It’s unclear whether or not Donald Trump has ever employed the services of a psychiatrist or therapist. But throughout Trump’s time in public life, psychiatrists have, from time to time, thought to psychoanalyze him from their couches, even though the American Psychiatric Association has cautioned its members to refrain from doing “armchair analysis” of public figures.
“The unique atmosphere of this year’s election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates, but to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible,” the group’s then-president, Maria A. Oquendo, said during the 2016 race. It goes back to “The Goldwater Rule,” a custom instituted around the 1964 election, when psychiatrists provided similar treatment to that year’s Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, and were discouraged from providing such public diagnoses.
Nevertheless, psychiatrists have sometimes been unable to resist the temptation.
“What we’re seeing in Trump is the impact of power on the human brain. It acts like cocaine and, in high doses, makes people feel elated, super-confident, and aggressive…Power increases testosterone, which in turn boosts dopamine,” @ihrobertson @irishtimes https://t.co/cDMhJno50E
— Brian Nolan (@BrianNolan1974) February 12, 2025
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Ian Robertson, emeritus professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin and author of the book How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief, took to the pages of the Irish Times this week to author an op-ed titled “A neuropsychologist’s view on Donald Trump: We’re seeing the impact of power on the human brain.”
“What we’re seeing in Trump is the impact of power on the human brain. It acts like cocaine, and in high doses makes people feel elated, super-confident and aggressive – like coked-up late-night revelers on Dublin’s Dame Street throwing the punches at strangers just because they can,” Robertson writes in the op-ed.”Trump’s great power is also a rejuvenator and energizer – an antidote to late-life senescence. Power increases testosterone, which in turn boosts dopamine – just like cocaine.”
“He is a man whose rules – what we typically call morals – so diverge from anything we recognise and who is so intoxicated by power that he is capable of shredding this remarkable rules-based development of human civilisation and replacing it with a global gangland ethos in the Vladimir Putin mould.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
