foreignpolicy--2020-01-29--The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made Bioweapon

The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made Bioweapon The recent outbreak of a new and potentially deadly coronavirus in China has , unsurprisingly , kicked off a deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories .
As of Tuesday , there were more than 6,000 confirmed cases of the virus , with 132 people dead .
The center of the epidemic , and still the location of around a third of the cases , is Wuhan , in the central province of Hubei .
Other cases have rapidly sprung up worldwide—but the transmission of paranoia and inaccurate information has managed to keep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about the virus , but researchers say it shares similarities to Middle East respiratory syndrome ( MERS ) and severe acute respiratory syndrome ( SARS ) —two infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades but that have been managed .
While concerns inside China are serious and travel restrictions have been imposed across much of the country , public health officials stress there is no need for panic , especially not in the West where the risk of transmission remains low .
That hasn ’ t stopped an outbreak of nonsense and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Washington Times — a paper with a distinct ideological bent — published an article claiming that the virus ’ outbreak could be linked to a military lab in Wuhan .
The article suggests a government-run lab , the Wuhan Institute of Virology , could have been researching military applications for the coronavirus and may have been the source of the outbreak .
The only basis for the claim is a quote from former Israeli intelligence officer Dany Shoham , who has expertise in biological warfare .
“ Certain laboratories in the institute have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ research and development , in Chinese [ biological weapons ] , at least collaterally , yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment , ” Shoham told the Times .
While Shoham never backed up the claim made in the story that the outbreak stemmed from a biological weapon , other outlets nevertheless picked up the idea and ran with it .
The Texas radio station KPRC posted the story to its site , concluding “ some intelligence experts believe the Chinese military ’ s biowarfare department may be responsible.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ officer had become “ intelligence experts.
” The Toronto Sun columnist Candice Malcolm pumped the theory on her YouTube show , asking : “ Why isn ’ t the mainstream media talking about the origins of this deadly virus ?
Could it be linked to China ’ s biological warfare program ?
” All this on the guesswork of one man—and it ’ s not the first time Shoham has pumped the tires on a theory without much merit .
In 2017 , he went on Radio Sputnik , a propaganda arm of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Islamic State had likely passed on chemical weapon capabilities to its sleeper cells in the West .
GreatGameIndia , a small conspiracy website—which , among other things , has reported that British intelligence was responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014—began publishing reports last week claiming that Canadian researchers had sold this strain of coronavirus to China .
The co-founder and editor of the website has also written extensively for the Centre for Research on Globalization , a Montreal-based site that has been identified by NATO as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The website pointed blame at Xiangguo Qiu , a former researcher with the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg , Manitoba , a government-run lab that has pioneered vaccines and treatments for various infectious diseases , including Ebola .
While it ’ s true she was escorted from the lab last year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police , there does not appear to be a national security element to the incident .
Charges have not been laid , and those familiar with the case say it is likely a matter of paperwork @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , worked extensively with labs in China to create treatments for deadly and infectious diseases .
While the claims made on GreatGameIndia are demonstrably untrue—the supposed shipment of the coronavirus in 2018 was for , in fact , for the MERS strain , not the novel coronavirus currently seen in Wuhan—it nevertheless got picked up by fellow conspiracy site ZeroHedge , which has a massive following ( about 670,000 Twitter followers and millions of visitors to its blog ) .
Its post on the baseless theory has been shared more than 6,000 times @ @ @ @ @ @ @ accounts , including by Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah .
The claims have since spread to a network of other less-than-reputable sites .
David Fisman , a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto ’ s Dalla Lana School of Public Health , said this coronavirus is definitely novel .
And new viruses , especially those that move fast , can cause panic .
Panic leads to people “ casting about for conspiracy theories , ” he said .
But diseases that quickly mutate and infect humans are simply part of nature @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” he told Foreign Policy .
And this bioweapon speculation isn ’ t exactly new .
In 2003 , during the SARS outbreak , the Jamestown Foundation think tank published an analysis suggesting “ there are compelling reasons , however unsettling , to at least ask whether there might be any linkage between SARS and China ’ s biological warfare efforts.
” That claim ultimately proved baseless .
The bioweapon fears aren ’ t the only ones out there .
BuzzFeed News has already put together a list of 19 myths , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the coronavirus outbreak .
Prepper websites , targeting those who obsessively prepare for the apocalypse and other widespread emergencies , have exploded with news of the outbreak , warning that the outbreak could rival that of the Spanish flu .
Infowars , the conspiracy site run by Alex Jones that has previously received the endorsement of U.S. President Donald Trump , has also been quick to spread lies and invented numbers about the outbreak .
On Reddit , multiple channels devoted to the coronavirus outbreak have popped up , and they have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ concern .
Users on the coronavirus subreddit have been posting details of flights originating from China and have been encouraging others to stockpile goods .
One user began creating graphs modeling the outbreak in exponential terms and concluding that the “ real ” death toll ( based on social media ) is in fact over 8,000 .
The user ’ s graphs , which have begun spreading on social media , assert there will be 11.5 million cases of the coronavirus by next month , with over 800,000 dead .
“ This is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But exponential growth is what happens if you leave these processes alone and don ’ t do anything about them.
” It ’ s called Farr ’ s Law , named for a famed British epidemiologist .
It holds that , as human behavior changes in the midst of a disease outbreak and health agencies take action , transmissions level off and then decline .
