Letter to the Editor: The promise of a Trump presidency

I am a UT alumnus; as recently as 2003 I was a Master’s-level student majoring in Counseling Psychology. In 2000 I graduated Magna cum Laude with a degree in Psychology from one of the nation’s best Psychology departments, UT’s.
I am addressing current UT students about a candidate to the Presidency who would ruin your future and our future as a nation, Donald Trump. Trump is a sick individual whom even a Republican leader, Senator Ted Cruz, characterized as a “pathological liar,” “serial philanderer” and “very narcissistic,” plus a “maniac.” Indeed, risking trouble with the State Boards, the licensing government agencies, clinical psychologists that never treated Trump have diagnosed him with Narcissistic Personality Disorder; the latter bringing echoes of Adolf Hitler’s diagnosis, according to Carl G. Jung, just after WWII: hysterical neurosis, which a former UT faculty member, Dr. John Lewton, said can be diagnosed using several of the DSM-IV, now DSM-V, axis. So ‘hysterical neurosis’ is rather a compound of mental health diseases.
In fact, back in 2002 Dr. Lewton told his graduate students that mental health diagnosis are tentative sketches, not diagnoses in the sense of allopathic medicine. So to reduce the sickness of Trump to textbook narcissism is an oversimplification. Trump’s obvious mania, his obsession with always being on the offensive even at the cost of losses in polls, tells of a far more complex diagnosis. Nonetheless, Trump’s sadism is a quintessential symptom of sociopaths, like the German Nazis, and hard-wired psychopaths.
I can’t help it seeing Trump as a Nazi. A faux populist, Trump promises to his WASP and WASC followers that he would never be able to deliver. Find someone who was a working class man in Toledo, forty-five years ago or so, when the city was full of factories. One of them told me, “When I did not like a factory job, I just quit and found another one across the street, that easy.” In short, the high-paying factory jobs that Trump promises will not come back; except for highly skilled workers in the high-tech industry and the like.

Yet, from last year to date, Trump has kept fooling the gullible into believing that he can deliver, only because of his success in business. Whereas in real life Trump is not nearly the excellent businessman he calls himself, his top deal-making skills notwithstanding. He has become a billionaire by lying, cheating, and filing four bankruptcies. In short, to rise to the top in U.S. politics Trump used many of Hitler’s tactics, and nonetheless the demonization of ethnic and religious minorities. In thus doing, Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a mass movement, a white supremacist political mass movement that at the grass-roots level is not altogether or intrinsically different from German Nazism.
In real life, Trump never before cared about the ordinary folk. Neither did Hitler really care about the Volk, the ordinary German folk; he deceived the folks just to feed his colossal narcissism, exactly like Trump. Hitler set up a massive deception game to destroy German’s weak Weimar Republic, and so Trump has done to our far stronger democracy, a long shot at a doomsday scenario that this nation might look like.
So like Hitler, Trump has blamed non-whites and foreigners for that which is a structural, and economic, problem: the ups and downs of industrial, and post-industrial, economies. So it is all the Mexicans’ fault, and here Trump promises devastating trade wars that have the potential of turning into actual wars. Then maniac “President Trump” holding the nuclear codes: can you, current UT students, imagine what might come next, that is from a thin-skinned leader unable to tolerate any slight? Once in power Trump would not deliver but further scapegoat ethnic and religious minorities, hence fueling violent white supremacies.
UT students, you do not want to get your degree and then watch the news about white supremacists brandishing assault rifles storming mosques or either Mexican-American or African-American neighborhoods, and murdering scores; then, in revenge, your family being killed by New Black Panthers or other violent ethnic militants.
But that is precisely the potentiality of what Trump has unleashed. Particularly because the drug cartels, now closely connected with both neo-Nazi state and non-state actors and Islamic terrorism, would love to make of the United States another battlefield like Mexico. No, Trump will not have any SA-like Stormtroopers seize the Reichstag, i.e. U.S. Congress, although the infamous Trump tweet with his face, the White House, the flag, and the German SS troops marching makes one cringe: freedom in the U.S. can only be lost gradually, step by step, incrementally.
In sum, this is not the normal presidential transition I experienced as a UT student at both the undergraduate and the graduate level; it calls for personal responsibility from each and every UT student, faculty member, and employee; plus all family members, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors.
We all need to rally against white supremacist, mentally deranged Donald Trump. Those of you who happen to be conservative Republicans, and all others, can most certainly vote to reelect Republican U.S. Senator Rob Portman, whose Senate work for both Ohio and the nation has been outstanding. But please do not vote for Trump, or, in the event of the catastrophe of Trump winning next November, one day you will deeply regret it.
There is a likelihood that the presidential election will be decided here in Ohio, so please, register to vote and vote against Trump.

Thank you,

Ricardo Oscar Martinez, UT alumnus