Attorney George Conway, husband to White House aide Kellyanne Conway, suggested Monday that President Donald Trump suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Conway, a frequent critic of the president, shared to social media images of the cover of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, along with two pages detailing Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder.
The textbook describes Narcissistic Personality Disorder as someone who displays a “pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior, need for admiration, lack of empathy” which may begin by early adulthood. The manual describes the latter condition as a “pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15.”
“Don’t assume that the things [President Trump] says and does are part of a rational plan or strategy, because they seldom are,” Conway said Monday. “Consider them as a product of his pathologies, and they make perfect sense.”
The attorney then warned “*all* Americans,” including Vice President Mike Pence and Cabinet members, should think “seriously” about “Trump’s mental condition and psychological state.”
Monday’s jabs at President Trump come after Conway asked last week if a “serious inquiry” should be launched into the president’s mental health.
Conway made headlines this month after claiming President Trump wishes to imprison top law enforcement officials, which he warned would plunge the U.S. into a “banana republic.”
“The president has suggested that members of his own Justice Department should be locked up for investigating the president,” Conway said of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe in a speech at Georgetown Law School. “Now, if people were to get indicted or not indicted on the basis of whether or not the president likes them, we wouldn’t have a republic,” he continued. “We’d have a banana republic.”
Conway, once under consideration to be a top official at the Department of Justice, co-founded an organized last November with the objective of encouraging conservative lawyers to “speak out” against the Trump administration.
“We believe in the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights and the necessity of civil discourse,” reads the mission statement of the group Check and Balances. “We believe these principles apply regardless of the party or persons in power.”
Conway has written several opinion-editorials arguing against some of President Trump’s actions, including the appointment of Matthew Whitaker as Acting Attorney General, which he described as “illegal” and “unconstitutional.”
President Trump has dismissed the lawyer’s repeated criticisms as a ploy to attract “publicity for himself.”