While it ’ s been misapplied in the past , it is a good predictor of how outbreaks can be stopped .
Looking at the graph in question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be spreading that sort of misinformation .
“ Curves don ’ t look like this .
Because we do things about them.
” While the coronavirus is undoubtedly spreading fast , it is worth putting the numbers in context .
There have been nearly 100,000 cases of influenza A and B , which cause the flu , in the United States since the flu season began in late September 2019—including 54 deaths of children .
It ’ s still not clear how this outbreak of the coronavirus compares to SARS and MERS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of reference .
The SARS outbreak of November 2002 , which continued until the following July , resulted in more than 8,000 cases and about 775 deaths in more than two dozen countries—the response to that outbreak was marred by a late response and Beijing ’ s effort to control information to hide the extent of the virus ’ reach .
MERS , meanwhile , was first discovered in the Persian Gulf in 2012 and since then has seen sporadic clusters of cases .
Over the past eight years , there have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 850 deaths spread out over more than two dozen countries .
For SARS , the R0 value—a number that estimates how many others each infected person could pass the virus onto—sat somewhere between 2 and 5 .
For the new coronavirus , the R0 value appears to be similar , but lower , Nancy Messonnier , the director of U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ’ s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease , said in a media briefing Monday .
“ Most articles have had interpretation that the R0 is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
To just look at the R0 value can be troubling , but that number doesn ’ t tell the whole story .
“ R_0 estimates for # SARS are 2 to 5 , whereas they ’ re only about 1.3 on average for seasonal # flu .
The latter causes millions of cases a year whereas the former didn ’ t even cause [ 10,000 ] , ” Maia Majumder , of Boston Children ’ s Hospital ’ s Computational Health Informatics Program , tweeted Saturday .
Speaking to Foreign Policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coronavirus has had an R0 value of , say , 2 in China before the public was alerted to its existence doesn ’ t mean it will continue to have that value .
“ It shouldn ’ t be treated as a constant of nature ; it varies considerably from place to place because of social practices , environmental differences , and so on , ” she said .
It does appear that the virus has spread faster than originally thought .
Researchers in Hong Kong estimate that the real number of infections @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Fisman says that ’ s “ the right order of magnitude ” ( he personally thinks the actual number of cases is closer to 15,000 ) but notes there ’ s another side to that .
“ If we ’ re missing a whole bunch of cases … well that means your cumulative case fatality is too high , ” Fisman said .
In other words : If the undiagnosed cases are so mild that infected people don ’ t know they ’ re infected , it does mean the scope of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it is less lethal than the confirmed case count would suggest .
( There are real concerns that the dead are being undercounted , but not on the scale that some conspiracy theorists , who have made claims of thousands dead , have suggested without proof . )
Part of the basis for suggesting that the infected number may be multiples higher than originally thought stems from speculation that the virus can transmit even when those infected are asymptomatic , or that those infected are contagious for longer than normal .
That comes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which indicated the virus has gotten more powerful .
Chinese Health Minister Ma Xiaowei said the incubation period could be as long as 14 days .
Fisman said the research to date doesn ’ t support that claim , and he said the incubation period looks more like that of SARS , at around six days .
He suggested that , as the virus can be mild in some infected people , they may not even know they ’ re symptomatic—children , for example , may run around and play , oblivious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , similarly , says there is no evidence to support the idea that asymptomatic people are contagious .
There are fears that the paranoia and panic could push some to profile all Asians as being vectors of disease .
“ What ’ s very concerning to me … is how easily those rumors can lead to inappropriate discrimination against people , and we need to take all those rumors with a grain of salt and recognize that they are just that : rumors , ” British Columbia Health Officer Bonnie Henry told reporters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s first case .
Discrimination is already occurring in China , where citizens with registration cards from Hubei are being forcibly quarantined or refused entry into public spaces or transportation—even if they haven ’ t been home in months or years .
As the Trump administration mulls possible travel bans and neighboring countries begin to close their borders , that paranoia may spread .

The recent outbreak of a new and potentially deadly coronavirus in China has, unsurprisingly, kicked off a deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The recent outbreak of a new and potentially deadly coronavirus in China has, unsurprisingly, kicked off a deluge of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
As of Tuesday, there were more than 6,000 confirmed cases of the virus, with 132 people dead. The center of the epidemic, and still the location of around a third of the cases, is Wuhan, in the central province of Hubei. Other cases have rapidly sprung up worldwide—but the transmission of paranoia and inaccurate information has managed to keep pace.
There is still plenty unknown about the virus, but researchers say it shares similarities to Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—two infectious diseases that have emerged in recent decades but that have been managed. While concerns inside China are serious and travel restrictions have been imposed across much of the country, public health officials stress there is no need for panic, especially not in the West where the risk of transmission remains low.
That hasn’t stopped an outbreak of nonsense and conspiracy theories. On Sunday, the Washington Times — a paper with a distinct ideological bent — published an article claiming that the virus’ outbreak could be linked to a military lab in Wuhan.
The article suggests a government-run lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, could have been researching military applications for the coronavirus and may have been the source of the outbreak.
The only basis for the claim is a quote from former Israeli intelligence officer Dany Shoham, who has expertise in biological warfare.
“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Shoham told the Times.
While Shoham never backed up the claim made in the story that the outbreak stemmed from a biological weapon, other outlets nevertheless picked up the idea and ran with it.
