's a falsehood
and they're giving Sean Spicer, our Press Secretary,
gave alternative facts to that
but the point remains that there is--
- Wait a minute, alternative facts?
Look, alternative facts are not facts, they're falsehoods.
(whimsical music)
- My name's George Conway.
I'm a lawyer, I'm a litigator.
I principally practice securities litigation.
I've argued appeals
including a big case in the Supreme Court.
My wife was Donald Trump's Campaign Manager
and now is Counselor to the President.
- And he said a lot about these instances.
- I was a Republican since probably about 1980
when Ronald Reagan was elected president.
I voted for Donald Trump in 2016
and I almost took a job in the Justice Department myself
to run the Civil Division of the Department of Justice.
Donald Trump wasn't my first choice
among the Republican nominees
but I was hopeful that he would calm down
and get better as time went on.
He started to show a little more discipline.
He would only go off the rails every third day
instead of every day,
but the problem was
once he got into the supreme position of power,
he lost some of his incentive to be disciplined
and I'm thinking at this point in time,
"What is wrong with him?"
Donald Trump is like a practical joke that got out of hand.
I mean, that's the problem.
I mean, I didn't go into the administration
for a lot of reasons
but the fundamental reason was it was a mess.
I guess I must've been googling Trump and mental health
because I clearly thought
there's something seriously wrong with him
and I came across an article in Rolling Stone magazine,
Is Trump a Malignant Narcissist?
And a number of people like Dr. Gartner were interviewed
and as soon as I read that I realized that's it.
You cannot understand his presidency without knowing this.
- My name is John Gartner.
I'm a psychologist.
I taught in the Department of Psychiatry
at Johns Hopkins University for 28 years.
I've written some books and I'm the founder of Duty to Warn,
an organization of mental health professionals
that believe that Donald Trump should be removed
because he's psychologically unfit.
My name is Lance Dodes.
I'm a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.
I've spent most of my research career
looking at compulsive and addictive behavior
and I've become interested in the importance of psychology
in politics in recent years
because of the threat to our country.
- My name is Justin Frank,
a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist.
I've been in practice in DC for about 40 years.
Is Donald Trump fit to serve as the President
and Commander in Chief?
I can answer that with one word, no.
Trump is a sociopath, a sadist, a con artist,
a racist, a misogynist, a sexist in general,
and I think it is a problem.
- How dare liberals, people on the left,
try to undo democracy by accusing a president
of being mentally ill without any basis?
Look, these psychiatrists now who are trying to diagnose
without ever having met the man.
- This is not the first time
the left has gone at Republicans.
They did the same thing to Barry Goldwater,
they did the same thing to Ronald Reagan.
- Over 1,000 psychiatrists diagnosed Barry Goldwater
and said he was mentally ill,
they were then rebuked
by the American Psychiatric Association
and said,
"Do not make diagnosis without seeing the patient."
And they continue to do it today.
(giddy music)
- [Narrator] The election campaign's
in full swing in New Hampshire,
bellwether state of the nation.
It goes to the polls on March 10th
and growing support for Goldwater.
- So, the Goldwater rule has an interesting history.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater ran for president
and a now defunct magazine, Fact Magazine,
did a survey of psychiatrists and published an article
saying psychiatrists think that Goldwater is unfit.
Goldwater sued them and he won
and as it turns out, actually, he deserved to win.
It was libelous.
He was not unstable.
And the psychiatrists
who wrote those statements about Goldwater,
it's important for people to understand
the history of our field,
this was in the '60s when Freudian psychiatry
really ruled the roost.
- This is what I've discovered.
We are constantly bedeviled by powerful,
unconscious forces in our beings.
- [John] And so their explanations were things like
he's a latent homosexual,
he's been scarred by his potty-training,
he has an unresolved Oedipus complex.
- [Narrator] Based on unconscious hate of his own father
caused by childhood jealousy.
(upbeat music)
- Freudian psychiatry,
though it has many important and positive aspects
and helped move the profession forward,
it's not been used well
in terms of its analyzing public figures.
I actually interviewed the last living member
of the ethics committee that formed the Goldwater rule
and he said these were obviously wild speculations,
they weren't founded in fact,
and so they embarrassed the profession
because they were really idle speculations
and so that's why they passed that rule.
He said to me,
"We never intended it to be a gag order,"
meaning that psychiatrists could never speak up
about public figures,
"We just didn't want them making unfounded statements."
- The Goldwater rule today has been incorrectly extended
and the incorrect part about it
is that it now is being used to suppress speech
about things that are knowable.
It's as nonsensical as saying an orthopedic surgeon
shouldn't be able to watch somebody in a football injury
and say that person probably has an ACL tear,
he can say it because he's an expert in the field.
Something happened, he observed it.
- And what people need to understand
is that actually the psychiatric interview
is the least reliable method of making a diagnosis
because our current diagnostic system, the DSM,
is based on observable, behavioral criteria.
Well, when you meet with someone they can lie to you.
So, they can say, "Oh, I never did that,"
or, "I don't do that."
But if you can actually observe their behavior,
if you can follow them around,
if you can watch them on TV,
if you can read their social media,
if you could talk to all their significant others,
you'd probably get a much more reliable indicator
of how they behave.
- I'm not concerned about anything
with the Russian investigation because it's a hoax.
That's enough.
Put down the mic. - Mr. President.
- I am more confident in my diagnosis of Donald Trump
than any diagnosis I've ever made before
because I have more information.
- By outward appearance,
you're 10 years older than you were a year ago.
- Some weariness has bit at my bones.
- It's not true
that having any kind of mental health disorder
would make someone a bad president.
One of my favorite books
is a book called "Lincoln's Melancholy",
about how Lincoln's being a depressive personality
is part of what allowed him to win the Civil War.
He had a capacity to endure mental suffering
that was baked into who he was
and so the enormous burden of the Civil War
was something he was actually able to endure.
- I have seen what's happened in this last four years
when in my state, when people lose their jobs
there's a good chance I'll know them by their names.
- Bill Clinton, I wrote a biography of Bill Clinton,
about how his hypomania was part of what energized him
in terms of his charisma and his creativity,
it also had to do with his impulse control problems
and his hypersexuality,
so it was a double-edged sword
but it doesn't disqualify someone from being president
if they have a psychological disorder,
but Donald Trump shows clear signs
of the most severe personality disorder,
it's called malignant narcissism
and was first introduced by Erich Fromm
who escaped the Nazis and spent a lot of his life
trying to understand the psychology of evil.
And he formulated this diagnosis of malignant narcissism
which has four components: narcissism, paranoia,
anti-social personality disorder and sadism.
I think everybody knows Donald Trump's a narcissist by now.
- I will be the greatest jobs producer
that God ever created.
I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me.
- Who are you consulting with consistently
so that you're ready on day one?
- [Donald] I'm speaking with myself, number one,
because I have a very good brain.
- But it's the other three components
that make him truly dangerous,
because many politicians are narcissistic
but he's also paranoid.
