(eerie music) (gentle piano music) - In the armed forces, there's a nuclear
weapons program called the Personnel
Reliability Program. Do you have personal defects? Do you have financial problems
which could compromise you? Do you have a problem
with infidelity? This is the program
where they screen you to see if you can be trusted to hold an M16 to
guard the truck that might carry
a nuclear weapon. Not that it will, that it might. That also is the program
where they determine whether you're an Air Force
missile flight officer, whether you can go
down into a bunker and be responsible
to turn the keys on a Minuteman-III missile. - [Announcer] The Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - That is an entire
scaled evaluation program that shows your
personal reliability to carry out your orders and
to do the highest risk things like fly a B-52
bomber or B-2 bomber and drop a nuclear weapon. The President of
the United States doesn't have to meet
any of these parameters, none of them whatsoever, because the electorate
choosing you clears you into all
of these programs. (crowd cheering) We have a president
of the United States who was duly elected,
he was put into office, given the great faith of
the people who voted him in. - I Donald John Trump
do solemnly swear. - I Donald John Trump
do solemnly swear. - And if we look at
the great presidents of the United States, there's one unifying thing: they maintained the continuity in how the Constitution
was upheld and defended. - [John] So help me God. - So help me God. - Congratulations,
Mr. President. (crowd cheering) (upbeat music) - At first, it was just
political name calling and insults suggesting
Donald Trump was a lunatic. - This man is a
pathological liar. - Guarantee I have a vocabulary
better than all of 'em, I know I have an IQ
better than all of them. I'm very highly educated. I know words. I have the best words but there's no better
word than stupid. Oh, I don't know what I said. I don't remember. I could stand in the
middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I
wouldn't lose any voters, okay? - [Man] But more recently, the conversation about the
president's mental state has taken a more serious tone. - I can't explain
this crazy behavior, but I can call it crazy. - [Donald] We've taken
this big, beautiful ship and it's being turned
around very quickly. - [Man] I'm not a
psychologist or a psychiatrist but the guy needs therapy. - USA! USA! I am the chosen one. - [Man] Almost everyone
seems to have an opinion. Could Donald Trump
be unfit for office? (chattering) - Good evening. Thank you guys for coming. I know our first
official press briefing is gonna to be on Monday but I wanted to give
you a few updates on the President's activities. But before I get to
the news of the day, I think I'd like to discuss
a little bit of the coverage in the past 24 hours. Yesterday, at a time when
our nation and the world was watching the peaceful
transition of power, some members of the
media were engaged in deliberately false reporting. Photographs of the
inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a
way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on
the National Mall. No one had numbers. This was the largest audience to ever witness an
inauguration, period, both in person and
around the globe. Even the New York Times
printed a photograph. - Why put him out there
for the very first time and utter a falsehood? Why did he do that? It undermines the credibility of the entire White House
press office on day one. - No it doesn't. Don't be so overly
dramatic about it, Chuck. You're saying it's a falsehood and they're giving Sean
Spicer, our Press Secretary, gave alternative facts to that but the point remains
that there is... - Wait a minute,
alternative facts? Look, alternative facts are
not facts, they're falsehoods. (whimsical music) - My name's George Conway. I'm a lawyer, I'm a litigator. I principally practice
securities litigation. I've argued appeals including a big case
in the Supreme Court. My wife was Donald
Trump's Campaign Manager and now is Counselor
to the President. - And he said a lot
about these instances. - I was a Republican
since probably about 1980 when Ronald Reagan
was elected president. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and I almost took a job in
the Justice Department myself to run the Civil Division of
the Department of Justice. Donald Trump wasn't
my first choice among the Republican nominees but I was hopeful that
he would calm down and get better as time went on. He started to show a
little more discipline. He would only go off the
rails every third day instead of every day, but the problem was once he got into the
supreme position of power, he lost some of his
incentive to be disciplined and I'm thinking at
this point in time, "What is wrong with him?" Donald Trump is like a practical
joke that got out of hand. I mean, that's the problem. I mean, I didn't go
into the administration for a lot of reasons but the fundamental
reason was it was a mess. I guess I must've been googling
Trump and mental health because I clearly thought there's something
seriously wrong with him and I came across an article
in Rolling Stone magazine, Is Trump a Malignant Narcissist? And a number of people like
Dr. Gartner were interviewed and as soon as I read
that I realized that's it. You cannot understand his
presidency without knowing this. - My name is John Gartner. I'm a psychologist. I taught in the
Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins
University for 28 years. I've written some books and I'm
the founder of Duty to Warn, an organization of mental
health professionals that believe that Donald
Trump should be removed because he's
psychologically unfit. My name is Lance Dodes. I'm a psychiatrist
and a psychoanalyst. I've spent most of
my research career looking at compulsive
and addictive behavior and I've become interested in
the importance of psychology in politics in recent years because of the threat
to our country. - My name is Justin Frank, a psychoanalyst
and a psychiatrist. I've been in practice in
DC for about 40 years. Is Donald Trump fit to
serve as the President and Commander in Chief? I can answer that
with one word, no. Trump is a sociopath,
a sadist, a con artist, a racist, a misogynist,
a sexist in general, and I think it is a problem. - How dare liberals,
people on the left, try to undo democracy
by accusing a president of being mentally ill
without any basis? Look, these psychiatrists now
who are trying to diagnose without ever having met the man. - This is not the first time the left has gone
at Republicans. They did the same thing
to Barry Goldwater, they did the same
thing to Ronald Reagan. - Over 1,000 psychiatrists
diagnosed Barry Goldwater and said he was mentally ill, they were then rebuked by the American
Psychiatric Association and said, "Do not make diagnosis
without seeing the patient." And they continue
to do it today. (giddy music) - [Narrator] The
election campaign's in full swing in New Hampshire, bellwether state of the nation. It goes to the
polls on March 10th and growing support
for Goldwater. - So, the Goldwater rule
has an interesting history. In 1964, Barry Goldwater
ran for president and a now defunct
magazine, Fact Magazine, did a survey of psychiatrists
and published an article saying psychiatrists think
that Goldwater is unfit. Goldwater sued them and he won and as it turns out,
actually, he deserved to win. It was libelous. He was not unstable. And the psychiatrists who wrote those statements
about Goldwater, it's important for
people to understand the history of our field, this was in the '60s
when Freudian psychiatry really ruled the roost. - This is what I've discovered. We are constantly
bedeviled by powerful, unconscious forces
in our beings. - [John] And so their
explanations were things like he's a latent homosexual, he's been scarred by
his potty-training, he has an unresolved
Oedipus complex. - [Narrator] Based
on unconscious hate caused by childhood jealousy. (upbeat music) - Freudian psychiatry, though it has many important
and positive aspects and helped move the
profession forward, it's not been used well in terms of its
analyzing public figures. I actually interviewed
the last living member of the ethics committee that
formed the Goldwater rule and he said these were
obviously wild speculations, they weren't founded in fact, and so they embarrassed
the profession because they were
really idle speculations and so that's why
they passed that rule. He said to me, "We never intended it
to be a gag order," meaning that psychiatrists
could never speak up about public figures, "We just didn't want them
making unfounded statements." - The Goldwater rule today
has been incorrectly extended and the incorrect part about it is that it now is being
used to suppress speech about things that are knowable. It's as nonsensical as
saying an orthopedic surgeon shouldn't be able to watch
somebody in a football injury and say that person
probably has an ACL tear, he can say it because he's
an expert in the field. Something happened,
he observed it. - And what people
need to understand is that actually the
psychiatric interview is the least reliable
method of making a diagnosis because our current
diagnostic system, the DSM, is based on observable,
behavioral criteria. Well, when you meet with
someone they can lie to you. So, they can say, "Oh,
I never did that," or, "I don't do that." But if you can actually
observe their behavior, if you can follow them around, if you can watch them on TV, if you can read
their social media, if you could talk to all
their significant others, you'd probably get a much
more reliable indicator of how they behave. - I'm not concerned
about anything with the Russian investigation
because it's a hoax. That's enough. Put down the mic.