The Texas radio station KPRC posted the story to its site, concluding “some intelligence experts believe the Chinese military’s biowarfare department may be responsible.” A speculation by a single former officer had become “intelligence experts.” The Toronto Sun columnist Candice Malcolm pumped the theory on her YouTube show, asking: “Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the origins of this deadly virus? Could it be linked to China’s biological warfare program?”
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All this on the guesswork of one man—and it’s not the first time Shoham has pumped the tires on a theory without much merit. In 2017, he went on Radio Sputnik, a propaganda arm of the Russian government, to suggest the Islamic State had likely passed on chemical weapon capabilities to its sleeper cells in the West.
GreatGameIndia, a small conspiracy website—which, among other things, has reported that British intelligence was responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014—began publishing reports last week claiming that Canadian researchers had sold this strain of coronavirus to China. The co-founder and editor of the website has also written extensively for the Centre for Research on Globalization, a Montreal-based site that has been identified by NATO as a peddler of Russian and Syrian propaganda.
The website pointed blame at Xiangguo Qiu, a former researcher with the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a government-run lab that has pioneered vaccines and treatments for various infectious diseases, including Ebola. While it’s true she was escorted from the lab last year by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, there does not appear to be a national security element to the incident. Charges have not been laid, and those familiar with the case say it is likely a matter of paperwork and protocol. Qiu, in fact, worked extensively with labs in China to create treatments for deadly and infectious diseases.
While the claims made on GreatGameIndia are demonstrably untrue—the supposed shipment of the coronavirus in 2018 was for, in fact, for the MERS strain, not the novel coronavirus currently seen in Wuhan—it nevertheless got picked up by fellow conspiracy site ZeroHedge, which has a massive following (about 670,000 Twitter followers and millions of visitors to its blog). Its post on the baseless theory has been shared more than 6,000 times on Facebook and tweeted by hundreds of accounts, including by Toronto Sun columnist Tarek Fatah. The claims have since spread to a network of other less-than-reputable sites.
David Fisman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said this coronavirus is definitely novel. And new viruses, especially those that move fast, can cause panic. Panic leads to people “casting about for conspiracy theories,” he said. But diseases that quickly mutate and infect humans are simply part of nature. “Welcome to emerging infectious diseases,” he told Foreign Policy.
And this bioweapon speculation isn’t exactly new. In 2003, during the SARS outbreak, the Jamestown Foundation think tank published an analysis suggesting “there are compelling reasons, however unsettling, to at least ask whether there might be any linkage between SARS and China’s biological warfare efforts.” That claim ultimately proved baseless.
The bioweapon fears aren’t the only ones out there. BuzzFeed News has already put together a list of 19 myths, fake images, and total falsehoods relating to the coronavirus outbreak.
Prepper websites, targeting those who obsessively prepare for the apocalypse and other widespread emergencies, have exploded with news of the outbreak, warning that the outbreak could rival that of the Spanish flu. Infowars, the conspiracy site run by Alex Jones that has previously received the endorsement of U.S. President Donald Trump, has also been quick to spread lies and invented numbers about the outbreak.
On Reddit, multiple channels devoted to the coronavirus outbreak have popped up, and they have quickly become hubs for panic and half-baked concern.
Users on the coronavirus subreddit have been posting details of flights originating from China and have been encouraging others to stockpile goods. One user began creating graphs modeling the outbreak in exponential terms and concluding that the “real” death toll (based on social media) is in fact over 8,000. The user’s graphs, which have begun spreading on social media, assert there will be 11.5 million cases of the coronavirus by next month, with over 800,000 dead.
“This is terrifying,” Fisman acknowledged. “But exponential growth is what happens if you leave these processes alone and don’t do anything about them.”
It’s called Farr’s Law, named for a famed British epidemiologist. It holds that, as human behavior changes in the midst of a disease outbreak and health agencies take action, transmissions level off and then decline. While it’s been misapplied in the past, it is a good predictor of how outbreaks can be stopped.
Looking at the graph in question, Fisman said it’s irresponsible to be spreading that sort of misinformation. “Curves don’t look like this. Because we do things about them.”
While the coronavirus is undoubtedly spreading fast, it is worth putting the numbers in context.
There have been nearly 100,000 cases of influenza A and B, which cause the flu, in the United States since the flu season began in late September 2019—including 54 deaths of children.
It’s still not clear how this outbreak of the coronavirus compares to SARS and MERS, but both outbreaks provide some frame of reference. The SARS outbreak of November 2002, which continued until the following July, resulted in more than 8,000 cases and about 775 deaths in more than two dozen countries—the response to that outbreak was marred by a late response and Beijing’s effort to control information to hide the extent of the virus’ reach. MERS, meanwhile, was first discovered in the Persian Gulf in 2012 and since then has seen sporadic clusters of cases. Over the past eight years, there have been nearly 2,500 confirmed cases and more than 850 deaths spread out over more than two dozen countries.
For SARS, the R0 value—a number that estimates how many others each infected person could pass the virus onto—sat somewhere between 2 and 5. For the new coronavirus, the R0 value appears to be similar, but lower, Nancy Messonnier, the director of U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, said in a media briefing Monday. “Most articles have had interpretation that the R0 is somewhere 1.5 and 3,” Messonnier said.
To just look at the R0 value can be troubling, but that number doesn’t tell the whole story.