So all of his crazy conspiracy theories.
- The state of Hawaii released
my official long-form birth certificate.
- [Moderator] The birth certificate was produced in 2011.
You continued to tell the story
and question the president's legitimacy in 2012,
'13, '14, '15.
- Yeah.
- How about this one about Ted Cruz's father?
- [Donald] His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald
prior to Oswald's being shot and nobody even brings it up.
- And his sense of being a victim.
- [Reporter] Mr. Trump turned his sights on Google tweeting,
"They have it rigged for me and others
"so that almost all stories and news is bad."
- And his demonization of anyone who disagrees with him.
- Nasty guy.
Now I know why he doesn't have one endorsement
from any of his colleagues.
- All right, John, I get to respond.
- [Moderator] Senator has picked from the buffet there.
- He's a nasty guy.
- These are all signs of a paranoid process,
anti-social personality disorder,
or what used to be called psychopathy or sociopathy.
It's constant lying, well, he's the most documented liar
in human history, I think, at this point.
It's violating the rights of other people
and exploiting other people.
So, sexual assault would be violating
the rights of other people,
not paying your bills,
or defrauding people through Trump University
would be an example of exploiting other people
and it's breaking laws and breaking norms.
Well, he's broken every norm of the presidency,
that's one of the reasons he's so out of control.
There's certain norms we thought no one would ever break
but it's part of his personality disorder to break norms
and to break laws and it's a lack of remorse.
He has no guilt or anxiety
about the destructive things that he does.
- Impeachment for that?
It was beautiful.
It was just a perfect conversation.
- And the fourth component
that Erich Fromm identified is sadism,
truly taking pleasure in harming, humiliating,
and degrading other human beings.
If you read his tweets,
I wrote an introduction to a book about his tweets,
I had to read to read thousands of his tweets
and they literally made me ill
because it was just one vicious attack
and humiliating insult after another after another.
I was like how can someone even come up
with thousands of vicious things
to say about so many people?
But he enjoys degrading and humiliating
and insulting other people.
- I do think that we have enough evidence
that most psychiatrists would feel like it's important
to warn about Trump.
We have a duty to warn.
- Psychologists, and really all mental health professionals,
have the duty to protect society
if there's a risk to society.
(eerie music)
- So the Tarasoff case was in the 1970s.
A patient said to a psychologist,
"I'm gonna go home and murder my girlfriend."
The psychologist didn't warn the potential victim
and the patient went home and killed the girlfriend
and it's now the law in all 50 states
that if you are aware that a patient
might be a danger to someone,
confidentiality goes out the window,
and confidentiality is one of our core values
but it's more important to warn someone
who could be harmed
than it is to maintain even our core value
of confidentiality.
Trump is not my patient,
he's not saying I'm gonna go kill my girlfriend
but the number of people who are at risk,
the number of people who could be harmed isn't one person,
it's hundreds of millions of people.
So if we didn't speak up, that would be the morality.
What annoys me about the Goldwater rule
the way it's being interpreted now,
is it's being interpreted as if we are being unethical
by speaking out and warning the public
when in fact I asked this question
to whom will history be kinder?
Those who spoke up during the age when Trump rose,
or those who were silent?
- I want the cleanest water on Earth.
I want the cleanest air on Earth,
and that's what we're doing
and I'm an environmentalist as you,
a lot of people don't understand that.
I have done more environmental impact statements
probably than anybody that's I guess I can say definitely
because I've done many, many, many of them
more than anybody that's ever been president,
or vice president, or anything even close to president,
and I think I know more about the environment
than most people.
(upbeat music)
- Gaslighting is a crucial tool of abusive personalities.
It is lying to someone in a way
that makes them doubt their own perception of reality.
- I'm Dr. Ramani Durvasula.
I'm a professor of psychology.
It's an interesting place
where the origin of this term gaslight came from,
it came from what was a play in the '30s
and then became a film called "Gaslight",
and it was about a man
who was slowly trying to drive his wife mad.
- A moment ago, the gas dimmed
as it does when someone turns on another light in the house.
Did you turn on another light, Elizabeth?
- No, ma'am, there's no one in the house but us.
- [Ramani] The gaslights kept getting turned up and down
and he was denying having done it.
- You're going to see a doctor, Madam.
- No.
- [Husband] More than one doctor tomorrow morning.
- Very common sorts of gaslighting statements
are things like, it never happened that way,
you must be losing your mind.
They'll literally say things happened that didn't happen,
I didn't do that, I didn't say that.
Many people call gaslighting a form of emotional abuse
because what you're really doing is setting out
to confuse another person.
When you confuse someone like that,
you really do almost render them more vulnerable to you
and actually easier to coerce
because now they don't really know which way is up.
It's as though you've turned gravity off
and turned them upside down.
- I don't know if you remember the point where Trump said,
"Listen, don't pay attention to what you're seeing,
"don't pay attention to what you're hearing."
- What you're seeing and what you're reading
is not what's happening.
- And it's interesting because as human beings
we're actually vulnerable to this.
There's a famous experience in social psychology
called the Asch Experiment.
The Asch Experiment is they show lines on a screen,
one is clearly longer than the other
and they ask them which line is longer
and they get it correct 100% of the time.
- That's two.
- Then you bring in four confederates
who work for the experimenter
but you pretend they're also in the study as subjects
and they all say that the shorter line is longer.
- [Man] Three.
- [Three] Three.
- Three.
- Three?
- 50% of the time the person will reverse themselves
and say, "You're right, the shorter line is the longer one."
We're very subject to the influence,
our reality testing is very subject to the influence
of social pressures.
So when he does these things
that are blatantly destructive and disordered
and yet people act as if they're normal
and they poo-poo these observations,
eventually we begin to quest ourselves and think,
"Oh, maybe I'm wrong.
"Maybe it actually is normal."
- What has been so disturbing
is that we've discovered, at least some of us,
that it's much quicker
to demolish a building than to build one
and Trump understands that
and I think he can demolish a lot of our faith as a nation
in our institutions,
he can demolish the effectiveness of institutions,
he can certainly psychologically confuse and gaslight people
like nobody's business.
(cameras clicking)
- Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I said during the transition, I'll say it up here,
I think there's been, at times,
a disconnect between the way we see the president
and how much we love the president
and the way some of you perhaps see the president.
I certainly see the American probably see the president
the way I do,
but we wanna get that message out there
and to use a Wall Street expression,
there might be an arbitrage spread
between how well we are doing
and how well some of you guys think we're doing
and we're gonna work hard to close that spread.
My name's Anthony Scaramucci.
I spent 11 days in the White House
as the president's Communications Director.
Trump is wickedly smart.
The guy made it to the American presidency, he's not stupid.
You can hate Trump 'cause he says assholeish things, okay?
And he's an obnoxious guy at times,
but what you're missing is that he's now a reflection
of the cultural zeitgeist,
he's an avatar of that anger.
