Twilight of American sanity A psychiatrist analyzes the age of Trump

Psychiatrist Frances is unwilling to join fellow mental-health professionals in assigning a diagnosis to Donald Trump. Instead, Frances views the 45th president's election as reflecting deeper dysfunctions in modern American life. Unfortunately, he cannot stop fulminating against the president, whom he calls "an irremediable creature of Stone Age emotions and medieval beliefs." Frances offers some good insights about societal delusions, but hurts his overall case with factual mistakes, such as claiming that "the U.S. has the greatest wealth inequality in the world," and hyperbole, such as stating that the U.S. is "deeply immersed in its most dystopian dark age." (More so than the Civil War or the Great Depression?) In making recommendations on how to counter Trump, he advocates support for such progressive grassroots groups as MoveOn and for global solutions to environmental problems, but with few or no specifics. Finally, the author doesn't do himself any favors with hackneyed sentences such as the following: "It has never been easy being human and our current challenges, difficult as they may seem, pale in comparison to the Black Plague or the 30 Years' War." Frances clearly has thought long and hard about Trumpism's many roots, but this attempt to analyze and respond to them never coheres. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Trump isn't crazy, but our society is."In this cogent analysis of "societal insanity," begun before the last presidential election, Frances (Psychiatry and Behavioral Science/Duke Univ.; Saving Normal: Reclaiming the Natural Power, Resilience, and Self-Healing Properties of the Brain, 2013, etc.) explores at length the many societal delusions that have given rise to Trump. The delusions include a false belief in fast, easy solutions to complex problems, such as global warming (God will fix it), guns (they don't kill people; people do), dwindling resources (there will be a high-tech fix), and so on. Exploiting this societal sickness, Trump, a "skilled snake-oil salesman selling quack medicinewon power because he promised quick, phony cures for thereal problems burdening the significant segment of our population left out of the American dream." Regarding Rust Belt jobs, writes the author, "most of the jobs were lost to automation, not globalization, and sadly they will never return." In the election campaign, Trump, a lifelong con man, displayed the common touch, while Hillary Clinton proved "remote and inaccessible, assuming she could rest comfortably on her long lead and past laurels." Frances makes no secret of his deep abhorrence of Trump: "we have placed the future of humanity in the hands of someone indifferent to facts, proud of scientific ignorance, and ready to act deceitfully on whim and spite." While Trump "doesn't qualify for a mental disorderhe does present with one of the world's best documented cases of lifelong failure to mature." He is "a distillation, mouthpiece, and terrifying living embodiment of all the worst in human nature and societal delusion." In his final, discursive chapters, Frances envisions the possibility of a rational post-Trump world informed by progressive populism. This welcome and insightful book joins a small shelf of essential titlesArlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land is anotherthat help explain why and how the Trump presidency happened. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.