“R_0 estimates for #SARS are 2 to 5, whereas they’re only about 1.3 on average for seasonal #flu. The latter causes millions of cases a year whereas the former didn’t even cause [10,000],” Maia Majumder, of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Computational Health Informatics Program, tweeted Saturday.
Speaking to Foreign Policy, Majumder said that just because the coronavirus has had an R0 value of, say, 2 in China before the public was alerted to its existence doesn’t mean it will continue to have that value. “It shouldn’t be treated as a constant of nature; it varies considerably from place to place because of social practices, environmental differences, and so on,” she said.
It does appear that the virus has spread faster than originally thought. Researchers in Hong Kong estimate that the real number of infections could be over 40,000 in Wuhan alone. Fisman says that’s “the right order of magnitude” (he personally thinks the actual number of cases is closer to 15,000) but notes there’s another side to that.
“If we’re missing a whole bunch of cases … well that means your cumulative case fatality is too high,” Fisman said. In other words: If the undiagnosed cases are so mild that infected people don’t know they’re infected, it does mean the scope of the outbreak is wider, but that it is less lethal than the confirmed case count would suggest. (There are real concerns that the dead are being undercounted, but not on the scale that some conspiracy theorists, who have made claims of thousands dead, have suggested without proof.)
Part of the basis for suggesting that the infected number may be multiples higher than originally thought stems from speculation that the virus can transmit even when those infected are asymptomatic, or that those infected are contagious for longer than normal. That comes from statements from the Chinese health authority, which indicated the virus has gotten more powerful. Chinese Health Minister Ma Xiaowei said the incubation period could be as long as 14 days. Fisman said the research to date doesn’t support that claim, and he said the incubation period looks more like that of SARS, at around six days. He suggested that, as the virus can be mild in some infected people, they may not even know they’re symptomatic—children, for example, may run around and play, oblivious to their runny nose.
The CDC, similarly, says there is no evidence to support the idea that asymptomatic people are contagious.
There are fears that the paranoia and panic could push some to profile all Asians as being vectors of disease.
“What’s very concerning to me … is how easily those rumors can lead to inappropriate discrimination against people, and we need to take all those rumors with a grain of salt and recognize that they are just that: rumors,” British Columbia Health Officer Bonnie Henry told reporters on Tuesday, in announcing her province’s first case.
Discrimination is already occurring in China, where citizens with registration cards from Hubei are being forcibly quarantined or refused entry into public spaces or transportation—even if they haven’t been home in months or years. As the Trump administration mulls possible travel bans and neighboring countries begin to close their borders, that paranoia may spread.


foreignpolicy--2020-01-29--Trump’s Narcissism Is What’s Really on Trial in the Senate

Trump ’ s Narcissism Is What ’ s Really on Trial in the Senate After an exhausting six days of arguments in the first impeachment trial of a U.S. president ever to be held in an election year , the bottom line for Democrats remained fairly simple .
Why should the U.S. Senate decide to remove President Donald Trump from office now , with the 2020 vote just nine months away ?
Because given Trump ’ s penchant for soliciting foreign interference in American elections , it ’ s unreasonable to expect he will stop in 2020 , argued House @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ You know you can ’ t trust this president to do what ’ s right for this country , ” Schiff said in his closing remarks .
“ You can trust he will do what ’ s right for Donald Trump.
” But there ’ s the rub .
Trump is suffering from narcissistic personality disorder , some mental health professionals believe , which means there may be little or no difference in his mind between what ’ s right for him and what ’ s right for the country—or in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good for the United States in Ukraine and what ’ s good for Trump in Ukraine .
And on this central point Trump has brought the vast majority of the Republican Party along with him—in particular , those who will grant him inevitable acquittal in the Senate .
The big impeachment news of the week was the revelation that Trump ’ s former National Security Advisor John Bolton has confirmed in his forthcoming book that Trump did indeed try to extort Ukraine into finding dirt on his political rival Joe Biden and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democrats ’ case for impeachment .
But the bigger news was that the Bolton news didn ’ t really matter .
Why ?
Because whether there was a quid pro quo or not , Trump really believed he was serving the nation ’ s interest , his defenders say .
“ The president believes that the Ukraine interfered in our election , ” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham , even as he noted that the evidence was to the contrary .
“ From the president ’ s point of view , he did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ added Graham , who once called Trump a “ kook ” and “ unfit for office ” but has since become one of his most outspoken defenders .
“ If he thought he was doing something wrong , he would probably shut up about it.
” During the question session on Wednesday , Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz took this argument a big step further by insisting that all presidents identify the national interest with their personal political interest to some extent—going so far as to compare Trump to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that I know believes that his election is in the public interest , ” Dershowitz said .
“ And mostly you ’ re right .
Your election is in the public interest .
And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest , that can not be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.
” The former Harvard Law professor was arguing , in effect , for the normalization of narcissism .
Experts in psychology , however , say Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ordinary politician , but instead is symptomatic of someone suffering from pathological narcissism .
“ The more narcissistic someone is , the more they ’ re likely to view people and the world as less a separate entity or being , and more like an extension of their own body , like an arm or a leg .
In that mindset , ‘ What the U.S. needs and what I need are one and the same , because I am the country , ’ ” said Craig Malkin , one of a group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their profession ’ s long-codified ethical guidelines that forbid diagnosis of a patient the therapist has not directly examined—have made public their conclusion that Trump has what the 20th-century psychologist Erich Fromm called “ malignant narcissism.