So when he's lighting people up on Twitter,
there's a very large group of people in the United States
that are actually giggling and they enjoy it.
- [Interviewer] What are you earliest memories
of Donald Trump?
- My earliest memories of Donald Trump are actually 1983,
during the Christmas season I visited the Trump Tower.
- [Narrator] The Trump Tower when it's completed,
will be $400 million worth of high-priced apartments,
commercial space and boutiques.
- What's happened is phenomenal.
I've never seen anything to the extent
that I have in New York.
It now, from a real estate standpoint,
has probably become the hottest city in the world.
- That building was a brand new building
in the center of New York
and it was a lot of publicity and fanfare.
It's got brass and a ton of pink marble
and it's a modern structure,
and he did a great job marketing it.
He sold out the condominiums
and he built for himself a triplex
which literally looks like Louis XIV smoked crystal meth
and then decorated it for him.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Walk into his office,
he had a ton of pictures of himself on the wall,
ton of magazine covers and all that sort of stuff.
I read "The Art of the Deal" when I was in law school
when it first came out,
and I said, "Okay, this guy's got it goin' on."
- Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome the author of this book right here,
"Trump: The Art of the Deal", Donald J. Trump.
(audience applauding)
At the beginning of the show,
I said you either love him or you hate him.
Now, do you find that that's true
or does everybody love you or does everybody hate you?
- No, most people love me
and a few really have great distaste for me, David.
- And why is it that those people, that few,
would not care for you?
Because you're so successful? - I can't imagine.
No, no, I don't think so.
It's just I sort of speak my mind a little bit,
a little bit like you in that respect.
- Yeah. - A little bit like you.
- A little bit like me.
- Not too much, hopefully.
- What were you like as a kid?
- Very normal in a lot of respects,
but a very solid child.
- [John] He grew up in Queens.
His father was making good money as he was being raised.
He built a lot of lower middle-income housing
on the border of Brooklyn and Queens.
- Fred Trump was a successful businessman,
he made a lot of money and he was smart at what he did.
However, Fred Trump was a dishonest, crooked guy,
who stole from the federal government,
who wouldn't allow black people
to move into his apartments.
His father said, "You've got to be a killer.
"You've gotta be king, you've gotta be tough,"
and he took that in.
- Is what you do something you've always wanted to do?
I know you're father was and still is
a real estate developer.
- My father was in real estate business
and I've been in that and other businesses
and different things.
I like what I'm doing.
I just enjoy what I'm doing.
I love the real estate business.
I learned a lot from my father, more than anything else,
I learned a lot.
- He wanted to make a name for himself
and he believed early on his career
that having a lot of publicity
and a lot of profile was gonna be good
for the sales and marketing of his apartment buildings
and condominiums and things that he was doing,
but he also wanted to have a unique celebrity persona
and so Howard Stern represented that for him.
(funky music)
- You once said that the best way to treat a woman
is to treat her like doody.
- No, I never said that - You never did?
- But it was attributed to me.
- So you never did say that?
- No, I never said that but it was attributed to me.
- [Howard] I see, so, you treat women with respect?
- I can't say that either.
- All right, good, all right.
Somewhere in between.
- [Donald] I do.
I treat women with great respect.
- Treat women somewhere in between respect
and doo-doo.
- My initial impressions of Donald Trump,
like everybody else, I was starstruck.
Back then, speaking about women that way
it was more the norm.
- Where's Marla go?
- I think we have to put Marla right up here.
- Come on, let's do that.
Let's take down Frederique.
- I went to a fundraiser
right after Ivana and Donald divorced
so I was excited that he was there.
I went up to him and I said,
"Hello, I'm a huge Howard Stern fan
"and I wanted to introduce myself."
And he said, "Why would I speak to you
"when there's so many beautiful women here?
"I wouldn't even let you suck my dick."
(gaping music)
- One of the problems here
is that Donald Trump doesn't have empathy
and that's not a modest statement,
he literally has no empathy.
He does not feel emotions like care and--
- [News Anchor] He's a sociopath?
- Well, as I've said since 2016 in The New Yorker
when he started to run for president,
yes, he is a sociopath.
There is no question.
He's a sociopath meaning he neither has a conscience
nor does he have a heart.
- You make it sound like "Blade Runner"
when the replicant knows you've found him out
and he doesn't feel anything anyway.
- He doesn't feel anything.
(gun firing)
- Empathy is a normal human trait,
it's actually normal in all mammals.
It starts in childhood with a parent and a child
and it continues throughout society,
it's what glues people together
instead of just fighting against each other.
Almost everybody has empathy, but not everybody.
People who don't have empathy
are the people that we call sociopaths or psychopaths.
- That sounds like a very destructive business philosophy.
- They often were treated cruelly.
They were treated without empathy themselves.
- You talk in your book about getting even,
the importance of getting even.
Is revenge sweet?
- I believe strongly in getting even.
If somebody has hurt you,
if somebody has gone out of their way to hurt you,
I think that if you have the opportunity
you should certainly go out of your way
to do a number on them
and I've had more criticism about that one statement
in my book than any other statement,
the clergy has called, the ministers,
the priests, the rabbis,
they've all said, "What a terrible thing to say,
"that's against our teachings."
I just believe it, I believe in an eye for an eye.
- If you don't have normal empathy,
you're going to mistreat people because they don't matter,
there's an abscense of loyalty.
The absence of loyalty is a sign
of anti-social personality disorder.
Loyalty at its best means I care about this person,
I value this person,
so I will stick by this person.
If you have a person without empathy,
what you find is that loyalty disappears
as soon as the other person crosses them.
As soon as somebody says, "I'm not with you anymore,"
or, "I disagree,"
it flips from you are the greatest person
to you are a horrible person, you are a worthless person,
and I will attack you, I will destroy you.
- Some of the people that were most loyal to me
are people that I didn't think would be,
some of the people that were least loyal to me
are people that are-- - You gotta.
- I think I would've treated 'em differently,
I think I would've treated different groups differently,
I would've wiped the floor with the guys weren't loyal,
which I will now do which is great.
You know I love getting even with people but,
- You're gonna get even with some people
because they-- - Yeah,
if given the opportunity,
I will get even with some people that were disloyal to me.
- Here comes one of the things they say about you
is that there ticks within you a vindictiveness.
- The people who climb to the top
by squashing other people,
those are what we call a successful sociopath.
Sociopaths can be successful because they are conmen.
If you're a conman,
you're convincing them that you are much better, greater,
more caring, more honest than you are.
- My name's Rick Reilly, I'm a golf writer,
and I've known Trump for 35 years maybe.
(upbeat music)
Trump is among our best golfing presidents.
- [Crowd Member] Oh, nice.
- For a 72-year-old guy, Trump is a good golfer.
He's got a really good, powerful move through the ball
and he hits it a long way and his putting is good,
he's a very wristy sort of old-school putter.
Cheating in golf at all is completely wrong
because it's the easiest sport to cheat at.
