https://www.salon.com/2019/07/22/understanding-our-bully-in-chief-donald-trumps-antisocial-personality-disorder-fits-a-pattern/?fbclid=IwAR1X3JQhpzWqZBDhQTNFJdrXvzEFGDPtjeqluHbDM7nb27Ot3F14S4T6UjU
"The generic predicament of racism is nothing new — particularly for the Republican Party. (See “The Long Southern Strategy.” Salon author interview here.) What is new is Trump’s malignant psychology, a character disorder shared by dozens of destructive autocratic leaders whose patterns of murderous rule Burkle described in a 2015 paper, “Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars,” drawing on decades of experience as a world leader in emergency public health crises such as war and conflict, as well as his background in psychiatry and pediatrics. A recent follow-up paper (“Character Disorders,” for short), focused on the negative impact autocratic leaders have on health security, human rights and humanitarian care. Burkle cites examples like Idi Amin in Uganda, Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, who “have emerged first as saviors and then as despots, or as common criminals claiming to be patriots.” Amin and Milosevic are particularly apt figures to compare with Trump, given their roles in fomenting genocidal ethnic strife in Uganda and Bosnia respectively. Once in power, such a leader “thrives on continuing conflict and never seeks peace,” Burkle wrote — as a predictable description of all autocratic leaders. Characteristically they befriend and admire other autocratic leaders who have more power than themselves. Burkle reminds us that Hitler modeled himself after Mussolini and that Hitler and Stalin allied in the invasion of Poland. Before World War II started, these leaders, along with Japanese officials, met to divide up the world. But when one has power the other desires, conflict can result — as it did in Hitler’s eventual invasion of Russia. “These autocrats are simply an adolescent bully in an adult’s body,” Burkle told me in early June, I’d written a two-part story [here and here] about Trump’s lies and his threat to democracy."