” This is a condition that “ lies on the borderline between sanity and insanity , ” as Fromm put it , and often characterizes would-be tyrants who impose their absolutist will on the state .
Long before conspiracy theorists planted the false idea in Trump ’ s head that Ukraine tried “ tried to take me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( according to envoy Kurt Volker ’ s testimony last fall ) , he has been identifying threats to him personally as threats to the United States .
And every indication is that he ’ s not just saying it , he believes it ( or at least he ’ s never disavowed any of it ) .
To Trump , critics in the media are “ enemies of the people , ” his enemies in Congress should be arrested for “ treason , ” and even the FBI , when it broke @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Michael Cohen to obtain evidence , had mounted an “ attack on our country.
” Trump ’ s reaction to the impeachment charges against him has been little different .
For weeks , diplomats , national security experts , and other officials have argued at great length that Trump sacrificed U.S. national interests in Ukraine—which a bipartisan consensus previously agreed meant supporting a democratic ally at war with authoritarian Russia—in pursuit of his personal political interest , and that this was an impeachable abuse of power .
But the evidence suggests that Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ukrainians into investigating former Vice President Biden and the Democrats was the right thing for the nation—because Ukraine posed , to his mind , a threat to him , the self-described savior of the nation , the man who in 2016 declared of America ’ s broken system , “ I alone can fix it.
” He has also been consistent in his near-total identification of the national interest with his political fortunes .
In their exhaustive recounting of the chronology of the Ukraine extortion scheme—which proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if that nation ’ s government didn ’ t announce it would help him discredit one of his leading political rivals in 2020—the Democratic impeachment managers have shown repeatedly that , even after he was caught , the president never changed his position .
His call with Zelensky was “ perfect , ” impeachment is an attempted “ coup , ” the Democrats and Bidens are the guilty ones , and Schiff and his fellow Democrats are “ major sleazebags.
” Trump ’ s unprecedented contempt for congressional prerogatives—the basis of the second @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump genuinely believes he has “ the right to do whatever I want as president , ” as he once put it .
Or , as the eloquent Schiff said in his closing argument in the impeachment trial Friday night , the only way Trump can accuse those who oppose or criticize him , like the Ukraine whistleblower , of being traitors “ is if you believe you are the state .
And anything that contradicts you is treason.
” Narcissists of Trump ’ s ilk also tend to embrace conspiracy theories about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there are scant facts to support such theories , because objective truth has no real meaning to them ; instead , reality is filtered through their grandiose sense of self-importance .
“ It ’ s quite possible that he believes the Ukrainians tried to take him down , because embracing paranoid conspiracy theories help ward off a far more threatening possibility : that his failings are his own , and not due to outside attack , ” Malkin said .
“ That thought , in and of itself , is intolerable for extreme @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say it is also normal for an extreme narcissist of Trump ’ s description to exercise power with a lack of empathy and cruelty toward others—as Trump so often does—to paranoiacally reject any form of criticism as a personal assault , and to twist concepts like fairness and honesty out of recognition until they mean only what is good for him .
“ I do not believe that he will have the same concept of corruption as you or I would , ” said Bandy Lee , a Yale University psychiatrist and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which Malkin contributed , The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump : 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President .
“ He may be able to tell apart right from wrong , but the meaning these hold is far less , ” Lee said in an email .
“ For example , based on his non-objective use of the word ‘ fair , ’ he is likely to conceptualize a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens and the 2016 election as ‘ good for him ’ and thus ‘ fair.
’ Whatever does @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others overwhelming disadvantage ) would thus be ‘ unfair.
’ An objective sense of fairness is probably not only non-existent for him but intolerable.
” Clearly Trump was somewhat aware that what he was demanding of Zelensky—holding hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance and a White House meeting hostage to his demand that the Ukrainian leader announce an investigation into the Bidens and the Democrats—was not exactly kosher .
Hence the White House ’ s frenzied effort to withhold the whistleblower complaint about Ukraine from Congress , defying the law , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Congress announced it was investigating on Sept. 9 , 2019 , and the Ukraine security aid was mysteriously released .
But there is no indication that Trump has ever felt he did anything seriously wrong himself ; on the contrary , as press reports and investigators closed in , he felt that his enemies were unfairly attacking him once again .
This was a president who , literally a day after special counsel Robert Mueller ’ s testimony to Congress about the demonstrated wrongdoing of Russian interference , considered himself so in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sought to solicit from Ukraine ’ s new president , in the now-infamous July 25 , 2019 , phone call , precisely the kind of foreign interference in a U.S. election that Trump had been accused of seeking during the yearlong slog of the Mueller investigation .
Trump has managed to bring almost all of his fellow Republicans along with him , even those who acknowledge privately that he behaved abusively toward Ukraine and that he was incorrect in his beliefs about the country , just as the U.S. intelligence community has concluded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump loyalists concede .
“ I can tell you without any doubt it was the Russians who hacked into the DNC [ Democratic National Committee ] .
It was not the Ukrainians , ” Graham said .
But , again , the facts don ’ t really matter , Graham suggested : If Trump believes the Ukrainians were responsible , then he was justified in strong-arming Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Democrats and their leading candidate , Biden .
The willingness of nearly the entire Republican Party to publicly endorse Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , to argue all that really counts is what Trump believed , not what actually happened—is also hallmark of a political movement shaped by a leader with malignant narcissism , some mental health professionals say .
