Enough about Trump already: Melinda Henneberger

When Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton meet Sunday for a town-hall style presidential debate in St. Louis, half of the questions will come from audience members. If we're lucky, their main theme will be "But enough about you."

A detailed discussion of how to cure the nation’s ills would stand out in a campaign which has focused far less on policy than on the personal well-being of the nominees.

This race has been so medicalized that Trump regularly questions Clinton’s physical strength. His detractors so seriously attack his mental health, meanwhile, that there’s been an intense back-and-forth in the psychiatric community over whether or not he should be diagnosed in the public square, without any actual exam. (Consensus: No, even as awareness of Narcissistic Personality Disorder has never been higher.)

At the vice presidential debate, moderator Elaine Quijano invited Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, to defend the mogul’s impulsivity: “Why do so many Americans think Mr. Trump is simply too erratic?” But Pence, who doesn’t seem to think he’s going to have to serve under Trump, didn’t do that, even when Clinton running mate Tim Kaine suggested that Trump is just the sort of ‘maniac’ that Pence’s hero Ronald Reagan had seen as a threat way back in the 1980s. (“Reagan…said the problem with nuclear proliferation is that some fool or maniac could trigger a catastrophic event. And I think that's who Governor Pence's running mate is, exactly who Governor Reagan warned us about.”)

Trump is hardly the first presidential nominee to be cast as temperamentally ill-suited to one of the hardest jobs in the world — and the man many of us consider our finest leader, Abe Lincoln, showed signs of clinical depression.

Yet a psychiatrist I know says Trump’s perceived instability has in turn provoked great anxiety among his patients, with four or five a week requiring treatment for Trump-related sleeplessness and anxiety. “I’ve never seen anything like it,’’ says Dr. Bernard Vittone of Washington, D.C. “In 30 years of practice, I’ve never even had one case like that before” involving a specific politician or race.

So are red-state shrinks similarly treating Hillary stress syndrome?

Doubtful, says my friend Lynn Hunter, a therapist in Lexington, Ky. — and not only because there are fewer mental health professionals per square mile in more conservative areas. “People concerned about Trump feel civilization is at stake with a lunatic running amok," she says, "whereas with Hillary, there’s hostility as opposed to a freak-out.”

Yet another cultural divide this year is over the way Trump talks about mental and physical challenges. He presents them as wimpy, whining and humiliating failures of stamina or will — not applicable to him, of course. In December, Trump tweeted that when his medical records were released, they would “show perfection.’’ His doctor, Harold Bornstein, more recently attested that the 70-year-old was not just in good health but “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

Physical perfection is a long-time preoccupation with Trump, who last year bemoaned model Heidi Klum’s supposed fall into single-digit attractiveness: “Sadly, she’s no longer a 10.”

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So, too, is the physical dominance he asserts every time he says he’d like to punch a protester in the face, or make “little” Michael Bloomberg’s head spin. Just as he successfully cast Jeb Bush as “low energy,” he derided Clinton as too weak to campaign when she had pneumonia.

When he infers that PTSD only happens to soldiers who “can’t handle” the horrors of war, or mocks New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for having limited movement in his right arm, the clear message is that anything less than peak functioning deserves our ridicule.

“She’s supposed to fight all of these different things,’’ he said of Clinton at a rally in Pennsylvania last weekend, “and she can’t make it 15 feet to her car” when she had to leave a 9/11 memorial event. As the crowd roared in approval, the GOP nominee then pretended to stumble and have trouble walking upright.

If he makes it to the White House, I have to wonder about the fates of Americans who really do need a steadying arm — physically, mentally or economically. Those are the people we need to hear more about.

Melinda Henneberger, a longtime political writer and a visiting fellow at Catholic University of America's Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies, is a member of Paste BN's Board of Contributors. Follow her on Twitter @MelindaDC.

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