There's no refs, there's no umps.
You could cheat every shot if you wanted
but it reveals your character that you don't,
or it reveals your character that you do
and he cheats all the time.
- I actually played golf with him
with Anthony Anderson one day.
- [Seth] Gotcha.
- And we were all playing together
and we clearly saw him hit a ball, hook a ball,
into a lake at Trump National in Jersey
and his caddy told him he found it.
(Seth laughs)
- People don't know this but he jerry rigs his golf carts
to go really fast.
He has somebody do that.
Only one golf cart at every course he owns
goes about 30 miles an hour and that's his,
it's number one,
everyone else goes about 15 to 18 miles per hour.
So he can hit the ball, zip he's out,
and you're still, "Hey, where's Trump?"
You hit, you hit.
By then he can kick the ball, move the ball,
take it out of lakes, whatever.
There's your ball.
Usually, you would put a mark down and pick up the ball.
What he does, he secretly puts the marker
on the end of the putter
and then he looks like he's marking it
but really now the mark is three feet closer,
that's a way easier putt.
He tried to cheat Tiger Woods in a round of golf once,
Tiger freaking Woods.
He's off to the right.
He's playing against Tiger Woods.
They each have a partner.
He chokes one flat into the water, splash.
He says to his partner,
"Throw me another one, they didn't see."
I'm like, "That's Tiger Woods."
- Tiger, we are inspired
by everything you have become and attained.
The job you've done is incredible.
- He's telling people he's won club championships
that he didn't even play in.
He won a club championship
that's being played in Bedminster, New Jersey,
when he was playing in Philadelphia
and he called in and said,
"Hey, what won the club championship today?"
And the guy goes, "Ah, 75, Joe Shmoe won it."
"Oh, I shot 73 today, make me the champion."
And the pro's like, "Ha, what?"
"Yeah, make me the champion.
"I played better here today."
So, Joe Shmoe's name comes off the wall,
maybe one of the great moments of his life
and Trump's name goes up
and this has happened over and over again.
And then he won at least six or seven times
tournaments where he was the only guy
playing in the tournament.
He'll buy a new golf course,
play the first round by himself and Melania,
and unless Melania gets hot, he's gonna be the winner
and so if you go to any of his courses
his first few years it's just him
because no one else played.
As a writer, I love Donald Trump.
I loved him 'cause he would say anything.
He was like, "Yeah, I banged Marilyn Monroe
"and I punched out Sinatra."
And we're like, "Yeah, what else you got?"
Because he'd say anything.
But as an American, I don't like him at all.
He terrifies me.
If he's gonna cheat at golf,
you don't think he's gonna cheat on his taxes?
You don't think he's gonna cheat on his wives?
You don't think he's gonna cheat to win an election?
You don't think he's gonna cheat to stop an investigation?
You don't think he's gonna cheat to break rules,
to get information from foreign countries?
My God, he just admitted he does it.
- I'm Bill Kristol.
I came to Washington over 30 years ago
to work in the Reagan Administration.
I was Chief of Staff to the Vice President
in the George H.W. Bush White House
so I worked in government,
worked in some Republican politics,
edited The Weekly Standard for a little over two decades.
- I'm Richard Painter.
I'm a law professor at the University of Minnesota.
I was the Chief White House Ethics Lawyer
for President George W. Bush.
Most of my life I was in the Republican party.
- I'm Malcom Nance, a former U.S. Intelligence officer.
Started out actually in cryptology
and sort of an expert
in all things related to foreign intelligence operations,
counterterrorism, and now Russian intelligence activities
in the United States.
- What a great looking group.
We're taking some pictures?
- We can just move right along.
- The traits that are important in a leader vary
but there are some absolute constants
and the way to look at them is the titles
and the core values that we see for each armed service,
honor, courage, commitment, country, duty,
service above self, excellence in all that we do,
always faithful, always prepared.
These are some of the core values
that we entrust in our national military leaders
and those should be the same core values
that we should have in our political leaders.
- To be a good leader,
a person has to first of all recognize
that other people have rights and individualities
that you need to take into account.
You appreciate who they are and what's important to them.
The problem arises in leadership
when you have a person who does not appreciate
that others are there as independent folks
but who are there to serve you.
- We expect leaders to bring people together,
to try to unify the country as best they can.
The number of attacks that this president
is making on Twitter are astronomical,
and then the attacks on the media on top of that.
- I've never really liked the Trump is an idiot,
Trump is a buffoon aspect of the anti-Trump rhetoric.
I think it does diminish more than it should
some of the real dangers he poses.
- [Interviewer] Do you think Donald Trump is fit to serve
as Commander in Chief?
- No, he's not fit to serve,
I think either by character or judgment,
I don't agree with his policies,
I don't think he has much experience,
he doesn't know how government works
but that can all be tolerated or survived
but in terms of his just basic character and judgment,
his basic sense of putting the country first,
at least in key moments,
every politician has moments where he cuts corners
and watches out for himself or herself
but Trump is the opposite.
I think it's a miracle when he actually seems
not to simply put his own narrow interests first,
and the recklessness, and the demagoguery,
so undercuts democratic norms and constitutional processes
that it's dangerous to the country.
- Why do they hate his guts?
They hate his guts
because he represents a threat to their status quo.
It's a very weird salad
because it doesn't fit in the box
of the traditional Republican establishment
or the Democratic Party.
I mean, he is a reflection
of our politically correct society.
If I'm not allowed to say what I'm thinking
and everyone's got me in a tight box,
when I go into the voting booth I'm gonna vote for him.
The more politically correct the society is,
the greater the reaction formation is
of the orange man comes to town.
- Why I support Trump is pretty easy.
He is the only president in the last probably 40 years
that has been for the people.
- I had an epiphany at my first Trump rally.
I tell people that it was a reconnection to my life
because I grew up in a blue-collar situation
and I hustled my way to some dough,
went to Tufts and Harvard Law School,
I worked at Goldman,
built two successful hedge fund businesses,
started to become independently wealthy
and then what ends up happening
is you pick up the collective biases
of the people around you
and so you don't really have a good ear to the ground.
And so when I got to the first Trump rally,
I crossed the security perimeter,
went in and started talking to people,
and I was like, "Oh, my God,
"Mr. Trump is talking to the people I grew up with."
And these are people that economically desperate.
We went from a economically middle class,
and lower middle class,
working class aspirational society
to a desperational society in 35 years
and I can explain what happened
through the forces of trade and globalism
and our mistakes about repositioning manufacturing
away from the United States,
all of those things that we did,
some of it accidental, some of it intentional,
left a very large group of people
feeling very, very desperate
about their economic aspirations and their wellbeing
and so that first Trump rally I was like,
"Whoa, there's a lot of people out here
"that are in a lot of pain and I missed it."
They have economic anxiety
and they are going to vote to reject the status quo,
it's an anger-based vote
and you have to work on policy solutions to fix that,
you have to heal that
because when you create a breach
in the social fabric of the society,
you create a systemic rise of populism
and you get all of these unintended,
or unexpected political outcomes.