- Mr. President. - I am more confident in my
diagnosis of Donald Trump than any diagnosis
I've ever made before because I have more information. - By outward appearance, you're 10 years older
than you were a year ago. - Some weariness
has bit at my bones. - It's not true that having any kind of
mental health disorder would make someone
a bad president. One of my favorite books is a book called
"Lincoln's Melancholy", about how Lincoln's being
a depressive personality is part of what allowed
him to win the Civil War. He had a capacity to
endure mental suffering that was baked into who he was and so the enormous
burden of the Civil War was something he was
actually able to endure. - I have seen what's happened
in this last four years when in my state, when
people lose their jobs there's a good chance I'll
know them by their names. - Bill Clinton, I wrote a
biography of Bill Clinton, about how his hypomania was
part of what energized him in terms of his charisma
and his creativity, it also had to do with his
impulse control problems and his hypersexuality, so it was a double-edged sword but it doesn't disqualify
someone from being president if they have a
psychological disorder, but Donald Trump
shows clear signs of the most severe
personality disorder, it's called malignant narcissism and was first introduced
by Erich Fromm who escaped the Nazis and
spent a lot of his life trying to understand
the psychology of evil. And he formulated this diagnosis
of malignant narcissism which has four components:
narcissism, paranoia, anti-social personality
disorder and sadism. I think everybody knows Donald
Trump's a narcissist by now. - I will be the
greatest jobs producer that God ever created. I know more about ISIS than
the generals do, believe me. - Who are you consulting
with consistently so that you're ready on day one? - [Donald] I'm speaking
with myself, number one, because I have a
very good brain. - But it's the other
three components that make him truly dangerous, because many politicians
are narcissistic but he's also paranoid. So all of his crazy
conspiracy theories. - The state of Hawaii released my official long-form
birth certificate. - [Moderator] The
birth certificate You continued to tell the story and question the president's
legitimacy in 2012, '13, '14, '15. - Yeah. - How about this one
about Ted Cruz's father? - [Donald] His father was
with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's being shot
and nobody even brings it up. - And his sense
of being a victim. - [Reporter] Mr. Trump turned
his sights on Google tweeting, "They have it rigged
for me and others "so that almost all
stories and news is bad." - And his demonization of
anyone who disagrees with him. - Nasty guy. Now I know why he doesn't
have one endorsement from any of his colleagues. - All right, John,
I get to respond. - [Moderator] Senator has
picked from the buffet there. - He's a nasty guy. - These are all signs
of a paranoid process, anti-social
personality disorder, or what used to be called
psychopathy or sociopathy. It's constant lying, well,
he's the most documented liar in human history, I
think, at this point. It's violating the
rights of other people and exploiting other people. So, sexual assault
would be violating the rights of other people, not paying your bills, or defrauding people
through Trump University would be an example of
exploiting other people and it's breaking laws
and breaking norms. Well, he's broken every
norm of the presidency, that's one of the reasons
he's so out of control. There's certain norms we
thought no one would ever break but it's part of his personality
disorder to break norms and to break laws and
it's a lack of remorse. He has no guilt or anxiety about the destructive
things that he does. - Impeachment for that? It was beautiful. It was just a
perfect conversation. - And the fourth component that Erich Fromm
identified is sadism, truly taking pleasure
in harming, humiliating, and degrading
other human beings. If you read his tweets, I wrote an introduction to
a book about his tweets, I had to read to read
thousands of his tweets and they literally made me ill because it was just
one vicious attack and humiliating insult
after another after another. I was like how can
someone even come up with thousands of vicious things to say about so many people? But he enjoys degrading
and humiliating and insulting other people. - I do think that we
have enough evidence that most psychiatrists would
feel like it's important to warn about Trump. We have a duty to warn. - Psychologists, and really all
mental health professionals, have the duty to protect society if there's a risk to society. (eerie music) - So the Tarasoff
case was in the 1970s. A patient said to
a psychologist, "I'm gonna go home and
murder my girlfriend." The psychologist didn't
warn the potential victim and the patient went home
and killed the girlfriend and it's now the
law in all 50 states that if you are
aware that a patient might be a danger to someone, confidentiality
goes out the window, and confidentiality is
one of our core values but it's more important
to warn someone who could be harmed than it is to maintain
even our core value of confidentiality. Trump is not my patient, he's not saying I'm gonna
go kill my girlfriend but the number of
people who are at risk, the number of people who could
be harmed isn't one person, it's hundreds of
millions of people. So if we didn't speak up,
that would be the morality. What annoys me about
the Goldwater rule the way it's being
interpreted now, is it's being interpreted
as if we are being unethical by speaking out and
warning the public when in fact I
asked this question to whom will history be kinder? Those who spoke up during
the age when Trump rose, or those who were silent? - I want the cleanest
water on Earth. I want the cleanest
air on Earth, and that's what we're doing and I'm an
environmentalist as you, a lot of people don't
understand that. I have done more environmental
impact statements probably than anybody that's
I guess I can say definitely because I've done many,
many, many of them more than anybody that's
ever been president, or vice president, or anything
even close to president, and I think I know more
about the environment than most people. (upbeat music) - Gaslighting is a crucial
tool of abusive personalities. It is lying to someone in a way that makes them doubt their
own perception of reality. - I'm Dr. Ramani Durvasula. I'm a professor of psychology. It's an interesting place where the origin of this
term gaslight came from, it came from what was
a play in the '30s and then became a film
called "Gaslight", and it was about a man who was slowly trying
to drive his wife mad. - A moment ago, the gas dimmed as it does when someone turns
on another light in the house. Did you turn on another
light, Elizabeth? - No, ma'am, there's no
one in the house but us. - [Ramani] The gaslights kept
getting turned up and down and he was denying
having done it. - You're going to
see a doctor, Madam. - No. - [Husband] More than one
doctor tomorrow morning. - Very common sorts of
gaslighting statements are things like, it
never happened that way, you must be losing your mind. They'll literally say things
happened that didn't happen, I didn't do that,
I didn't say that. Many people call gaslighting
a form of emotional abuse because what you're really
doing is setting out to confuse another person. When you confuse
someone like that, you really do almost render
them more vulnerable to you and actually easier to coerce because now they don't
really know which way is up. It's as though you've
turned gravity off and turned them upside down. - I don't know if you remember
the point where Trump said, "Listen, don't pay attention
to what you're seeing, "don't pay attention to
what you're hearing." - What you're seeing
and what you're reading is not what's happening. - And it's interesting
because as human beings we're actually
vulnerable to this. There's a famous experience
in social psychology called the Asch Experiment. The Asch Experiment is they
show lines on a screen, one is clearly
longer than the other and they ask them
which line is longer and they get it correct
100% of the time. - That's two. - Then you bring in
four confederates who work for the experimenter but you pretend they're also
in the study as subjects and they all say that the
shorter line is longer. - [Man] Three. - [Three] Three. - Three. - Three? - 50% of the time the person
will reverse themselves and say, "You're right, the
shorter line is the longer one." We're very subject
