Steven Pinker, a Canadian psychologist and longtime faculty member at Harvard, reflected this week in a NYT op-ed on what he is terming ‘Harvard Derangement Syndrome’. The university, one of many lightening rods for the Trump administration, has drawn multiple ‘strikes’ — first for refusing to take a knee to the ‘modest proposal’ that they cede administrative oversight, admission policies, nominal presidency, DEI mandates, and a whole truck load of other demands. . . by the current Whitehouse autocrat. After the dictum was withdrawn (oopsie, must have been sent in error!), Harvard’s tax exempt status was to be removed, again on executive instruction to the IRS — don’t get Elizabeth Warren started on that one! And now an attempt to block all international student attendance, which, if it hadn’t been stayed, would have gone a good way toward gutting fiscal viability and academic excellence at the institution. 

After detailing Harvard’s manifest ‘warts and all’, Pinker goes on to plead his case for a ‘sense of proportionality’ and temperance when dealing not with just institutions, but all the other targets of ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ (as the current catch phrase goes!) — aka, DOGE’s slash and burn approach to implementing the administration’s whim. 

Early in his piece, Pinker makes reference to a symptom, oh so familiar to mental health practitioners, that resonated with this one in particular: ‘splitting’. Anyone with even a passing brush with CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), will recognize what has for nigh on 75 years been viewed as ‘black or white’ ‘all or none’ views of the world. In Pinker’s words, a world populated by ‘exalted angels’ or ‘odious evildoers’. In those of CBT’s patriarch, Albert Ellis, irrational thought.

I was (once again) reminded of a collection of essays published shortly after the beginning of Trump’s first term, called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Contributions from academics and clinicians, psychologists and psychiatrists — all very careful to avoid ‘diagnosing’ the new president; but offering up thoughts on what various and sundry disorders, syndromes might be descriptive — were he to be assessed and diagnosed. The twenty plus articles float narcissism, dementia, antisocial personality, sociopathy, or just flat ‘crazy’ as considerations. 

I’ve been asked too many times to count, variations on the same question: ‘So. . . what is he?’ I typically ‘plead the 5th’ — but can’t resist the temptation to speculate. . .even if only privately! Pinker’s piece raised another question: Is there a dysfunctional, administrative style underpinning not just Trump. . . but Project 2025 as a game plan? Is there an institutional personality? One that so informs its governance and so reflects the characteristics of its chief, that it goes far beyond a ‘split view of the world’ all the way to borderline behaviour? 

So with the proviso that this is not a diagnosis. . . but only a ‘compare and contrast’ exercise between traits and styles associated with borderline behaviour and the parallels with administrative proclivities. . .

Just sayin’. . . to riff on OJ — if the glove fits.