What do those 'beautiful mind paper boxes' say about Donald Trump's mental health?
By Charles Jay in the Daily Kos
According to the indictment, Trump
Employee 1 says:
“There is still a little room in the shower where his other stuff is. Is it only his papers he cares about? Theres (sic) some other stuff in there that are not papers. Could that go to storage? Or does he want everything there on property.”
Trump Employee 2, whom The New York Times said
was identified by multiple people as Trump’s former assistant Molly Michael,
replied:
“Yes — anything that’s not the
beautiful mind paper boxes can definitely go to storage. Want to take a look at
the space and start moving tomorrow AM?”
So what does that reference to
“beautiful mind paper boxes” say about their opinion of Trump’s mental state?
The New York Times reported
that the phrase “beautiful mind” material was used by aides during Trump’s
years in the White House “to refer to the boxes full of papers and odds and
ends he carried around with him almost everywhere.”
And where did the reference to “A
Beautiful Mind” come from? The Times made this link:
It was a reference to the title of a
book and movie depicting the life of John F. Nash Jr., the mathematician with
schizophrenia played in the film by Russell Crowe, who covered his office with
newspaper clippings, believing they held a Russian code he needed to crack.
The phrase had a specific connotation.
The aides employed it to capture a type of organized chaos that Mr. Trump
insisted on, the collection and transportation of a blizzard of newspapers and
official documents that he kept close and that seemed to give him a sense of
security.
One former White House official, who was granted anonymity to describe the situation, said that while the materials were disorganized, Mr. Trump would notice if somebody had riffled through them or they were not arranged in a particular way. It was, the person said, how “his mind worked.”
Now, Nash was an actual genius who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1994 for his pioneering work in game theory. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at age 31 in 1959. His wife Alicia Nash said he developed the idea that all men who wore red ties were part of a Soviet conspiracy against him.
In the film, he’s
depicted as having the delusional belief that he was doing top-secret work
for the government to look for hidden patterns in magazines and
newspapers and deliver his results to a secret mailbox to thwart a Soviet
plot.
Donald Trump is a self-described “very stable genius.” But as The Atlantic pointed out, Trump has an aversion to reading.
Author Michael Wolff, in his book “Fire
and Fury,” quoted Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn as writing in an
email: “It’s worse than you can imagine … Trump won’t read anything—not
one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway
through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
That raises the question of why this
non-reader is so obsessed with keeping boxes full of written material,
including classified documents.
Trump has always kept boxes filled with news clippings. documents and other mementos, according to more than a half-dozen people who have worked with Trump, including before he took office as president, the Times reported.
The Times reported
that starting early in his administration, Trump would use a cardboard box to
take papers and documents from the West Wing up to the residence at the end of
the day.
Officials familiar with Trump’s
practice told the Times that Trump was “meticulous” about
putting things in specific boxes and was generally able to identify what was in
the boxes immediately around him in the White House.
The newspaper said Trump “was not
especially interested” when then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and
other aides expressed concern that some presidential records might go missing
if they were kept in the residence. The officials told the Times that Trump
even insisted on taking specific boxes with him on Air Force One when he
was traveling.
The indictment says Trump and White
House staff members, including his body man Walt Nauta, personally packed
material into boxes before leaving the White House. Nauta was indicted for
allegedly helping Trump mishandle classified government documents at
Mar-a-Lago.
And Trump kept up the practice of
filling up one box after another after he left the White House to reside in
Mar-a-Lago, the Times reported. Dozens of boxes stacked in a
storage room, ballroom and even a bathroom could be seen in photos provided by the
Department of Justice, according to Trump’s indictment.
Just hours after his arraignment in a
federal courtroom in Miami last Tuesday, Trump told supporters at his
Bedminister, N.J., golf resort that the boxes contained “all types of personal
belongings,”including “newspapers, press clippings” and “thousands of White
House pictures,” as well as “clothing, memorabilia and much, more more.” He
omitted any mention of the classified documents that the FBI found in its
search.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the
materials in the boxes belong to him, using the phrase “my boxes.” According to
notes from one of his lawyers detailed in the indictment,
Trump reportedly said, “I don't want anybody looking through my boxes.”
That prompted Washington Post columnist
Eugene Robinson to comment on MSNBC that “in addition to being
a bad person, Donald Trump is a deeply weird person."
"It is almost a kind
of Gollum in 'Lord of the Rings' moment. ‘My Precious.’ It’s like a
hoarding instinct about these documents. Some sort of weird security blanket
...It boosts his ego and reminds him that he actually somehow became president
of the United States," Robinson said, adding, "I don't know what
it is about it, but it's pathological, in addition to being criminal."
On MSNBC’s “The Last
Word,” host Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant
clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In 2019, in an interview for Raw Story,
Dodes said Trump met every diagnostic term for an “Antisocial Personality
Distorder,” saying that “all his actions are signs of this severe, continuous,
mental disturbance.”
O’Donnell asked Dodes whether there
was “a psychiatric explanation” for why Trump kept those classified documents
even though the federal government demanded them and his attorneys told
him to give them back.
"My guess would be that it makes
him greater in his own mind," Dodes said. "Now, he has secret
documents, which he had when he was president, but if he loses the presidency,
at least he has the secret documents. It's like having a badge when
you’re four years old that says you're a secret policeman. I think
it's something like that. He needs it for himself."
Dodes predicted that as Trump's
legal troubles continue to mount, he will "look worse and
worse."
"He will be worse and worse, but
there’ll be less of the veneer and we’ll see how much of a psychopath he
is. That’s the psychiatric explanation. He is fundamentally different from
normal people. We'll see more and more of that.”
And maybe it’s time for Democrats to
go for the jugular and emphasize over and over — using Trump’s speeches,
social media posts and criminal indictments — to simply say that Donald
Trump is unfit for office because he’s crazy.
After all, the GOP has propagated the
false meme that President Joe Biden is cognitively impaired, has dementia, and
isn’t fit to serve a second term. And Russia has been assisting by
spreading disinformation about Biden’s mental health.
Biden’s accomplishments in office, of
course, prove otherwise. But Trump’s “beautiful mind paper boxes” are
indicative that even those closest to him have doubts about his mental state.
And maybe it’s time to revive a
Democratic campaign slogan from nearly 60 years ago. In 1964, Arizona Sen.
Barry Goldwater, a conservative who probably would have been a never-Trumper
today, campaigned with the slogan: “in your heart you know he’s right.”
Campaign buttons from the collection of the Lyndon Baines
Johnson Library and Museum.
LBJ Library photo by Jay Godwin.
Democrats supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson, replied with this highly effective counter slogan: “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”