I didn't see it myself, but Trump saw it
and so that's something you have to give him credit for.
Here is a billionaire so you'd have to say
this is a completely out of touch dude
but he saw it, I did not see it
and I grew up with it.
(gentle piano music)
So, take a step back.
We racked up $18 trillion of debt,
we killed a million people in the Middle East,
we wounded 70,000 servicemen and women,
7,000 servicemen and women have died
and 22 are dying a day in the United States
from suicide related to posttraumatic stress.
Our educational system K-12 is completely uneven and broken,
our infrastructure completely failed and broken,
we have no industrial policy,
there's nobody in the United States
as a public servant that has a 10-year plan,
they don't even have a five-year plan.
So the American population is looking at the situation
and saying, "Wait a minute, this is not working for me."
The stock market crashes
and the very big bank is about to go out of business,
the government sends them $1 trillion to protect them
what about me?
And so people feel that the system is rigged
and the system is unfair towards them.
You call these people deplorable, white ethnocentrics,
white nationalists,
whatever those knuckle dragging misnomers,
those adjectives of attack on these people,
they tune you out.
You'd be better served
going into those areas of the country and listening to them
and say, "Hey, you know what?
"I don't think you're a racist
"or you're a white trash person,
"I think you're a person
"that really just wants your family to have a better life
"and as a public servant,
"I'm gonna try to come up with policies
"that help you do that."
David Axelrod said to me,
"Remember, Anthony, people will vote for somebody
"they won't like.
"They gave Richard Nixon a landslide, nobody liked him,
"they gave him a landslide.
"What they don't like doing
"is they don't like voting for people that dislike them."
See the difference?
So you're standing at a podium calling people deplorable,
they're like, "Okay, give my vote to the orange man.
"Let's see how he does."
(crowd cheering)
- I think Trump speaks to people in a really very good way.
He is appealing to people who are hurt, angry,
they feel bypassed, ignored,
and not taken seriously.
The problem is that he doesn't speak
to the humanity of the people who don't agree with him.
- They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime,
they're rapists.
We're building that wall and it's going up very big.
(crowd cheering)
- If you have any racism in you,
Trump's gonna let you bring it out.
I get to be a jerk again.
I get to be 1956 America again.
- It's not a racist, this guy treats everybody like shit.
He's not a racist, okay?
It doesn't matter if you're black, white,
lesbian, transgender, he treats everybody the same.
He went to Elton John's wedding, he's an asshole,
that's different from being a racist.
He's obviously an asshole.
- It's so sad that so many people have let their worst side
come out through Trump.
- Get the fuck out of here!
Our country, motherfucker!
Our country!
Go fucking cook my burrito, bitch!
Trump!
I love Trump!
Fuck you!
- Are you racist?
- I am the least racist person that you have ever met.
I look at my African American over here.
Look at him.
Are you the greatest?
You know what I'm talking about?
I have a great relationship with the blacks.
I've always had a great relationship with the blacks.
I love the old days.
You know what they used to do to guys like that
when they're in a place like this?
They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks.
- I resisted for quite some time
the notion that he is racist.
It's more a function of his narcissism than anything else,
it's not really racism.
That was sort of the way I viewed Trump,
that he doesn't like them because they oppose him
and that's really what it's about,
it's all function of his narcissism
and when he says things that were supportive
of some of those bad people at Charlottesville,
that's again a function of his narcissism
because the people who were attacking those people
were attacking him.
- You had a group on one side that was bad
and you had a group on the other side
that was also very violent
but you also had people that were very fine people,
on both sides.
You had people in that group, excuse me, excuse me,
I saw the same pictures as you did.
- [Crowd] Russia is our friend.
The south will rise again.
- You had people in that group
that were there to protest
the taking down of the statue Robert E. Lee.
To them, a very, very important statue.
- [Crowd] You will not replace us.
- My mother came from the Philippines.
She came to the United States in the late 1950s
so I'm half Filipino and the other half
is some mixture of Irish-Scottish,
I'm classic American mutt.
I think of myself as an American
and I just assume people aren't racist
and I tend to forget that, well, some people are
and that's the lesson with Trump is
I just gave him the benefit of the doubt.
- These are people that if they don't like it here
they can leave.
- But what he said about those members of Congress,
it brought back that memory
of the one time I really remember, wow,
there really are people like that here.
I was with my mother when I was a teenager
in a parking lot in Massachusetts when somebody said to her,
"Go back to your country."
Sorry, and I found that to be,
and it really came home to me then.
This man is a racist, he is evil.
- The Democrat Party is now being led
by four left wing extremists
who reject everything that we hold dear.
- [Crowd] Send her back!
Send her back!
Send her back!
Send her back!
Send her back!
- He's a racist beyond any question.
- [Crowd] USA!
USA!
- The first time I saw Trump at a rally
telling the crowd that he loved them
but he also hated everybody else,
when I saw him leading them
in a loyalty oath using emotions in that way
I realized that this was not politics as usual.
- Raise you right hand, everybody.
Do you swear that you're going
to vote for Donald Trump tomorrow?
Raise that hand.
I love you, I love you.
- He had talked about being president for many, many years
with his advisor of the time, Steve Bannon,
who is a White Nationalist, an unabashed racist.
Steve Bannon considers himself a student of history
and he likes to think that he knows the cycles of history
in terms of resentment and racism
and in this case, he was correct.
- [Narrator] This is Italy in 1922.
These marching men are charter members
of a new Italian political party, the fascists,
founded and led by a flamboyant ex-editor,
ex-army corporal, ex-socialist, Benito Mussolini.
His movement numbers a million members
including uniformed Black Shirts
and Mussolini successfully forces his leadership
on the Italian king and people.
Despite the fact that 80% of Italians
still support the constitutional monarchy,
his threats of violence and revolution
win him the office of Premier.
On his first anniversary,
with the aid of gunfire, kidnapping and castor oil,
he is absolute dictator.
- At the time Mussolini came on the political scene in 1919,
Italy was a limited democracy.
People had the vote, women could vote,
and Mussolini came in as a revolutionary,
as a rabble-rouser to completely shake things up.
One of the most crucial moments of authoritarian capture
is when traditional elites
invite the authoritarian-in-the-making into power.
Fascism was a very violent movement.
The political establishment,
these traditional conservatives,
were so frightened of the continuation of the violence
that they actually invited him to become Prime Minister.
He was invited into the office
and they thought that he could be contained
and he would do their dirty work
and then they could control him
and tragically, that was not to be.
He attacked the press.
He attacked democracy as something that was not necessary.
He joked about having term limits removed.
His arch enemy, Giacomo Matteotti,
the leader of the Socialist Party,
was seen being taken away by fascist thugs.