to the influence, our reality testing is very
subject to the influence of social pressures. So when he does these things that are blatantly
destructive and disordered and yet people act
as if they're normal and they poo-poo
these observations, eventually we begin to
quest ourselves and think, "Oh, maybe I'm wrong. "Maybe it actually is normal." - What has been so disturbing is that we've discovered,
at least some of us, that it's much quicker to demolish a building
than to build one and Trump understands that and I think he can demolish a
lot of our faith as a nation in our institutions, he can demolish the
effectiveness of institutions, he can certainly psychologically
confuse and gaslight people like nobody's business. (cameras clicking) - Thank you. Thank you very much. I said during the transition,
I'll say it up here, I think there's been, at times, a disconnect between the
way we see the president and how much we
love the president and the way some of you
perhaps see the president. I certainly see the American
probably see the president the way I do, but we wanna get that
message out there and to use a Wall
Street expression, there might be an
arbitrage spread between how well we are doing and how well some of you
guys think we're doing and we're gonna work hard
to close that spread. My name's Anthony Scaramucci. I spent 11 days
in the White House as the president's
Communications Director. Trump is wickedly smart. The guy made it to the American
presidency, he's not stupid. You can hate Trump 'cause he
says assholeish things, okay? And he's an obnoxious
guy at times, but what you're missing is
that he's now a reflection of the cultural zeitgeist, he's an avatar of that anger. So when he's lighting
people up on Twitter, there's a very large group of
people in the United States that are actually giggling
and they enjoy it. - [Interviewer] What are
you earliest memories of Donald Trump? - My earliest memories of
Donald Trump are actually 1983, during the Christmas season
I visited the Trump Tower. - [Narrator] The Trump
Tower when it's completed, will be $400 million worth
of high-priced apartments, commercial space and boutiques. - What's happened is phenomenal. I've never seen
anything to the extent that I have in New York. It now, from a real
estate standpoint, has probably become the
hottest city in the world. - That building was
a brand new building in the center of New York and it was a lot of
publicity and fanfare. It's got brass and
a ton of pink marble and it's a modern structure, and he did a great
job marketing it. He sold out the condominiums and he built for
himself a triplex which literally looks like
Louis XIV smoked crystal meth and then decorated it for him. I mean, it's ridiculous. Walk into his office, he had a ton of pictures
of himself on the wall, ton of magazine covers and
all that sort of stuff. I read "The Art of the Deal"
when I was in law school when it first came out, and I said, "Okay, this
guy's got it goin' on." - Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the author
of this book right here, "Trump: The Art of the
Deal", Donald J. Trump. (audience applauding) At the beginning of the show, I said you either love
him or you hate him. Now, do you find
that that's true or does everybody love you
or does everybody hate you? - No, most people love me and a few really have great
distaste for me, David. - And why is it that
those people, that few, would not care for you? Because you're so successful?
- I can't imagine. No, no, I don't think so. It's just I sort of speak
my mind a little bit, a little bit like
you in that respect. - Yeah.
- A little bit like you. - A little bit like me. - Not too much, hopefully. - What were you like as a kid? - Very normal in
a lot of respects, but a very solid child. - [John] He grew up in Queens. His father was making good
money as he was being raised. He built a lot of lower
middle-income housing on the border of
Brooklyn and Queens. - Fred Trump was a
successful businessman, he made a lot of money and
he was smart at what he did. However, Fred Trump was
a dishonest, crooked guy, who stole from the
federal government, who wouldn't allow black people to move into his apartments. His father said, "You've
got to be a killer. "You've gotta be king,
you've gotta be tough," and he took that in. - Is what you do something
you've always wanted to do? I know you're father
was and still is a real estate developer. - My father was in
real estate business and I've been in that
and other businesses and different things. I like what I'm doing. I just enjoy what I'm doing. I love the real estate business. I learned a lot from my father,
more than anything else, I learned a lot. - He wanted to make
a name for himself and he believed
early on his career that having a lot of publicity and a lot of profile
was gonna be good for the sales and marketing
of his apartment buildings and condominiums and
things that he was doing, but he also wanted to have
a unique celebrity persona and so Howard Stern
represented that for him. (funky music) - You once said that the
best way to treat a woman is to treat her like doody. - No, I never said that
- You never did? - But it was attributed to me. - So you never did say that? - No, I never said that but
it was attributed to me. - [Howard] I see, so, you
treat women with respect? - I can't say that either. - All right, good, all right. Somewhere in between. - [Donald] I do. I treat women with
great respect. - Treat women somewhere
in between respect and doo-doo. - My initial impressions
of Donald Trump, like everybody else,
I was starstruck. Back then, speaking
about women that way it was more the norm. - Where's Marla go? - I think we have to
put Marla right up here. - Come on, let's do that. Let's take down Frederique. - I went to a fundraiser right after Ivana
and Donald divorced so I was excited
that he was there. I went up to him and I said, "Hello, I'm a huge
Howard Stern fan "and I wanted to
introduce myself." And he said, "Why
would I speak to you "when there's so many
beautiful women here? "I wouldn't even let
you suck my dick." (gaping music) - One of the problems here is that Donald Trump
doesn't have empathy and that's not a
modest statement, he literally has no empathy. He does not feel
emotions like care and... - [News Anchor]
He's a sociopath? - Well, as I've said since
2016 in The New Yorker when he started to
run for president, yes, he is a sociopath. There is no question. He's a sociopath meaning
he neither has a conscience nor does he have a heart. - You make it sound
like "Blade Runner" when the replicant knows
you've found him out and he doesn't feel
anything anyway. - He doesn't feel anything. (gun firing) - Empathy is a
normal human trait, it's actually normal
in all mammals. It starts in childhood
with a parent and a child and it continues
throughout society, it's what glues people together instead of just fighting
against each other. Almost everybody has
empathy, but not everybody. People who don't have empathy are the people that we call
sociopaths or psychopaths. - That sounds like a very
destructive business philosophy. - They often were
treated cruelly. They were treated without
empathy themselves. - You talk in your book
about getting even, the importance of getting even. Is revenge sweet? - I believe strongly
in getting even. If somebody has hurt you, if somebody has gone out
of their way to hurt you, I think that if you
have the opportunity you should certainly
go out of your way to do a number on them and I've had more criticism
about that one statement in my book than any
other statement, the clergy has
called, the ministers, the priests, the rabbis, they've all said, "What
a terrible thing to say, "that's against our teachings." I just believe it, I believe
in an eye for an eye. - If you don't have
normal empathy, you're going to mistreat people
because they don't matter, there's an abscense of loyalty. The absence of loyalty is a sign of anti-social
personality disorder. Loyalty at its best means
I care about this person, I value this person, so I will stick by this person. If you have a person
without empathy, what you find is that
loyalty disappears as soon as the other
person crosses them. As soon as somebody says,
"I'm not with you anymore," or, "I disagree," it flips from you are
the greatest person to you are a horrible person,
you are a worthless person, and I will attack you,
I will destroy you. - Some of the people that
were most loyal to me are people that I
didn't think would be, some of the people that
were least loyal to me are people that are...
