Sweetleaf wrote:
Even if he does have autism that does not undo his Trump obsession or sexism he's expressed, idk if he's autistic or not I don't really buy it but even it was true autism is not an excuse to be an absolute as*hole.
There’s a culture of antipsychiatry on the right that tends to be weird about mental illness, a category in which they include autism. For instance, when Greta Thunberg spoke before Congress in 2019, and it was reported that she was on the spectrum, some conservatives argued that she was being taken advantage of—as if her autism meant she was a mentally incapacitated person incapable of thinking independently. They were adopting a tone of fake sympathy to put her down by implying she lacked agency. Unfortunately, that’s how a lot of the public understands autism.
With regard to his denial of having bipolar disorder on the grounds that Jewish doctors are trying to control him, putting aside the anti-Semitism for the moment, it’s common for people with psychosis to claim the meds are an attempt to poison them. But with him, some part of me is reluctant to pathologize his behavior, because it just feels like everything he says is an attempt to deflect blame. He always talks as if he never can do any wrong, that everything is always somebody else’s fault. He was like this even a couple of decades ago when he was occasionally saying things I kind of agreed with (“Bush doesn’t care about black people”). If there’s any pathological explanation for him, I think it would be more in the realm of NPD than bipolar disorder or autism. Barring that, maybe at least part of the problem is his years of being a mega-superstar where so many people worship at his feet. Not everyone in his position becomes this obnoxious, but it can’t be healthy for anyone’s soul.