Eventually, his body was found
but it was a huge outrage
and a special investigation was launched
with the prosecutor
and in the course of this,
Mussolini's career looked like it was over
and he was being asked to resign
and to end this, he declared a dictatorship in January 1925.
He changed the special prosecutors.
The assassins were given light prison sentences
and eventually pardoned
because dictators love to pardon criminals
and the Italian society was never the same again.
(chanting in foreign language)
There are times in history when figures appear
who are able to coalesce existing hatreds and anxieties
that exist in a culture
and form from them a movement through rallies,
through propaganda, through promises to them.
- We will be ending the AIDS epidemic
and curing childhood cancer.
- [Ruth] Only they know the truth,
only they can fix the problems.
- We are finally putting America first.
- My name is Cheryl Koos
and I'm a historian of interwar Europe,
and fascism and authoritarianism.
Hitler gained his followers by promising them a better life,
a better Germany
but he also had a scapegoat.
- Jews as diseased and foreign objects.
One of the most dangerous things about authoritarian leaders
is that they're particular personal quirks,
their obsessions, their preoccupations
often become state policy.
- And I think one of the manifestations of that
that we've seen in policy is the Zero Tolerance Policy.
- Immigration is the fault in all of the problems
that we're having.
You look at what's happening in Europe,
you look at what's happening in other places,
we can't allow that to happen to the United States,
not on my watch.
- The separating of children from parents,
think about the kind of mind to think,
"I know how we're gonna restrict immigration.
"Let's take their children away (cackles)"
I mean, it's a cruel, almost cartoonishly evil,
kind of thing to do.
- Who's number one with Hispanics?
Trump.
- It's a violation of human rights
to take children away from their parents,
to be so uncaring about the permanent effect
on these children, and it is gonna be permanent,
is cruel and sadistic behavior,
it's completely different from saying
we need to have strong borders,
or we need to limit immigration or something like that.
Those things, if they are worth doing,
can be done without destroying children's lives.
- One institution, in my opinion,
that hasn't stood up for themselves at all
are Congress and the Republican Party.
- It's quite extraordinary that the Republic Party,
they're slotting right into behavior in Italy in 1920s
and Germany in the early 1930s and so on.
- [Donald] I wanna know who's the person
who gave the whistleblower,
who's the person who gave the whistleblower the information?
Because that's close to a spy.
You know what we used to do in the old days
when we were smart?
The spies and treason,
we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.
- He does not believe in democracy.
The way he rules in the White House shows that.
It reminded me of something I read by Ivana Trump
when he was married to her
and in their divorce proceedings
she had written that he liked reading Hitler's speeches,
and Hitler's speeches would always build you up
to this crescendo of shouting
and repeating things three times
because if you repeat something three times,
it breaks through to the audience
and it becomes a fact in their mind.
- And I want you all to know
that we are fighting the fake news,
it's fake, phony, fake.
(crowd cheering)
A few days ago
I called the fake news the enemy of the people,
and they are, they are the enemy of the people.
- The big lie technique that came from Nazis,
so now we're faced with the same problem.
People say over and over and over again
something which has never been true,
it's a lie, basically, or it may be a prejudice
but when you repeat it,
unless it's challenged quickly and effectively,
it becomes the norm, it becomes accepted wisdom
even though it's completely wrong.
- Repeat everything three times
and the third time it becomes the truth.
He is capitalizing on that.
- The Authoritarian Playbook
is a way that these kinds of men capture democracy.
After they get power, they proceed to tame the judiciary,
they attack the press
and the ultimate aim is to get people to believe
that reality is what they say it is.
- The fake news, right?
The fake news.
(crowd cheering)
- They are not about the greater good
and calling people to their better angels,
they're about fostering a sense of victimization and fear,
and how the nation could be purer,
and how the nation would be better
without X, Y and Z elements.
- Hail Trump!
Hail our people!
Hail victory!
- [Interviewer] So, is it appropriate
to compare Trump to Hitler?
- I compare Trump to Hitler all the time
and that makes people angry and I'm not gonna stop doing it,
and I'll tell you why I'm not gonna stop doing it
because my father was a great historian
and student of Jewish history
and he used to say to me all the time,
"John, the meaning of history is in the Holocaust."
We cannot be silent.
It's not that he's as bad as Hitler
or that he's the equivalent of Hitler,
but he has the same diagnosis as Hitler.
He's in the same category,
that it's a psychological type
that can be more or less extreme
but they share these common characteristics,
they're cut from the same cloth.
Those of us who've been raised in this current era,
we don't realize how spoiled we've been.
We've been raised from the World War II boom of prosperity
to today, one of the greatest periods
of peace and prosperity in human history
and we've also taken it for granted
that our democracy was solid,
that liberal democracy
is now becoming the touchstone for the planet,
that's what we believed three years ago
but Plato predicted thousands of years ago
that democracies always end in autocracy
and we're so naive that we don't understand
that every democracy is always vulnerable
to being taken over and turned into an autocracy.
- We are in the third era
of the rise of charismatic threatening strongmen in history.
The first was during the Fascist period
in the '20s and '30s.
After World War II, you had anticolonial strongmen
like Mobutu and Qaddafi
and today, we have a new crop of leaders
who are threatening liberal democracy
or have already partly destroyed it.
- Trump has helped autocrats all around the world just,
I mean, almost immediately out of the box.
Erdogan in Turkey.
- [Translator] Turkey has the right
to eliminate all possible threats towards sovereignty,
with or without it's allies.
- [Malcom] el-Sisi in Egypt.
- [Translator] Whenever there is a minority
trying to impose their extremist ideology,
we have to intervene regardless of their numbers.
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Malcolm] Even in Libya,
they're backing the strongman al-Haftar.
- His most important aim
is take over the capital, of course,
because the one who takes over the capital
is the one in power.
- [Malcolm] You have presidents like Bolsonaro in Brazil.
(speaks in foreign language)
- [Translator] These red outcasts
will be banished from our homeland,
it will be a cleansing never seen in Brazilian history.
- [Malcolm] You have strongmen
in the Philippines like Duterte.
- Hitler massacred three million Jews.
Now, there is three million drug addicts,
I'd be happy to slaughter them.
- [Malcolm] Vladimir Putin.
(speaks in foreign language)
(crowd cheering)
- Russia is actually fueling
right wing extremist governments in Europe,
they're funding them.
AFD in Germany, Alternative for Deutschland.
(crowd chanting in foreign language)
They're the second largest political party in Germany
fueled mainly by hatred of liberalism and immigration.
These people are all fellow travelers now
and as fellow travelers,
they all believe in the same thing
and they believe that democracy is a failed experiment
and that the polar axis of the world should shift.
We are in a battle for our political and ideological lives,
what was America is now under siege around the world.
This is a dangerous, dangerous time for the world.
Are we moving to a time where the 1930s have been forgotten
and people are viewing it a template not a warning?
- The only way we can perpetuate a democracy
is by people sharing those values
and thinking that that is something to be upheld.