Such leaders manage to “ make their crazy ideas mainstream ideas , to shape and change the beliefs of society , ” said John Gartner , a Princeton- and Cornell-trained psychotherapist who has worked to overturn the American Psychiatric Association ’ s Goldwater rule , according to which professionals agree not to publicly diagnose someone they have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came into being after psychological assessments appeared about Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election . )
In this way , Trump has taken control of a party that once stood for fiscal restraint , free trade , and stable alliances but now , terrified of his wrath , subscribes to Trump ’ s nearly opposite views .
Privately , some Republicans say they wish they had some means of registering disapproval of Trump ’ s conduct toward Ukraine without voting for his removal from office .
But many of them continue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t approve of his behavior , it doesn ’ t rise to the level of ousting a president whose fate will be decided by voters less than 10 months from now .
And since the rules of impeachment don ’ t allow them to do anything but acquit or convict , Republicans almost certainly will , as a caucus , vote to acquit .
Trump ’ s narcissistic approach to the national interest has been amply in evidence in other ways .
He has brazenly used the presidency to boost his businesses and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the interests of the Trump Organization , putting up U.S. and other delegations at his hotels and golf courses , and proposing his Doral club in Miami as the venue for next year ’ s G-7 .
( He even expressed puzzlement when even his fellow Republicans pronounced themselves appalled by the idea ) .
He has spent most of his presidency seeking personal deals with key leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and short-shrifting long-established geopolitical traditions .
His ongoing confrontation with Iran @ @ @ @ @ @ @ negotiated multilateral 2015 nuclear deal ( which many of his top aides had urged him to fix rather than renounce ) appear to be mainly directed toward getting a new Trump-branded deal he can claim single-handedly saved the Middle East .
The evidence suggests , in other words , that Trump views not just the nation but the global system through the same narcissistic filter .
One of the mysteries of Trump ’ s character is that , from the beginning of his career , he ’ s plainly seen himself as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s putting on an act .
In scripted speeches and remarks , he makes a good show of advocacy for the same downtrodden Americans he often derides in private .
At the same time , Trump appears to genuinely embrace the conspiracy theories he advances—the idea of Ukraine ’ s involvement in 2016 itself began as a strange , unfounded internet meme—and he only doubles down the more he is questioned or attacked .
This too is evidence of a narcissistic and paranoid personality , Gartner said .
“ At various points Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I get away with this ?
’ He keeps discovering , ‘ Hey I can get away with this all right !
’ That ’ s the way a criminal thinks , ” he said .
What has boosted Trump ’ s political success is that he conveys a sense of sincerity in expressing his beliefs even about discredited ideas .
That is said to be the mark of all great salesmen : They don ’ t just pretend to believe in the quality of the product they ’ re selling , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the heart of Trump ’ s appeal : Though he lies all the time , according to media fact checkers , the lies may not be lies to him , and thus he appears all the more authentic to his supporters .
Although his life is built on fakery right down to his transplanted orange hair and his pretense that he is far wealthier and successful in business than he really is , people sense that on another level Trump is authentically himself .
He believes what he says .
That personal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else , what saves Trump from legal conviction in any impeachment trial .
It may be , in other words , something like the impeachment equivalent of being declared innocent by reason of insanity .
But for the nation , more dangerous days may lie ahead .
Experts warn that exoneration by the Senate may only open the door to more grandiosity by a president who seems to believe that he is his own law , with no one and nothing standing in his way .
Or as Schiff put it , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to stop .
”

After an exhausting six days of arguments and two days of questions in the first impeachment trial of a U.S. president ever to be held in an election year, the bottom line for Democrats remained fairly simple. Why should the U.S. Senate decide to remove President Donald Trump from office now, with the 2020 vote just nine months away? Because given Trump’s penchant for soliciting foreign interference in American elections, it’s unreasonable to expect he will stop in 2020, argued House impeachment lead manager Rep. Adam Schiff. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said in his closing remarks. “You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump.”
After an exhausting six days of arguments and two days of questions in the first impeachment trial of a U.S. president ever to be held in an election year, the bottom line for Democrats remained fairly simple. Why should the U.S. Senate decide to remove President Donald Trump from office now, with the 2020 vote just nine months away? Because given Trump’s penchant for soliciting foreign interference in American elections, it’s unreasonable to expect he will stop in 2020, argued House impeachment lead manager Rep. Adam Schiff. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said in his closing remarks. “You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump.”
But the president’s lawyers, at least some of them, are arguing in effect that this blending of personal and national interest is acceptable, or at least not impeachable—and that argument appears to be winning. During the question session on Wednesday, Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz insisted that all presidents identify the national interest with their personal political interest to some extent—going so far as to compare Trump to Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. “”Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest,” Dershowitz said, in an argument that stunned the chamber. “And mostly you’re right. Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
On the face of it, the big impeachment news of the week was the revelation that Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton has confirmed in his forthcoming book that Trump did indeed try to extort Ukraine into finding dirt on his political rival Joe Biden and the Democrats—thus bearing out the heart of the Democrats’ case for impeachment. But the bigger news was that the Bolton news didn’t really matter, and an early effort to make him the first witness in the trial quickly faded as even those Republicans who found Trump’s actions “inappropriate,” like retiring Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, said the allegations still do not meet the Constitution’s standard of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
On this central point Trump has brought the vast majority of the Republican Party along with him—in particular, those who will grant him inevitable acquittal in the Senate. Whether there was a quid pro quo or not, what mainly matters is that Trump really believed he was serving the nation’s interest, many of his defenders say. “The president believes that the Ukraine interfered in our election,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, even as he noted that the evidence was to the contrary. “From the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind,” added Graham, who once called Trump a “kook” and “unfit for office” but has since become one of his most outspoken defenders. “If he thought he was doing something wrong, he would probably shut up about it.”