- You gotta. - I think I would've
treated 'em differently, I think I would've treated
different groups differently, I would've wiped the floor
with the guys weren't loyal, which I will now
do which is great. You know I love getting
even with people but, - You're gonna get
even with some people because they...
- Yeah, if given the opportunity, I will get even with some
people that were disloyal to me. - Here comes one of the
things they say about you is that there ticks within
you a vindictiveness. - The people who
climb to the top by squashing other people, those are what we call
a successful sociopath. Sociopaths can be successful
because they are conmen. If you're a conman, you're convincing them that
you are much better, greater, more caring, more
honest than you are. - My name's Rick Reilly,
I'm a golf writer, and I've known Trump
for 35 years maybe. (upbeat music) Trump is among our best
golfing presidents. - [Crowd Member] Oh, nice. - For a 72-year-old guy,
Trump is a good golfer. He's got a really good,
powerful move through the ball and he hits it a long way
and his putting is good, he's a very wristy sort
of old-school putter. Cheating in golf at
all is completely wrong because it's the easiest
sport to cheat at. There's no refs,
there's no umps. You could cheat every
shot if you wanted but it reveals your
character that you don't, or it reveals your
character that you do and he cheats all the time. - I actually played
golf with him with Anthony Anderson one day. - [Seth] Gotcha. - And we were all
playing together and we clearly saw him
hit a ball, hook a ball, into a lake at Trump
National in Jersey and his caddy told
him he found it. (Seth laughs) - People don't know this but
he jerry rigs his golf carts to go really fast. He has somebody do that. Only one golf cart at
every course he owns goes about 30 miles an
hour and that's his, it's number one, everyone else goes about
15 to 18 miles per hour. So he can hit the
ball, zip he's out, and you're still,
"Hey, where's Trump?" You hit, you hit. By then he can kick the
ball, move the ball, take it out of lakes, whatever. There's your ball. Usually, you would put a mark
down and pick up the ball. What he does, he
secretly puts the marker on the end of the putter and then he looks
like he's marking it but really now the mark
is three feet closer, that's a way easier putt. He tried to cheat Tiger Woods
in a round of golf once, Tiger freaking Woods. He's off to the right. He's playing
against Tiger Woods. They each have a partner. He chokes one flat
into the water, splash. He says to his partner, "Throw me another
one, they didn't see." I'm like, "That's Tiger Woods." - Tiger, we are inspired by everything you have
become and attained. The job you've
done is incredible. - He's telling people he's
won club championships that he didn't even play in. He won a club championship that's being played in
Bedminster, New Jersey, when he was playing
in Philadelphia and he called in and said, "Hey, what won the club
championship today?" And the guy goes, "Ah,
75, Joe Shmoe won it." "Oh, I shot 73 today,
make me the champion." And the pro's like, "Ha, what?" "Yeah, make me the champion. "I played better here today." So, Joe Shmoe's name
comes off the wall, maybe one of the great
moments of his life and Trump's name goes up and this has happened
over and over again. And then he won at
least six or seven times tournaments where
he was the only guy playing in the tournament. He'll buy a new golf course, play the first round
by himself and Melania, and unless Melania gets hot,
he's gonna be the winner and so if you go to
any of his courses his first few
years it's just him because no one else played. As a writer, I
love Donald Trump. I loved him 'cause he
would say anything. He was like, "Yeah, I
banged Marilyn Monroe "and I punched out Sinatra." And we're like, "Yeah,
what else you got?" Because he'd say anything. But as an American, I
don't like him at all. He terrifies me. If he's gonna cheat at golf, you don't think he's
gonna cheat on his taxes? You don't think he's
gonna cheat on his wives? You don't think he's gonna
cheat to win an election? You don't think he's gonna
cheat to stop an investigation? You don't think he's gonna
cheat to break rules, to get information
from foreign countries? My God, he just
admitted he does it. - I'm Bill Kristol. I came to Washington
over 30 years ago to work in the Reagan
Administration. I was Chief of Staff
to the Vice President in the George H.W.
Bush White House so I worked in government, worked in some
Republican politics, edited The Weekly Standard
for a little over two decades. - I'm Richard Painter. I'm a law professor at the
University of Minnesota. I was the Chief White
House Ethics Lawyer for President George W. Bush. Most of my life I was
in the Republican party. - I'm Malcom Nance, a former
U.S. Intelligence officer. Started out actually
in cryptology and sort of an expert in all things related to
foreign intelligence operations, counterterrorism, and now
Russian intelligence activities in the United States. - What a great looking group. We're taking some pictures? - We can just move right along. - The traits that are
important in a leader vary but there are some
absolute constants and the way to look
at them is the titles and the core values that we
see for each armed service, honor, courage,
commitment, country, duty, service above self,
excellence in all that we do, always faithful,
always prepared. These are some of
the core values that we entrust in our
national military leaders and those should be
the same core values that we should have in
our political leaders. - To be a good leader, a person has to first
of all recognize that other people have
rights and individualities that you need to
take into account. You appreciate who they are
and what's important to them. The problem arises in leadership when you have a person
who does not appreciate that others are there
as independent folks but who are there to serve you. - We expect leaders to
bring people together, to try to unify the
country as best they can. The number of attacks
that this president is making on Twitter
are astronomical, and then the attacks on
the media on top of that. - I've never really liked
the Trump is an idiot, Trump is a buffoon aspect
of the anti-Trump rhetoric. I think it does diminish
more than it should some of the real
dangers he poses. - [Interviewer] Do you think
Donald Trump is fit to serve as Commander in Chief? - No, he's not fit to serve, I think either by
character or judgment, I don't agree with his policies, I don't think he
has much experience, he doesn't know how
government works but that can all be
tolerated or survived but in terms of his just
basic character and judgment, his basic sense of
putting the country first, at least in key moments, every politician has moments
where he cuts corners and watches out for
himself or herself but Trump is the opposite. I think it's a miracle
when he actually seems not to simply put his own
narrow interests first, and the recklessness,
and the demagoguery, so undercuts democratic norms
and constitutional processes that it's dangerous
to the country. - Why do they hate his guts? They hate his guts because he represents a
threat to their status quo. It's a very weird salad because it doesn't
fit in the box of the traditional
Republican establishment or the Democratic Party. I mean, he is a reflection of our politically
correct society. If I'm not allowed to
say what I'm thinking and everyone's got
me in a tight box, when I go into the voting
booth I'm gonna vote for him. The more politically
correct the society is, the greater the
reaction formation is of the orange man comes to town. - Why I support
Trump is pretty easy. He is the only president in
the last probably 40 years that has been for the people. - I had an epiphany at
my first Trump rally. I tell people that it was
a reconnection to my life because I grew up in a
blue-collar situation and I hustled my
way to some dough, went to Tufts and
Harvard Law School, I worked at Goldman, built two successful
hedge fund businesses, started to become
independently wealthy and then what ends up happening is you pick up the
collective biases of the people around you and so you don't really have
a good ear to the ground. And so when I got to
the first Trump rally, I crossed the
security perimeter, went in and started
talking to people, and I was like, "Oh, my God, "Mr. Trump is talking to
the people I grew up with." And these are people that