- I mean, Trump is a symptom of a lot of things,
including a rise of a kind of ethnonationalism
and authoritarianism
but he is a symptom who's become a very important cause.
The United States is standing against
ethnonationalist sentiments and authoritarian regimes
around the world,
I think that puts a certain amount of check on them.
With the American president on their side,
it's an exponential shot in the arm
for them and an exponential weakening of liberal democracy
around the world.
- I actually go back to, believe it or not, chimpanzees.
When Jane Goodall was observing chimpanzees,
one of the things she showed us was how loving they were,
and how human they were,
and she bonded with them
and formed these relationships with them
and then the males would compete for dominance.
They'd pound their chest,
and they'd throw dirt up in the air,
and they'd throw heavy rocks into the river
to show who is more powerful
but no one ever really got hurt.
It was all called display behavior
just to show who was the toughest
and that person would become the alpha.
What happened, though, after many years
is that troop that she observed became so big
that they split into two troops.
So everything she taught us about chimpanzees
is really what we would call within group behavior,
it says nothing about between group behavior.
Once the troops had split apart,
a very aggressive charismatic alpha male
from one of the groups would start beating his chest,
and hooting, and slapping the other males,
and getting them excited
and then they would start marching
toward the other group's territory
and the other males would follow him
(percussive music)
and they would wait at the edge of the territory
for another male,
maybe even someone they were friends with
when the troop was one troop
and they will barrel down the hill
and beat that male to death.
(chimpanzees shrieking)
And they'll do that systematically
until they're able to take over
the other group's females and their land.
Now, think about this from an evolutionary point of view.
Who's genes got to move on?
The troop with the malignant, narcissistic leaders
that said, "Let's go kill all the other chimpanzees."
(chimpanzees shrieking)
So this is very deep in our genetic programming
and this is why demagogues like Trump
are able to be successful
because before Trump we had fractures in our society
but we had this overarching identity as Americans.
Donald Trump fractures it and says,
"No, we're actually two troops
"and our troop is being attacked by that troop
"and if we don't go over there
"and beat the crap out of them,
"they're gonna destroy us."
And that is like a siren song
to the deep genetic programming
in the base of our animal brains
that, yes, if somebody convinces us
that other troop is trying to kill us,
and I don't care how bad my leader is,
but he's the one who's leading us to the edge of the troop
so only one of us is gonna survive
who cares if he's a liar?
We wanna survive
and the only way we survive
is by attacking those other people.
That primitive programming is actually not atypical,
they're not anomalous, they're not unusual.
Humankind has been at war
in every place at every time, right?
And they've been horrible in war to burning down villages,
raping women, torturing people, killing people,
that's actually normal for the human animal, unfortunately.
It's the psychology of power.
(crowd cheering)
We all tend to fall behind the powerful leader
out of self-preservation and out of group perseveration,
it's the natural instinct.
- [Interviewer] What are you most fearful of
about this president being in control?
- Nuclear war.
I mean, that's the long-term, that's the biggest risk,
is that he gets in a confrontation with a foreign leader,
North Korea, with China where his ego's on the line.
- Several months ago,
a foreign policy expert on an international level
went to advise Donald Trump
and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons.
Three times he asked, at one point,
"If we have them, why can't we use them?"
- North Korea best not make any more threats
to the United States,
they will be met with fire and fury
the likes of which this world has never seen before.
- A president of the United States,
even if he's being a showman,
saying that we will bring fire and fury to your country,
that is an implicit nuclear threat.
Donald Trump does not have the temperament
to be around these systems.
- Welcome to the White House.
This ceremony and the treaty we are signing today
are both excellent examples of the rewards of patience.
- [Narrator] It was 1987 and President Reagan
and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev
celebrated the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
as calming Cold War tensions.
The INF scrapped thousands of ground launched
nuclear and conventional missiles
with ranges of from 300 to 3,400 miles.
- [Reporter] Moscow and Washington
have repeatedly accused each other of violating the treaty,
a deal that helps protect the security of the U.S.
and its allies in Europe and the Far East.
Russia has condemned President Trump's intention
to withdraw from the pact,
the Deputy Foreign Minister is saying
it would be a very dangerous step.
- [Man] Sierra, Victor, Two.
- [Malcom] The President of the United States
is a nuclear monarchy.
He is a king.
There are no safeguards other than his whim,
that determines when he launches an atomic bomb and where.
The briefcase that he has, the football,
is a communications device
and all it does is authenticates him
to the nuclear arsenal's chain of command.
- [Commander] Unlock code enter,
Juliet, Papa, Papa.
- [Malcolm] And it executes his order
once he has authenticated himself.
- [Commander] Mark.
T-minus 50.
- Not one bomb's going, multiple bombs are going
So when you choose that option,
that missile will blow that country up in 35 minutes
and there is no turning it off.
Once they boost into space, they're gone.
- The president has the authority to order a nuclear attack,
including a first strike
and it is extremely unlikely that the military command
would not take his orders.
- The president can decide
that France is a national security threat
and he can order an ICBM strike.
- [Man] That's not the correct procedure.
- Screw the procedure.
I want somebody on the goddamn phone
before I kill 20 million people.
- Sir, we have a launch order.
- [Timer] Four, three, two
- Put your hand on the keys, sir.
- [Timer] One, launch.
- So what do you say to people
who say that Trump is a bluffer, a strategic thinker,
he won't do this?
Are you willing to bet your children's life on it?
Are you willing to bet the lives
of every person in this nation on it?
And if you're willing to say that
about any person who will pathologically lie to you,
to your face, documentable, quantifiably lie
to you, your wife, your children on a daily basis,
then you don't really understand what the stakes are.
(missile blasting)
We cannot allow that kind of gamesmanship to continue,
this man controls those weapons.
- I don't think you can understand Trump
or much else of what's going on in the world today
without factoring in the effects of death anxiety.
Are we doing what we're doing for the reasons that we claim
or could there be something
that lurks beneath the surface of consciousness?
In "The Denial of Death",
Becker argues that it is our awareness
that we will inevitably die
and our inability to accept the reality
of the human condition with grace and courage
that underlies almost all human activity.
What Freud pointed out is that we're animals
and we don't like that,
we're breathing pieces of defecating meat
that aren't any more significant
or enduring than lizards or potatoes.
So, if you think about it,
I'm gonna die,
I could walk outside and get smoked by a comet.
You wouldn't be able to stand up in the morning.
You would literally be overwhelmed
by paralyzing existential terror.
What we do to bury that anxiety is to embrace belief systems
that life has meaning and we have value.
In a single word, culture.
So the prevailing belief in the U.S. in the last century
is that America is the home of the free and the brave,
anybody who works hard enough
can be just as successful
as Oprah, or Bill Gates, or Warren Buffet
and that we will always be the world's foremost economic,
as well as military power
and so one of the first knees
in our psychological groin was 9/11
when both our military and economic power
had been challenged,
then we get clobbered with the recession,
combined with globalization,
combined with demographic reality
that by the middle of the century
white people will be in the minority
and so for many Americans,
their world view have been completely upended.
