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For weeks, reports have abounded about President Joe Biden’s cognitive condition in the wake of his terrible performance at last month’s CNN presidential debate, with some Democrats going so far as to call for him to quit the presidential race.
But not nearly as much ink has been spilt on the mental condition of Donald Trump.
With the former President less than 24 hours away from accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for the third consecutive election, conservative attorney George Conway is determined to give him a diagnosis.
Conway — a former corporate litigator who once ghostwrote a legal brief in a case that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton — first came to public attention in 2018 after he began publicly criticizing Trump while married to a top White House official, then-Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway.
In an interview with The Independent last week, he said he realized something was not right with Trump after an unsettling encounter with the then-president at then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s 2017 wedding. And by 2019, he said he’d become “thoroughly convinced” that Trump “was out of his f**king mind.”
Now, nearly six years later, he’s divorced from his then-wife and retired from practicing law. And he is focusing on campaigning against Trump in the harshest terms possible.
Today, Conway is launching a new political action committee, the Anti-Psychopath PAC, which he says will “highlight the existential threat Donald Trump poses to democracy and remind voters of the former president’s mental unfitness for office.”
Although it was originally set to begin on Monday, the first day of the Republican National Convention, Conway delayed the project after the assassination attempt on Trump during a campaign rally last Saturday.
He told The Independent that the “despicable attempt on the former president’s life” does not change Trump’s “ingrained and lifelong psychological traits.”
“it certainly does not lessen the need for a serious public discussion about his manifest mental disorders and the dangers they present to the nation and the world,” he added.
The committee’s website, which went live early Thursday, features the former litigator in a direct-to-camera video explaining what he’s doing.
In it, Conway says the “most important issue” in “the most important election in our lifetimes” — Trump’s mental health — is not being addressed.
While he maintains it’s perfectly acceptable to ask questions about Biden in the wake of his debate performance and other public slip-ups, he lamented the “double standard” being applied to Trump.
“We’ve all seen videos of Trump slurring words and rambling nonsensically even with the help of a teleprompter—most recently about sharks and electrocution and Hannibal Lecter,” he said. “But Donald Trump has a bigger problem, and it’s not his age: It’s the fact that Donald Trump has never been right in the head.”
“His own people know it, and always have. And he’s not simply eccentric or odd in a good way. He’s unwell—mentally unwell—in a dangerous way,” he said, adding that he believes Trump is a “malignant narcissist”.
Continuing, Conway claims that Trump is “a pathological liar” who shares psychological characteristics that he claims are shared by “dangerous cult leaders and dictators.”
He also alleges that the American press has been unwilling to cover Trump’s mental health because it remains “the last taboo” in political reporting.
“The failure to treat Trump’s behavior as pathological has led the media and the country, perversely, to treat it as normal. And that’s a big reason why we’re seeing the double standard being applied to the candidates today,” he said.
Conway said he has put up the initial seed money for the PAC’s work, a symbolic amount of $343,434.34 — representing Trump’s 34 felony convictions — in addition to the nearly $1 million he donated to the Biden campaign earlier this year. He’s also lined up another $1 million donation to the PAC to kick things off, and he said he expects to raise another million within a short period of time after the launch.
The committee’s first efforts at public outreach will be a series of billboards in Milwaukee, thanking Republican voters for nominating a “convicted felon,” a “criminal” and a “psycho.”
There will also be a billboard circulating around the Republican convention on Thursday and it will be at the Milwaukee airport to greet attendees when they leave the next day.
Conway told The Independent that he’s putting more of his own money into this effort because of the importance of bringing Trump’s mental health to voters as an issue. He added that the Trump-aligned “Project 2025” blueprint for a second term is “ultimately an extension” of Trump’s alleged sociopathy “because basically he wants to turn the government into a mechanism for retribution.”
“That’s all narcissistic sociopaths care about. Other than adulation, they want revenge for all the slights — for people who don’t follow his commands … and that’s why he’s authoritarian,” he added.
Since the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally last weekend, members of both parties have made pleas for a cooling of rhetoric. In an address to the nation, President Biden called for unity and said that violence toward political candidates is “sick” and un-American.
Trump claimed that he had written a scorching speech about Biden but had torn it up and would deliver a more unifying speech on Thursday night at the convention.
Conway, however, believes his searing rhetoric is justified, considering the stakes of the election.
“We’re talking about whether or not a narcissistic sociopath who has no remorse, no empathy, has no conscience is going to have control of the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal,” he said.