economically desperate. We went from a
economically middle class, and lower middle class, working class
aspirational society to a desperational
society in 35 years and I can explain what happened through the forces of
trade and globalism and our mistakes about
repositioning manufacturing away from the United States, all of those things that we did, some of it accidental,
some of it intentional, left a very large
group of people feeling very, very desperate about their economic
aspirations and their wellbeing and so that first
Trump rally I was like, "Whoa, there's a lot
of people out here "that are in a lot of
pain and I missed it." They have economic anxiety and they are going to vote
to reject the status quo, it's an anger-based vote and you have to work on
policy solutions to fix that, you have to heal that because when you create a breach in the social fabric
of the society, you create a systemic
rise of populism and you get all of
these unintended, or unexpected
political outcomes. I didn't see it myself,
but Trump saw it and so that's something you
have to give him credit for. Here is a billionaire
so you'd have to say this is a completely
out of touch dude but he saw it, I did not see it and I grew up with it. (gentle piano music) So, take a step back. We racked up $18
trillion of debt, we killed a million
people in the Middle East, we wounded 70,000
servicemen and women, 7,000 servicemen
and women have died and 22 are dying a day
in the United States from suicide related to
posttraumatic stress. Our educational system K-12 is
completely uneven and broken, our infrastructure
completely failed and broken, we have no industrial policy, there's nobody in
the United States as a public servant
that has a 10-year plan, they don't even have
a five-year plan. So the American population
is looking at the situation and saying, "Wait a minute,
this is not working for me." The stock market crashes and the very big bank is
about to go out of business, the government sends them
$1 trillion to protect them what about me? And so people feel that
the system is rigged and the system is
unfair towards them. You call these people
deplorable, white ethnocentrics, white nationalists, whatever those knuckle
dragging misnomers, those adjectives of
attack on these people, they tune you out. You'd be better served going into those areas of the
country and listening to them and say, "Hey, you know what? "I don't think you're a racist "or you're a white trash person, "I think you're a person "that really just wants your
family to have a better life "and as a public servant, "I'm gonna try to
come up with policies "that help you do that." David Axelrod said to me, "Remember, Anthony, people
will vote for somebody "they won't like. "They gave Richard Nixon a
landslide, nobody liked him, "they gave him a landslide. "What they don't like doing "is they don't like voting
for people that dislike them." See the difference? So you're standing at a podium
calling people deplorable, they're like, "Okay, give
my vote to the orange man. "Let's see how he does." (crowd cheering) - I think Trump speaks to people
in a really very good way. He is appealing to people
who are hurt, angry, they feel bypassed, ignored, and not taken seriously. The problem is that
he doesn't speak to the humanity of the people
who don't agree with him. - They're bringing drugs,
they're bringing crime, they're rapists. We're building that wall
and it's going up very big. (crowd cheering) - If you have any racism in you, Trump's gonna let
you bring it out. I get to be a jerk again. I get to be 1956 America again. - It's not a racist, this guy
treats everybody like shit. He's not a racist, okay? It doesn't matter if
you're black, white, lesbian, transgender, he
treats everybody the same. He went to Elton John's
wedding, he's an asshole, that's different
from being a racist. He's obviously an asshole. - It's so sad that so many
people have let their worst side come out through Trump. - Get the fuck out of here! Our country, motherfucker! Our country! Go fucking cook
my burrito, bitch! Trump! I love Trump! Fuck you! - Are you racist? - I am the least racist
person that you have ever met. I look at my African
American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest? You know what I'm talking about? I have a great relationship
with the blacks. I've always had a great
relationship with the blacks. I love the old days. You know what they used
to do to guys like that when they're in a
place like this? They'd be carried out
on a stretcher, folks. - I resisted for quite some time the notion that he is racist. It's more a function of his
narcissism than anything else, it's not really racism. That was sort of the
way I viewed Trump, that he doesn't like them
because they oppose him and that's really
what it's about, it's all function
of his narcissism and when he says things
that were supportive of some of those bad
people at Charlottesville, that's again a function
of his narcissism because the people who
were attacking those people were attacking him. - You had a group on
one side that was bad and you had a group
on the other side that was also very violent but you also had people
that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that
group, excuse me, excuse me, I saw the same
pictures as you did. - [Crowd] Russia is our friend. The south will rise again. - You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of the
statue Robert E. Lee. To them, a very, very
important statue. - [Crowd] You will
not replace us. - My mother came
from the Philippines. She came to the United
States in the late 1950s so I'm half Filipino
and the other half is some mixture
of Irish-Scottish, I'm classic American mutt. I think of myself as an American and I just assume
people aren't racist and I tend to forget that,
well, some people are and that's the
lesson with Trump is I just gave him the
benefit of the doubt. - These are people that
if they don't like it here they can leave. - But what he said about
those members of Congress, it brought back that memory of the one time I
really remember, wow, there really are
people like that here. I was with my mother
when I was a teenager in a parking lot in
Massachusetts when "Go back to your country." Sorry, and I found that to be, and it really came
home to me then. This man is a
racist, he is evil. - The Democrat Party
is now being led by four left wing extremists who reject everything
that we hold dear. - [Crowd] Send her back! Send her back! Send her back! Send her back! Send her back! - He's a racist
beyond any question. - [Crowd] USA! USA! - The first time I
saw Trump at a rally telling the crowd
that he loved them but he also hated
everybody else, when I saw him leading them in a loyalty oath using
emotions in that way I realized that this was
not politics as usual. - Raise you right
hand, everybody. Do you swear that you're going to vote for Donald
Trump tomorrow? Raise that hand. I love you, I love you. - He had talked about being
president for many, many years with his advisor of
the time, Steve Bannon, who is a White Nationalist,
an unabashed racist. Steve Bannon considers
himself a student of history and he likes to think that he
knows the cycles of history in terms of
resentment and racism and in this case,
he was correct. - [Narrator] This
is Italy in 1922. These marching men
are charter members of a new Italian political
party, the fascists, founded and led by a
flamboyant ex-editor, ex-army corporal,
ex-socialist, Benito Mussolini. His movement numbers
a million members including uniformed Black Shirts and Mussolini successfully
forces his leadership on the Italian king and people. Despite the fact
that 80% of Italians still support the
constitutional monarchy, his threats of
violence and revolution win him the office of Premier. On his first anniversary, with the aid of gunfire,
kidnapping and castor oil, he is absolute dictator. - At the time Mussolini came
on the political scene in 1919, Italy was a limited democracy. People had the vote,
women could vote, and Mussolini came in
as a revolutionary, as a rabble-rouser to
completely shake things up. One of the most crucial moments
of authoritarian capture is when traditional elites invite the
authoritarian-in-the-making Fascism was a very
violent movement. The political establishment, these traditional conservatives, were so frightened of the
continuation of the violence that they actually invited
him to become Prime Minister. He was invited into the office and they thought that
