Poster for #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump( 2020 ), dir. Dan Partland( all images courtesy The 2050 Group)

For years now, professional psychologists and armchair pundits alike have been diagnosing Donald Trump with a variety of mental illnesses, all from afar. This has proven roughly as effective at stopping him as the Democrats’ impeachment struggles. Yet, such ineffectivenes has not impeded A Duty to Warn, an organization of mental health professionals who still seem to think they can make a difference by pointing out that Trump is anything but” a very stable genius .” Their crowning effort, the crowdfunded documentary #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump( yes, the hashtag is part of the name ), is now available on VOD.

Here’s a wildernes theme: What if has become a giant asshole isn’t a sign of mental illness? What if you can’t readily beckon apart all the troubling questions raised by Trump’s ascendancy with that description? What if all the shitty, glib discourse about Trump’s mental state actually serves less like strikes on him and more like strikes on beings with confirmed mental disease? You know, people who aren’t in positions of significant supremacy, who are far more likely than Trump to be harmed by furthering the stigma around their conditions.( Adding literal offense to the injury of his administration cutting funding for mental healthcare .)

Does Donald Trump have some anatomy of mental illness? Perhaps. I , not being a professional psychologist and having never met the three men, am not qualified to make a judgment there. One would think that others could abide by this very basic guideline, and yet now we have a whole-ass movie proving otherwise. #Unfit brings together a variety of experts and “experts” to was demonstrated by its “official” diagnosis of Trump as someone with malignant narcissism, and how this establishes him unfit for the presidency. What precisely they would like to be done about this is unclear. Vote? That didn’t exactly work out so well the last time. As last-ditch efforts to sway public opinion before a presidential election go, this one actually manages to be even less persuasive or related than Michael Moore’s Trumpland( 2016 ).

Curiously, the majority of members of the film isn’t even devoted to Trump’s mental health, but rather to reiterate all the abominable things he’s done over the course of his presidency, from separating and enclose immigrant families to attacking the press. I guess this might be useful if you’ve been completely dismis the bulletin for the past five years, or if for some reason you crave a few cases solid smashes of rage-nostalgia. This could be a side effect of the documentary think the mental health element a steal when it’s really really generic anti-Trump agitprop. Or the detail may in fact be to pathologize Trump’s destructive plans, while ignoring the fact that they’re the natural outcome of the Republican Party’s evolution over the past few decades.

From #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump

It’s astounding how poorly this movie erects and posts its controversies. It denies that diagnosing Trump from afar contravenes the “Goldwater rule” of the American Psychiatric Association’s ethical recommendations by virtually saying ” Nuh-uh, it doesn’t ,” quoting the” duty to warn” concept as rationale. It tries to head off criticism around labelling mental illness by claiming that other presidents have play-act the job just fine with their own psychological publications, in the process again transgressing the Goldwater rule!( One talking head, John Gartner, has reached it his whole thing to try to convince people that Bill Clinton has hypomania .) It furthers the aggravating conflation of politicians lying with the phenomenon of gaslighting.

Best( read: worst) of all, a sizable segment was dedicated to an aged golfing sidekick of Trump’s discussing how he misleads at the game. This string is more in-depth and detailed than anything the film delves into about his intolerance, misogyny, or authoritarianism. Now, if I were of the same inclination as the makers of this #Unfit, I might hypothesize that this proposes they are more upset and outraged by someone cheating at golf than they are by concentration camp, rape, or the restriction of civil liberty. It’s almost as if to them, respectability and sound affair more than activities. And it doesn’t seem to matter to them if they propel mentally ill people under the bus when announcing Trump out.

#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump is now available to stream.

Read more: hyperallergic.com