But there’s the rub. Trump probably has a narcissistic personality disorder, some mental health professionals say, which means there may be little or no difference in his mind between what’s right for him and what’s right for the country—or in the present case, between what’s good for the United States in Ukraine and what’s good for Trump in Ukraine. His behavior is not that of any ordinary politician, but instead is symptomatic of someone suffering from pathological narcissism. “The more narcissistic someone is, the more they’re likely to view people and the world as less a separate entity or being, and more like an extension of their own body, like an arm or a leg. In that mindset, ‘What the U.S. needs and what I need are one and the same, because I am the country,’” said Craig Malkin, one of a group of mental health experts who—in defiance of their profession’s long-codified ethical guidelines that forbid diagnosis of a patient the therapist has not directly examined—have made public their conclusion that Trump has what the 20th-century psychologist Erich Fromm called “malignant narcissism.” This is a condition that “lies on the borderline between sanity and insanity,” as Fromm put it, and often characterizes would-be tyrants who impose their absolutist will on the state.
Long before conspiracy theorists planted the false idea in Trump’s head that Ukraine tried “tried to take me down,” as the president said (according to envoy Kurt Volker’s testimony last fall), he has been identifying threats to him personally as threats to the United States. And every indication is that he’s not just saying it, he believes it (or at least he’s never disavowed any of it). To Trump, critics in the media are “enemies of the people,” his enemies in Congress should be arrested for “treason,” and even the FBI, when it broke into the office of his erstwhile lawyer Michael Cohen to obtain evidence, had mounted an “attack on our country.”
Trump’s reaction to the impeachment charges against him has been little different. For weeks, diplomats, national security experts, and other officials have argued at great length that Trump sacrificed U.S. national interests in Ukraine—which a bipartisan consensus previously agreed meant supporting a democratic ally at war with authoritarian Russia—in pursuit of his personal political interest, and that this was an impeachable abuse of power. But the evidence suggests that Trump truly believes his effort to extort the Ukrainians into investigating former Vice President Biden and the Democrats was the right thing for the nation—because Ukraine posed, to his mind, a threat to him, the self-described savior of the nation, the man who in 2016 declared of America’s broken system, “I alone can fix it.”
He has also been consistent in his near-total identification of the national interest with his political fortunes. In their exhaustive recounting of the evidence of the Ukraine extortion scheme—which proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Trump sought to withhold U.S. support for Ukraine if that nation’s government didn’t announce it would help him discredit one of his leading political rivals in 2020—the Democratic impeachment managers showed repeatedly that, even after he was caught, the president never changed his position. His call with Zelensky was “perfect,” impeachment is an attempted “coup,” the Democrats and Bidens are the guilty ones, and Schiff and his fellow Democrats are “major sleazebags.” Trump’s unprecedented contempt for congressional prerogatives—the basis of the second article of impeachment—is yet more evidence that Trump genuinely believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president,” as he once put it.
As Schiff said in his closing argument, the only way Trump can accuse those who oppose or criticize him of being traitors “is if you believe you are the state. And anything that contradicts you is treason.”
Or, as the eloquent Schiff said in his closing argument in the impeachment trial a week ago, the only way Trump can accuse those who oppose or criticize him, like the Ukraine whistleblower, of being traitors “is if you believe you are the state. And anything that contradicts you is treason.”
Narcissists of Trump’s ilk also tend to embrace conspiracy theories about imagined threats to them, even if there are scant facts to support such theories, because objective truth has no real meaning to them; instead, reality is filtered through their grandiose sense of self-importance. “It’s quite possible that he believes the Ukrainians tried to take him down, because embracing paranoid conspiracy theories help ward off a far more threatening possibility: that his failings are his own, and not due to outside attack,” Malkin said. “That thought, in and of itself, is intolerable for extreme narcissists to entertain.”
Experts in psychology say it is also normal for an extreme narcissist of Trump’s description to exercise power with a lack of empathy and cruelty toward others—as Trump so often does—to paranoiacally reject any form of criticism as a personal assault, and to twist concepts like fairness and honesty out of recognition until they mean only what is good for him.
“I do not believe that he will have the same concept of corruption as you or I would,” said Bandy Lee, a Yale University psychiatrist and the chief author of the 2017 book to which Malkin contributed, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
“He may be able to tell apart right from wrong, but the meaning these hold is far less,” Lee said in an email. “For example, based on his non-objective use of the word ‘fair,’ he is likely to conceptualize a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens and the 2016 election as ‘good for him’ and thus ‘fair.’ Whatever does not give him overwhelming advantage (and others overwhelming disadvantage) would thus be ‘unfair.’ An objective sense of fairness is probably not only non-existent for him but intolerable.”
Clearly Trump was somewhat aware that what he was demanding of Zelensky—holding hundreds of millions of dollars in security assistance and a White House meeting hostage to his demand that the Ukrainian leader announce an investigation into the Bidens and the Democrats—was not exactly kosher. Hence the White House’s frenzied effort to withhold the whistleblower complaint about Ukraine from Congress, defying the law, and to block nearly every other inquiry—until Congress announced it was investigating on Sept. 9, 2019, and the Ukraine security aid was mysteriously released.
