Good Reason To Remember Johns Hopkins on His 222nd Birthday

When I learned that today was the birthday of Johns Hopkins and began to peruse his biography, I thought I’d be reading about the life of a man extraordinarily devoted to medicine.  As it turns out, he was a businessman, extraordinarily dedicated to getting rich by selling dry goods to farmers in 19th century Maryland, often taking moonshine in exchange and reselling it as “Hopkins Finest.”

With the enormous fortune he amassed,  he founded the university and hospital that have come to be regarded as one of the go-to institutions for cutting-edge research into human health and the treatment of physical and mental illness. All’s well that ends well.   Today, statements concerning the emotional health of certain persons, when they come with the imprimatur of Johns Hopkins, tend to bear a certain level of credibility that, had they been issued  from a lesser school, may not be taken as seriously.

So much the worse for Donald Trump.

I give you this, from U.S. News and World Report:  John D. Gartner, a practicing psychotherapist who taught psychiatric residents at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, minces as few words as the president in his professional assessment of Trump.  “Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president,” says Gartner. Trump, Gartner says, has “malignant narcissism,” which is different from narcissistic personality disorder and which is incurable.

With Trump in possession of the nuclear codes, what could possibly go wrong?