So fast forward to 2015,
Donald Trump declares that he's running for President.
He comes down the escalator.
He's like, "Mexicans are rapists, I'm gonna keep you safe."
And I said to myself, "That guy is gonna win."
- The American dream is dead.
- [Audience Member] Bring it back.
- But if I get elected president,
I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger
than ever before
and we will make America great again.
Thank you, thank you very much.
(crowd cheering)
- When the psychological shit hits the fan,
if you'll pardon the expression,
and when people are economically
and psychologically insecure,
when somebody comes along and confidently proclaims
in very simple terms
that they will keep them safe, they will make them prosper,
they will bring back the good old days,
that's the psychological hook.
If you look at it from a detached perspective,
we're really at a crossroads,
the impending environmental apocalypse
juxtaposed with simmering ethnic tensions,
juxtaposed with rampant economic inequality
and here we have Trump magnifying all of those difficulties.
What Trump also did masterfully
was to take nonexistent problems
and render them potentially traumatic
by grotesquely overemphasizing the danger.
- Look at the deal he's making with Iran.
- Once you get on board psychologically,
once you commit to a demagogueish ideologue,
that puts up a fact proof screen
between you and the world.
Once you are fully on board,
there's no rational argument that will alter your opinion.
There is always a tendency for charismatic leaders
to bring out the tribal nature of humans,
it is very easy to lapse into an us versus them mentality.
Rationality will lose every time.
- Where is the red line?
Where do you say,
"Okay, hey, No mas, I'm not supporting this guy anymore?"
Where is the line?
So, it's obviously been crossed by many people
but for me the line would be when you look at our documents
and you look at our constitution,
North Korea, Russia, Venezuela has the exact same language,
go look at their constitution,
they have the same flowery language related to human rights
and all of that stuff
but what make us unique is the checks and balances
and the power diffusion
in the construction of the government.
So if Trump starts to trample on that,
then I'm gonna turn on him, have to.
You can't disrupt a 243-year experiment
for one dude's personality.
- It has now been a week
since the Centers for Disease Control
confirmed the first community transmission of coronavirus
in the United States.
- We all have personalities.
Some people are more dependent,
some people are more aggressive.
It becomes pathological
when you see the whole world through a screen
that makes everything fit your need.
- Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.
- [Lance] It's not just being manipulative,
it's a fundamental inability to not be that way.
- This big, vast land of ours, this great country of ours,
we have 240 cases.
Most of those people are gonna be fine.
- Donald Trump doesn't care about experts.
- [Journalist] Can you also weigh in
on this issue of hydroxychloroquine?
What do you think about this
and what is the medical evidence?
- How many times I've answered that question?
Maybe 15.
- [Journalist] Doctor.
- 15 times.
- He only cares about people
who will tell him what he already wants to hear.
He makes himself ignorant about almost everything
because he only wants to hear what he wants to hear.
- We have it so well under control.
I mean, view this the same as the flu.
When somebody sneezes,
I mean, I try and bail out as much as possible
and I haven't touched my face in weeks, in weeks.
- [Journalist] Mr. President, the--
- I miss it.
- And one of the most devastating things he's been doing
is to emotionally train Americans not to care about others,
to extinguish compassion
and to extinguish kindness in themselves.
He terms it being tough.
- He is giving people a license to hate,
to provide a source of anger, to go after each other,
how are we all tolerating this?
Loyalty is not blind obedience
unless you're supporting a demagogue, okay?
And so you don't wanna ever be like that in your life.
- Relax, we're doing great.
- [Reporter] The DOW is now down nearly 900 points.
- [New Anchor] Economists have been ramping up
their projections.
- [Reporter] The virus spreading explosively
like quote, a bomb.
- To be president, you have to exercise good judgment
on behalf of the American people for their interests.
- They have to go back to work, our country has to go back,
our country is based on that.
I think it's gonna happen pretty quickly.
- It's got nothing to do with the safety of the people,
it's about him.
It's not about the country.
- He spent a lot of time on Twitter today
boasting about the excellent television ratings
his news conferences have received lately.
- We have Monday Night Football-type ratings
and that these are like "Bachelor" finale.
- He is not fit because he is unable to think,
he can only react and attack.
- What do you say to Americans
who are watching you right now who are scared?
- I say that you're a terrible reporter.
That's really bad reporting.
- He is unfit to be president because he cannot think.
- [Reporter] The U.S. is surpassing Italy
as the country with the most fatalities.
- [News Anchor] He says he wants to reopen the country
with a big bang.
- Pursuing truth is to the mind
like food is to the body.
Without pursuing truth, your psyche starves
and Trump's psyche has been starving for a long time.
- [Journalist] Say, sir, what metrics you will use
to make that decision?
- The metrics right here.
If we can hold that down between 100,000 and 200,000,
we all together have done a very good job.
I am very proud to be your president.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, everybody, thank you.
- He's detached from reality.
I mean, this is just demented.
(gentle guitar music)
- The founding fathers always knew that a king-like tyrant
would try to rule as a personal dictator
and use the powers of the presidency
to enhance or enrich himself,
but they never foresaw the senate the judiciary
might completely abdicate their responsibilities
and go along with that.
- The natural tendency of history in many ways
is towards greater liberalism and altruism
but human nature has these competing forces,
and so what we're seeing now
is this amazing regression from where we were
we are literally going backwards, I think, a century or two.
We all have to do everything that we can do
because our society is at risk and we could lose it all,
we could lose this grand experiment in democracy.
I think we're more than halfway there,
I think people don't realize how far this
has actually progressed.
- When you're in a period of rising authoritarianism,
it's easy to get exhausted
because the news comes at you
like bullets from a machine gun, all of it bad.
One of the best weapons against authoritarianism
is protest in the street,
and protests are key
because not only does the leader see that he's unpopular,
but even more important,
his allies see that the public is actually against them.
- Think of what you tell your kids.
You tell them to be honest.
You tell them to tell the truth.
You tell them, don't think of yourself, don't brag.
don't trash other people to make yourself feel good.
How can you support Donald Trump?
How can you support somebody
who essentially violates all of the things
that we want them to follow?
It makes no sense.
It's corrosive for them, it's corrosive for you,
and it's corrosive for the country.
- This is a phenomenal, phenomenal country.
It's one of the most unique historical experiments
in the 5,500 years of recorded history.
We have to figure out a way to help people
and bring them into the new world of globalization,
they have to feel like they're part
of the aspirational success of America
that our parents felt.
- I believe at our best that we have the capacity
to radically reconceptualize who we are
and the extent to which that we can accept
our commonality as human beings,
I think therein lies the key
because then there's no one left to hate
and that's not gonna stop us from hating
but as Ernest Becker put it,
maybe we can hate stuff that we should
like poverty and injustice,
and maybe we can then use righteous indignation
to everybody's best interest.
(gentle music)