“Based on his non-objective use of the word ‘fair,’ he is likely to conceptualize a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens and the 2016 election as ‘good for him’ and thus ‘fair.’ ”
But there is no indication that Trump has ever felt he did anything seriously wrong himself; on the contrary, as press reports and investigators closed in, he felt that his enemies were unfairly attacking him once again. This was a president who, literally a day after special counsel Robert Mueller’s testimony to Congress about the demonstrated wrongdoing of Russian interference, considered himself so in the right and free of constraint that he sought to solicit from Ukraine’s new president, in the now-infamous July 25, 2019, phone call, precisely the kind of foreign interference in a U.S. election that Trump had been accused of seeking during the yearlong slog of the Mueller investigation.
Trump has managed to bring almost all of his fellow Republicans along with him, even those who acknowledge privately that he behaved abusively toward Ukraine and that he was incorrect in his beliefs about the country, just as the U.S. intelligence community has concluded. That is a point even some Trump loyalists concede. “I can tell you without any doubt it was the Russians who hacked into the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. It was not the Ukrainians,” Graham said. But, again, the facts don’t really matter, Graham suggested: If Trump believes the Ukrainians were responsible, then he was justified in strong-arming Zelensky into announcing an investigation into the Democrats and their leading candidate, Biden.
The willingness of nearly the entire Republican Party to publicly endorse Trump’s way of thinking—in other words, to argue all that really counts is what Trump believed, not what actually happened—is also hallmark of a political movement shaped by a leader with malignant narcissism, some mental health professionals say. Such leaders manage to “make their crazy ideas mainstream ideas, to shape and change the beliefs of society,” said John Gartner, a Princeton- and Cornell-trained psychotherapist who has worked to overturn the American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater rule, according to which professionals agree not to publicly diagnose someone they have not treated personally. (The rule came into being after psychological assessments appeared about Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election.) In this way, Trump has taken control of a party that once stood for fiscal restraint, free trade, and stable alliances but now, terrified of his wrath, subscribes to Trump’s nearly opposite views.
Privately, some Republicans say they wish they had some means of registering disapproval of Trump’s conduct toward Ukraine without voting for his removal from office. But many of them continue to believe that while they don’t approve of his behavior, it doesn’t rise to the level of ousting a president whose fate will be decided by voters less than 10 months from now. And since the rules of impeachment don’t allow them to do anything but acquit or convict, Republicans almost certainly will, as a caucus, vote to acquit.
Trump’s narcissistic approach to the national interest has been amply in evidence in other ways. He has brazenly used the presidency to boost his businesses and personal brand, refusing to recuse himself from the interests of the Trump Organization, putting up U.S. and other delegations at his hotels and golf courses, and proposing his Doral club in Miami as the venue for next year’s G-7. (He even expressed puzzlement when even his fellow Republicans pronounced themselves appalled by the idea). He has spent most of his presidency seeking personal deals with key leaders such as Chinese President Xi Jinping and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and short-shrifting long-established geopolitical traditions. His ongoing confrontation with Iran and his casual discarding of the painstakingly negotiated multilateral 2015 nuclear deal (which many of his top aides had urged him to fix rather than renounce) appear to be mainly directed toward getting a new Trump-branded deal he can claim single-handedly saved the Middle East. The evidence suggests, in other words, that Trump views not just the nation but the global system through the same narcissistic filter.
“At various points Trump has been testing us: ‘Can I get away with this?’ He keeps discovering, ‘Hey I can get away with this all right!’ That’s the way a criminal thinks.”
One of the mysteries of Trump’s character is that, from the beginning of his career, he’s plainly seen himself as a performer who’s aware he’s putting on an act. In scripted speeches and remarks, he makes a good show of advocacy for the same downtrodden Americans he often derides in private. At the same time, Trump appears to genuinely embrace the conspiracy theories he advances—the idea of Ukraine’s involvement in 2016 itself began as a strange, unfounded internet meme—and he only doubles down the more he is questioned or attacked. This too is evidence of a narcissistic and paranoid personality, Gartner said. “At various points Trump has been testing us: ‘Can I get away with this?’ He keeps discovering, ‘Hey I can get away with this all right!’ That’s the way a criminal thinks,” he said.
What has boosted Trump’s political success is that he conveys a sense of sincerity in expressing his beliefs even about discredited ideas. That is said to be the mark of all great salesmen: They don’t just pretend to believe in the quality of the product they’re selling, they really believe. Hence the strange paradox at the heart of Trump’s appeal: Though he lies all the time, according to media fact checkers, the lies may not be lies to him, and thus he appears all the more authentic to his supporters. Although his life is built on fakery right down to his transplanted orange hair and his pretense that he is far wealthier and successful in business than he really is, people sense that on another level Trump is authentically himself. He believes what he says.
That personal conviction will be, more than anything else, what saves Trump from legal conviction in his impeachment trial. It may be, in other words, something like the impeachment equivalent of being declared innocent by reason of insanity.
But for the nation, more dangerous days may lie ahead. Experts warn that exoneration by the Senate may only open the door to more grandiosity by a president who seems to believe that he is his own law, with no one and nothing standing in his way.
Or as Schiff put it, “You know it’s not going to stop.”
Jan. 31: This story has been updated.