he could be contained and he would do their dirty work and then they could control him and tragically,
that was not to be. He attacked the press. He attacked democracy
as something that He joked about having
term limits removed. His arch enemy,
Giacomo Matteotti, the leader of the
Socialist Party, was seen being taken
away by fascist thugs. Eventually, his body was found but it was a huge outrage and a special
investigation was launched with the prosecutor and in the course of this, Mussolini's career
looked like it was over and he was being asked to resign and to end this, he declared a
dictatorship in January 1925. He changed the
special prosecutors. The assassins were given
light prison sentences and eventually pardoned because dictators love
to pardon criminals and the Italian society
was never the same again. (chanting in foreign language) There are times in history
when figures appear who are able to coalesce
existing hatreds and anxieties that exist in a culture and form from them a
movement through rallies, through propaganda,
through promises to them. - We will be ending
the AIDS epidemic and curing childhood cancer. - [Ruth] Only they
know the truth, only they can fix the problems. - We are finally
putting America first. - My name is Cheryl Koos and I'm a historian
of interwar Europe, and fascism and
authoritarianism. Hitler gained his followers by
promising them a better life, a better Germany but he also had a scapegoat. - Jews as diseased
and foreign objects. One of the most dangerous things
about authoritarian leaders is that they're particular
personal quirks, their obsessions,
their preoccupations often become state policy. - And I think one of the
manifestations of that that we've seen in policy is
the Zero Tolerance Policy. - Immigration is the fault
in all of the problems that we're having. You look at what's
happening in Europe, you look at what's
happening in other places, we can't allow that to
happen to the United States, not on my watch. - The separating of
children from parents, think about the kind
of mind to think, "I know how we're gonna
restrict immigration. "Let's take their
children away (cackles)" I mean, it's a cruel,
almost cartoonishly evil, kind of thing to do. - Who's number one
with Hispanics? Trump. - It's a violation
of human rights to take children away
from their parents, to be so uncaring about
the permanent effect on these children, and
it is gonna be permanent, is cruel and sadistic behavior, it's completely
different from saying we need to have strong borders, or we need to limit immigration
or something like that. Those things, if
they are worth doing, can be done without
destroying children's lives. - One institution,
in my opinion, that hasn't stood up
for themselves at all are Congress and the
Republican Party. - It's quite extraordinary
that the Republic Party, they're slotting right into
behavior in Italy in 1920s and Germany in the
early 1930s and so on. - [Donald] I wanna
know who's the person who gave the whistleblower, who's the person who gave the
whistleblower the information? Because that's close to a spy. You know what we used
to do in the old days when we were smart? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little
differently than we do now. - He does not
believe in democracy. The way he rules in the
White House shows that. It reminded me of something
I read by Ivana Trump when he was married to her and in their divorce proceedings she had written that he liked
reading Hitler's speeches, and Hitler's speeches
would always build you up to this crescendo of shouting and repeating things three times because if you repeat
something three times, it breaks through
to the audience and it becomes a
fact in their mind. - And I want you all to know that we are fighting
the fake news, it's fake, phony, fake. (crowd cheering) A few days ago I called the fake news
the enemy of the people, and they are, they are
the enemy of the people. - The big lie technique
that came from Nazis, so now we're faced
with the same problem. People say over and
over and over again something which has
never been true, it's a lie, basically,
or it may be a prejudice but when you repeat it, unless it's challenged
quickly and effectively, it becomes the norm, it
becomes accepted wisdom even though it's
completely wrong. - Repeat everything three times and the third time
it becomes the truth. He is capitalizing on that. - The Authoritarian Playbook is a way that these kinds
of men capture democracy. After they get power, they
proceed to tame the judiciary, they attack the press and the ultimate aim is
to get people to believe that reality is
what they say it is. - The fake news, right? The fake news. (crowd cheering) - They are not about
the greater good and calling people to
their better angels, they're about fostering a sense
of victimization and fear, and how the nation
could be purer, and how the nation
would be better without X, Y and Z elements. - Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory! - [Interviewer] So,
is it appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler? - I compare Trump to
Hitler all the time and that makes people angry and
I'm not gonna stop doing it, and I'll tell you why I'm
not gonna stop doing it because my father
was a great historian and student of Jewish history and he used to say
to me all the time, "John, the meaning of
history is in the Holocaust." We cannot be silent. It's not that he's
as bad as Hitler or that he's the
equivalent of Hitler, but he has the same
diagnosis as Hitler. He's in the same category, that it's a psychological type that can be more or less extreme but they share these
common characteristics, they're cut from the same cloth. Those of us who've been
raised in this current era, we don't realize how
spoiled we've been. We've been raised from the
World War II boom of prosperity to today, one of
the greatest periods of peace and prosperity
in human history and we've also
taken it for granted that our democracy was solid, that liberal democracy is now becoming the
touchstone for the planet, that's what we believed
three years ago but Plato predicted
thousands of years ago that democracies
always end in autocracy and we're so naive that
we don't understand that every democracy
is always vulnerable to being taken over and
turned into an autocracy. - We are in the third era of the rise of
charismatic threatening The first was during
the Fascist period in the '20s and '30s. After World War II, you
had anticolonial strongmen like Mobutu and Qaddafi and today, we have a
new crop of leaders who are threatening
liberal democracy or have already
partly destroyed it. - Trump has helped autocrats
all around the world just, I mean, almost immediately
out of the box. Erdogan in Turkey. - [Translator]
Turkey has the right to eliminate all possible
threats towards sovereignty, with or without it's allies. - [Malcom] el-Sisi in Egypt. - [Translator] Whenever
there is a minority trying to impose their
extremist ideology, we have to intervene
regardless of their numbers. (speaks in foreign language) - [Malcolm] Even in Libya, they're backing the
strongman al-Haftar. - His most important aim is take over the
capital, of course, because the one who
takes over the capital is the one in power. - [Malcolm] You have presidents
like Bolsonaro in Brazil. (speaks in foreign language) - [Translator]
These red outcasts will be banished
from our homeland, it will be a cleansing never
seen in Brazilian history. - [Malcolm] You have strongmen in the Philippines like Duterte. - Hitler massacred
three million Jews. Now, there is three
million drug addicts, I'd be happy to slaughter them. - [Malcolm] Vladimir Putin. (speaks in foreign language) (crowd cheering) - Russia is actually fueling right wing extremist
governments in Europe, they're funding them. AFD in Germany, Alternative
for Deutschland. (crowd chanting in
foreign language) They're the second largest
political party in Germany fueled mainly by hatred of
liberalism and immigration. These people are all
fellow travelers now and as fellow travelers, they all believe
in the same thing and they believe that democracy
is a failed experiment and that the polar axis
of the world should shift. We are in a battle for our
political and ideological lives, what was America is now
under siege around the world. This is a dangerous,
dangerous time for the world. Are we moving to a time where
the 1930s have been forgotten and people are viewing it
