Donald Trump’s sanity is not the question. The real issue is how he got into office | Gary Younge

While writing a New Yorker profile on Donald Trump in the late 1990s, Mark Singer attempted to discover something about the businessman’s private thoughts, as opposed to his outsized, public persona. When Singer asked him what he thought about when shaving in front of the mirror, Trump did not really understand the question.

“OK, I guess I’m asking, ‘do you consider yourself ideal company?’” Singer said. “You really want to know what I consider ideal company?” replied Trump. “A total piece of ass.”

Divining, assessing and adjudicating the mental health of this US president has become just a parlour game. Following a 2017 conference, 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health experts wrote a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, it was their moral and civic “duty to warn” America that “for psychological reasons”, Trump was “more dangerous than any president in history”. They diagnosed him with everything from “severe character pathology” to “delusional disorder”, which can be added to the of “narcissistic personality disorder” and “antisocial personality disorder” which are regularly offered.