The war in Ukraine is being directed by a dictator who is a sadist carrying out the most evil weaponing against innocent people of Ukraine.
It’s difficult to understand how anyone could direct such as treacherous and cowardice war against women, children and older men who have no defense other than hiding in the basement of their homes or nearby buildings. More than a third of the population of Ukraine has been displaced, and millions have fled to other countries.
For my forthcoming book, The Trump Files, I studied the work of Dr. Bandy X. Lee and Dr. Robert J. Lifton to try and understand Donald Trump. The same discoveries I made about Trump can be applied to Vladimir Putin. Let me explain.
Donald Trump presented the United States with what Dr. Robert Jay Lifton calls “malignant normality,”1 which occurs when society begins to see forms of destructive and dangerous behavior as normal. Donald Trump and Trumpism render an array of malignant normality. Lifton, born in 1926, is an American psychiatrist and author who is known for his studies of psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and he has been one of the most outspoken critics of Donald Trump.
Science educator Charles “Kip” Ault, professor emeritus of science education at Lewis & Clark College, has suggested that Trump’s malignant normality includes megalomania, willful ignorance, dishonesty, and fraud.2 Add Ault’s thinking to what Lifton says about Trump’s malignant normality and a condition of extreme abnormality emerges that replaces American democracy. The circumstance of Trump’s malignant normality includes extensive lying, falsification, systemic corruption, attacks on critics, disregard of intelligence agencies and findings, repudiation of climate change truths, embrace of dictators, and berating of international allies.3
Jack Hassard, The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science and Public Health. Northington-Hearn Publishing: Marietta, Forthcoming August 2022.
Depth of analysis is available to try and understand then deal with individuals such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Neither Trump nor Putin are normal persons. Yet, according to Lee, the psychiatric community did little to deal with Trump while he was president.
Notes from the Interview
Following are some notes I’ve taken from Dr. Lee’s interview on the TEDx program shown below.
Trump and Putin are self destructive, but take this psychiatric condition out on other people. Putin is projecting and unfolding what is going on in his mind thereby inflicting great harm on the Ukrainian people. Now, we (the world) is experiencing the kind of warfare and chaos that has been going on inside his mind. Lee says that Putin projects his impairments, his illnesses onto others. One point she makes that is important, is that diseased disordered people such as Putin and Trump project their own mental impairments onto others—they often label others—healthy others—impaired. The bombing of hospitals, maternity wards, children in schools are all acts of sadism and indeed, this behavior also manifests itself in the Russian military whereby troops carryout the same kind of sadistic behavior that marks the mind of Putin. Lee also comments that when we have people like a Trump or Putin in power, the destructiveness of their mind spreads to other parts of society. Sooner or later, their behavior becomes normalized. We see this in how the press deals not only with Trump, but the war in Ukraine. The press conveniently forgets the atrocities (war crimes?) that the American military carried out in “our” wars, especially in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The culture of the United States is very different now than it was five or six years ago, and this is due the rise of Donald Trump, a psychologically damaged man, to the level of presidential leadership. His malignant normality has spread throughout the American population that now there are millions of people that accept his inner demon that the election was stolen from him, and that those that stole it must be punished or defeated.
And when the war against Ukraine began, it was Trump and his sycophants who said Putin’s invasion was “genius” and “savvy.” Here, one dictator is praising another. Throughout Trump’s presidency he rubbed shoulders with other tyrants including Xi Jinping (China), Kim Jong Un (North Korea), Rodrigo Duterte (Philippines), Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey).
Lee informs us of the psychiatry underlying Putin and Trump. Hassan explores the nature of cults, based on his personal experience and scholarly research and helps us understand mind control, and how to undo it.
I recommend you either watch the entire interview, or scroll through it to hear from the speakers.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, M.D., forensic psychiatrist and world expert on violence.
Dr. Stephen Hassan, Mental Health counselor, author
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1 R. J. Lifton, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival (New York: The New Press, 2017). Lifton’s concept of “malignant normality” emerged from of his study of Nazi doctors who over time and through perverse counseling, drinking together, and assurances and support of each other were adapted to evil.
2 Kip Ault, personal email, August 6, 2021. Dr. Ault is the author of Challenging Science Standards, 2015, and Beyond Science Standards, 2021, Rowan & Littlefield Publishers.
3 R. J. Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry (New York: The New Press, 2019), 189.
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