Opinion | On Trump, crazy or calculating isn’t the question

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In his April 7 Thursday Opinion column, “Is Trump crazy, or calculating? His opponents have to decide., ”Jason Willick asked a question that has been asked many times. Without a carefully conducted, comprehensive and extensive face-to-face evaluation of former president Donald Trump, this type of question leads nowhere.

The question sets up a false dichotomy when asking whether a person is one thing or another; in this case, crazy or calculating. People can be both crazy and calculating contemporaneously, and even more of one or the other over time, just as people can be both anxious and depressed.

In someone whose observed behavior shifts over time, we might be experiencing a person best described as unstable, rather than as a person with a fixed state of mind. As a psychologist with 40 years of experience and having ample data that Mr. Trump has shared with the public, I think it would be easy enough to refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and assign all sorts of diagnoses to the former president. However, this sort of parlor game would not be fair to Mr. Trump or useful for the public.

Getting back to Mr. Willick’s piece, in which he wrote that the American people have to decide whether Mr. Trump is crazy or calculating, the vastly more central question voters need to ask themselves is whether they want a person whose behaviors provide evidence of profound instability in the White House, and not whether that person is crazy or calculating.

David Sommers, Kensington

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