Many mental-health professionals have voiced the opinion that Donald Trump exhibits symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). A Change.org petition posted on January 26, 2017 by Baltimore psychologist John Gartner urging Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office received 60,000 signatures by October 2017. Gartner told the Baltimore Sun that he believed Trump was a “malignant narcissist.” In a 2015 Vanity Fair article several mental-health professionals had agreed that Trump appeared to present symptoms of NPD, but Harvard’s Howard Gardner identified what for him was a more serious problem. “For me,” he told Vanity Fair, “the compelling question is the psychological state of his supporters.”

Otto Kernberg, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City wrote an article for Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2020 titled “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression.” (Kernberg 2020)

The term malignant narcissism was first used by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in 1964, calling it a “severe mental sickness” that was the “quintessence of evil.” Malignant narcissism is now regarded as a combination of traits that can appear in narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.

The word “evangelical” is derived from the Greek euangelion, which in classical Greek meant “the reward for bringing good news.” In New Testament times the sense of the word was transferred to mean the good tidings themselves. The 2nd century Church Fathers  began referring to the authors of the Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – as Evangelists, “bringers of the “good news” of Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther used “evangelical” to describe his theology when he separated from the Catholic church in the 16th century in part over his belief that sins are forgiven based on faith alone, and not “works” – acts performed with the expectation of a reward.

“Evangelical” became associated with the first “Great Awakening,” in eighteenth century America where under the influence of Puritan Jonathan Edwards, among others, it represented the “good news” of salvation through Christ, emphasizing the need for a personal conversion experience. It was the latter that can be identified with the phrase “born again.” As the emphasis on conversion extended to converting outsiders evangelicalism became associated with revivalism. In its focus on spiritual rebirth and individual devotion American evangelicalism drew on the doctrine of pietism, which rejects political control of spiritual affairs, in the words of James Emery White, rejecting the “compulsory and cultural” in favor of the “voluntary and personal.”

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) was founded in 1942. By its own account the timing did not seem particularly auspicious for the creation of an ecclesiastical organization. The US was just emerging from the Great Depression, and had suffered through two world wars, which, along with advances in organic chemistry, astronomy and anthropology, called into question the existence, power, and goodness of a deity.

The whirlwind of events of the last several weeks have displaced more familiar political analyses in much popular media. An apparent attempt at assassinating former president Donald Trump on the eve of the Republican convention, Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, and Vice President Harris replacing him at the head of the ticket would each have been unusual, striking events individually, but taken together sent commentators and analysts in search of precedents.

Yet amid or in spite of the unusual events, some things quickly reverted to normal. Despite a professed “toning down” of violent language from Republicans, Trump and newly anointed elegiac hillbilly VP candidate JD Vance “doubled down” on violent language, especially that directed at migrants and immigrants. And with that, some things were back to “normal,” at least as far as Republican candidate sound bites were concerned.

What had in the runup to the events of mid-July seemed newly bold right-wing rhetoric pervading Republican party communications has been treated by some commentators as something new. Certainly the January 6, 2021 riot represented a new level of violence in the nation’s capital. To find a precedent for the placement of bombs one must look back to the 1983 bombing of the Senate side of the Capitol building, ostensibly to protest US involvement in Grenada. In its conception and coordination, however, January 6 most closely resembled the so-called Brooks Brothers riot in Miami in 2000, largely coordinated by Bush campaign official Brad Blakeman, but including future Trump partisan Roger Stone and others who would become members of the George W. Bush administration. Like the January 6 riot, the goal of the Brooks Brothers riot was to stop a vote-counting process, resorting to violence if necessary.

In his recent book When the Clock Broke, writer John Ganz locates the origins of multiple aspects of our current political and cultural environment in events, people, and actions from the 90s. For example: the mythologizing of criminal figures as popular outlaws he associates with legendary mafioso John Gotti; the trend toward political movements that purport to oppose political movements he associates with the quixotic campaigns of Ross Perot; the rightward shift of the Republican party he associates with one-time grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, and serial presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

During the recent BET awards TV broadcast, host Taraji P, Henson used the platform to issue repeated warnings that a win by Republican Donald Trump in the November presidential election would, in Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch’s words, “undermine our fundamental rights.” Bunch, who has been one of the few op-ed writers at a major news outlet to focus on Trump and his lies in the aftermath of the recent presidential debate, sees Henson’s use of her platform to warn of the GOP’s plans to drastically change the relationship between government and citizens as a potential turning point in the presidential campaign. While the details of Project 2025 are apparently not widely known, the 900+ page document is publicly available, and touted by right-wing pundits – including principal architect, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts – on conservative media.

Voting rights website Democracy Docket describes Project 2025 as “a collection of policy transition proposals” that would enable Trump, if elected, to “vastly remake the federal government most effectively to carry out an extremist far-right agenda.”