Hindustan Times (Amritsar)

The worry is that Trump will lead the US into a war

A widely accepted view is that the American president suffers from a narcissist­ic personalit­y disorder

- ELIZABETH DREW Elizabeth Drew is a senior journalist and author The views expressed are personal Project Syndicate 2017

Much of America’s capital has entered a state of near-panic. In recent days, President Donald Trump has been acting more bizarre ly than ever, and the question raised in the mind of politician­s and civilians alike, though rarely spoken aloud, has been: Can the United States afford to wait for Special Counsel Robert Mueller to wrap up his investigat­ion? That could still take quite awhile.

The question of timing has become increasing­ly urgent, given the heightened danger that the US will deliberate­ly or accidental­ly end up in a war with North Korea. That risk, coupled with Trump’s increasing­ly peculiar behaviour, has made Washington more tense than I’ve ever known it to be.

During an Oval Office ceremony to honour Native-American heroes of World War II, he offended them by issuing a racist comment. He picked an unnecessar­y fight with the prime minister of the United Kingdom by re tweeting a British ne o-fascist group’ s antiMuslim posts. And he continued to bait North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who seems equally unstable.

Trump has also been re visiting his mendacious claim about Ba rack O ba ma having not been born in the US — the bogus allegation that launched his political career, which he’d renounced prior to the election.

A widely accepted view is that he suffers from a narcissist­ic personalit­y disorder. According to the Mayo Clinic, such a disorder “is a mental condition in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for excessive attention and admiration, troubled relationsh­ips, and a lack of empathy for others .” Another view held by a number of medical profession­als, based on how Trump spoke in interviews in the late 1980s and how he speaks now is that the president is suffering from the onset of dementia.

Trump’ s erratic behaviour has been attributed to his anxiety about Mueller’ s investigat­ion into his and his campaign’ s possible collusion with Rs si a in the Kremlin’ s effort to tilt the 2016 election in his direction–an investigat­ion that could end ina charge of conspiracy. And that increasing­ly bizarre behaviour came even before the news broke, on December 1, that Trump’ s first national security adviser and close campaign aide, retired General Michael Flynn, had agreed top lead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI in exchange for his cooperatio­n with the investigat­ion.

It has been speculated that Flynn will point afingerath­isson-in-law JaredKushn­er.But Trump’s earlier efforts to steer prosecutor­s away from Flynn were strong signals that Flynn knows something that Trump desperatel­y hopes that prosecutor­s won’t find out.

 ?? AP ?? During an Oval Office ceremony to honour NativeAmer­ican heroes of World War II, US President Donald Trump offended them by issuing a racist comment
AP During an Oval Office ceremony to honour NativeAmer­ican heroes of World War II, US President Donald Trump offended them by issuing a racist comment
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