a template not a warning? - The only way we can
perpetuate a democracy is by people
sharing those values and thinking that that is
something to be upheld. - I mean, Trump is a
symptom of a lot of things, including a rise of a
kind of ethnonationalism and authoritarianism but he is a symptom who's
become a very important cause. The United States
is standing against ethnonationalist sentiments
and authoritarian regimes around the world, I think that puts a certain
amount of check on them. With the American
president on their side, it's an exponential
shot in the arm for them and an exponential
weakening of liberal democracy around the world. - I actually go back to,
believe it or not, chimpanzees. When Jane Goodall was
observing chimpanzees, one of the things she showed
us was how loving they were, and how human they were, and she bonded with them and formed these
relationships with them and then the males would
compete for dominance. They'd pound their chest, and they'd throw
dirt up in the air, and they'd throw heavy
rocks into the river to show who is more powerful but no one ever really got hurt. It was all called
display behavior just to show who
was the toughest and that person would
become the alpha. What happened, though,
after many years is that troop that she
observed became so big that they split into two troops. So everything she taught
us about chimpanzees is really what we would
call within group behavior, it says nothing about
between group behavior. Once the troops had split apart, a very aggressive
charismatic alpha male from one of the groups would
start beating his chest, and hooting, and
slapping the other males, and getting them excited and then they would
start marching toward the other
group's territory and the other males
would follow him (percussive music) and they would wait at
the edge of the territory for another male, maybe even someone
they were friends with when the troop was one troop and they will
barrel down the hill and beat that male to death. (chimpanzees shrieking) And they'll do
that systematically until they're able to take over the other group's
females and their land. Now, think about this from an
evolutionary point of view. Who's genes got to move on? The troop with the malignant,
narcissistic leaders that said, "Let's go kill
all the other chimpanzees." (chimpanzees shrieking) So this is very deep in
our genetic programming and this is why
demagogues like Trump are able to be successful because before Trump we had
fractures in our society but we had this overarching
identity as Americans. Donald Trump
fractures it and says, "No, we're actually two troops "and our troop is being
attacked by that troop "and if we don't go over there "and beat the crap out of them, "they're gonna destroy us." And that is like a siren song to the deep genetic programming in the base of our animal brains that, yes, if
somebody convinces us that other troop is
trying to kill us, and I don't care how
bad my leader is, but he's the one who's leading
us to the edge of the troop so only one of us
is gonna survive who cares if he's a liar? We wanna survive and the only way we survive is by attacking
those other people. That primitive programming
is actually not atypical, they're not anomalous,
they're not unusual. Humankind has been at war in every place at
every time, right? And they've been horrible in
war to burning down villages, raping women, torturing
people, killing people, that's actually normal for the
human animal, unfortunately. It's the psychology of power. (crowd cheering) We all tend to fall
behind the powerful leader out of self-preservation and
out of group perseveration, it's the natural instinct. - [Interviewer] What
are you most fearful of about this president
being in control? - Nuclear war. I mean, that's the long-term,
that's the biggest risk, is that he gets in
a confrontation with North Korea, with China
where his ego's on the line. - Several months ago, a foreign policy expert
on an international level went to advise Donald Trump and three times he asked about
the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he
asked, at one point, "If we have them, why
can't we use them?" - North Korea best not
make any more threats to the United States, they will be met
with fire and fury the likes of which this
world has never seen before. - A president of
the United States, even if he's being a showman, saying that we will bring
fire and fury to your country, that is an implicit
nuclear threat. Donald Trump does not
have the temperament to be around these systems. - Welcome to the White House. This ceremony and the
treaty we are signing today are both excellent examples
of the rewards of patience. - [Narrator] It was 1987
and President Reagan and Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev celebrated the Intermediate
Range Nuclear Forces Treaty as calming Cold War tensions. The INF scrapped thousands
of ground launched nuclear and
conventional missiles with ranges of from
300 to 3,400 miles. - [Reporter] Moscow
and Washington have repeatedly accused each
other of violating the treaty, a deal that helps protect
the security of the U.S. and its allies in
Europe and the Far East. Russia has condemned
President Trump's intention to withdraw from the pact, the Deputy Foreign
Minister is saying it would be a very
dangerous step. - [Man] Sierra, Victor, Two. - [Malcom] The President
of the United States is a nuclear monarchy. He is a king. There are no safeguards
other than his whim, that determines when he launches
an atomic bomb and where. The briefcase that
he has, the football, is a communications device and all it does is
authenticates him to the nuclear arsenal's
chain of command. - [Commander] Unlock code enter, Juliet, Papa, Papa. - [Malcolm] And it
executes his order once he has
authenticated himself. - [Commander] Mark. T-minus 50. - Not one bomb's going,
multiple bombs are going So when you choose that option, that missile will blow that
country up in 35 minutes and there is no turning it off. Once they boost into
space, they're gone. - The president has
the authority to order including a first strike and it is extremely unlikely
that the military command would not take his orders. - The president can decide that France is a
national security threat and he can order an ICBM strike. - [Man] That's not
the correct procedure. - Screw the procedure. I want somebody on
the goddamn phone before I kill 20 million people. - Sir, we have a launch order. - [Timer] Four, three, two - Put your hand
on the keys, sir. - [Timer] One, launch. - So what do you say to people who say that Trump is a
bluffer, a strategic thinker, he won't do this? Are you willing to bet
your children's life on it? Are you willing to bet the lives of every person in
this nation on it? And if you're
willing to say that about any person who will
pathologically lie to you, to your face, documentable,
quantifiably lie to you, your wife, your
children on a daily basis, then you don't really
understand what the stakes are. (missile blasting) We cannot allow that kind
of gamesmanship to continue, this man controls those weapons. - I don't think you
can understand Trump or much else of what's
going on in the world today without factoring in the
effects of death anxiety. Are we doing what we're doing
for the reasons that we claim or could there be something that lurks beneath the
surface of consciousness? In "The Denial of Death", Becker argues that
it is our awareness that we will inevitably die and our inability to
accept the reality of the human condition
with grace and courage that underlies almost
all human activity. What Freud pointed out
is that we're animals and we don't like that, we're breathing pieces
of defecating meat that aren't any more significant or enduring than
lizards or potatoes. So, if you think about it, I'm gonna die, I could walk outside and
get smoked by a comet. You wouldn't be able to
stand up in the morning. You would literally
be overwhelmed by paralyzing
existential terror. What we do to bury that anxiety
is to embrace belief systems that life has meaning
and we have value. In a single word, culture. So the prevailing belief in
the U.S. in the last century is that America is the home
of the free and the brave, anybody who works hard enough can be just as successful as Oprah, or Bill
Gates, or Warren Buffet and that we will always be
the world's foremost economic, as well as military power and so one of the first knees in our psychological
groin was 9/11 when both our military
and economic power had been challenged, then we get clobbered
with the recession, combined with globalization, combined with
demographic reality that by the middle
of the century white people will
be in the minority and so for many Americans, their world view have
been completely upended. So fast forward to 2015, Donald Trump declares that
he's running for President. He comes down the escalator. He's like, "Mexicans
are rapists, I'm And I said to myself,
"That guy is gonna win." - The American dream is dead. - [Audience Member]
Bring it back. - But if I get
elected president, I will bring it back bigger
and better and stronger than ever before and we will make
America great again. Thank you, thank you very much. (crowd cheering) - When the psychological
shit hits the fan, if you'll pardon the expression, and when people are economically and psychologically insecure, when somebody comes along
and confidently proclaims in very simple terms that they will keep them safe,
they will make them prosper, they will bring back
the good old days, that's the psychological hook. If you look at it from
a detached perspective, we're really at a crossroads, the impending
environmental apocalypse juxtaposed with simmering
ethnic tensions, juxtaposed with rampant
economic inequality and here we have Trump
magnifying all of What Trump also did masterfully was to take nonexistent problems and render them
potentially traumatic by grotesquely
overemphasizing the danger. - Look at the deal
he's making with Iran. - Once you get on
board psychologically, once you commit to a
demagogueish ideologue, that puts up a fact proof screen between you and the world. Once you are fully on board, there's no rational argument
that will alter your opinion. There is always a tendency
for charismatic leaders to bring out the tribal
nature of humans, it is very easy to lapse into
an us versus them mentality. Rationality will
lose every time. - Where is the red line? Where do you say, "Okay, hey, No mas, I'm not
supporting this guy anymore?" Where is the line? So, it's obviously been
crossed by many people but for me the line would be
when you look at our documents and you look at
our constitution, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela
has the exact same language, go look at their constitution, they have the same flowery
language related to human rights and all of that stuff but what make us unique
is the checks and balances and the power diffusion in the construction
of the government. So if Trump starts
to trample on that, then I'm gonna turn
on him, have to. You can't disrupt a
243-year experiment for one dude's personality. - It has now been a week since the Centers
for Disease Control confirmed the first community
transmission of coronavirus in the United States. - We all have personalities. Some people are more dependent, some people are more aggressive. It becomes pathological when you see the whole
world through a screen that makes everything
fit your need. - Now the Democrats are
politicizing the coronavirus. - [Lance] It's not just
being manipulative, it's a fundamental inability
to not be that way. - This big, vast land of ours,
this great country of ours, we have 240 cases. Most of those people
are gonna be fine. - Donald Trump doesn't
care about experts. - [Journalist] Can
you also weigh in on this issue of
hydroxychloroquine? What do you think about this and what is the
medical evidence? - How many times I've
answered that question? Maybe 15. - [Journalist] Doctor. - 15 times. - He only cares about people who will tell him what
he already wants to hear. He makes himself ignorant
about almost everything because he only wants to
hear what he wants to hear. - We have it so
well under control. I mean, view this
the same as the flu. When somebody sneezes, I mean, I try and bail
out as much as possible and I haven't touched my
face in weeks, in weeks. - [Journalist] Mr.
President, the... - I miss it. - And one of the most
devastating things is to emotionally
train Americans not to extinguish compassion and to extinguish
kindness in themselves. He terms it being tough. - He is giving people
a license to hate, to provide a source of anger,
to go after each other, how are we all tolerating this? Loyalty is not blind obedience unless you're supporting
a demagogue, okay? And so you don't wanna ever
be like that in your life. - Relax, we're doing great. - [Reporter] The DOW is
now down nearly 900 points. - [New Anchor] Economists
have been ramping up their projections. - [Reporter] The virus
spreading explosively like quote, a bomb. - To be president, you have
to exercise good judgment on behalf of the American
people for their interests. - They have to go back to work,
our country has to go back, our country is based on that. I think it's gonna
happen pretty quickly. - It's got nothing to do with
the safety of the people, it's about him. It's not about the country. - He spent a lot of
time on Twitter today boasting about the
excellent television ratings his news conferences
have received lately. - We have Monday Night
Football-type ratings and that these are
like "Bachelor" finale. - He is not fit because
he is unable to think, he can only react and attack. - What do you say to Americans who are watching you
right now who are scared? - I say that you're
a terrible reporter. That's really bad reporting. - He is unfit to be president
because he cannot think. - [Reporter] The U.S.
is surpassing Italy as the country with
the most fatalities. - [News Anchor] He says he
wants to reopen the country with a big bang. - Pursuing truth is to the mind like food is to the body. Without pursuing truth,
your psyche starves and Trump's psyche has been
starving for a long time. - [Journalist] Say, sir,
what metrics you will use to make that decision? - The metrics right here. If we can hold that down
between 100,000 and 200,000, we all together have
done a very good job. I am very proud to
be your president. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody, thank you. - He's detached from reality. I mean, this is just demented. (gentle guitar music) - The founding fathers always
knew that a king-like tyrant would try to rule as
a personal dictator and use the powers
of the presidency to enhance or enrich himself, but they never foresaw
the senate the judiciary might completely abdicate
their responsibilities and go along with that. - The natural tendency
of history in many ways is towards greater
liberalism and altruism but human nature has
these competing forces, and so what we're seeing now is this amazing regression
from where we were we are literally going
backwards, I think, We all have to do
everything that we can do because our society is at
risk and we could lose it all, we could lose this grand
experiment in democracy. I think we're more
than halfway there, I think people don't
realize how far this has actually progressed. - When you're in a period
of rising authoritarianism, it's easy to get exhausted because the news comes at you like bullets from a
machine gun, all of it bad. One of the best weapons
against authoritarianism is protest in the street, and protests are key because not only does the
leader see that he's unpopular, but even more important, his allies see that the public
is actually against them. - Think of what
you tell your kids. You tell them to be honest. You tell them to tell the truth. You tell them, don't think
of yourself, don't brag. Don't trash other people
to make yourself feel good. How can you support
Donald Trump? How can you support somebody who essentially violates
all of the things that we want them to follow? It makes no sense. It's corrosive for them,
it's corrosive for you, and it's corrosive
for the country. - This is a phenomenal,
phenomenal country. It's one of the most unique
historical experiments in the 5,500 years
of recorded history. We have to figure out
a way to help people and bring them into the
new world of globalization, they have to feel
like they're part of the aspirational
success of America that our parents felt. - I believe at our best
that we have the capacity to radically
reconceptualize who we are and the extent to which
that we can accept our commonality as human beings, I think therein lies the key because then there's
no one left to hate and that's not gonna
stop us from hating but as Ernest Becker put it, maybe we can hate
stuff that we should like poverty and injustice, and maybe we can then
use righteous indignation to everybody's best interest. (gentle music)