Part I - America Personified

Uncle Sam or Lady Liberty?

Per Perplexity,

The famous phrase "we get the leaders we deserve" represents one of democracy's most enduring and contentious observations about political accountability, yet its precise origin remains shrouded in historical uncertainty. While this sentiment has been attributed to various prominent figures throughout history, including Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, and George Bernard Shaw, the exact authorship appears to be a matter of scholarly debate rather than historical certainty.

Is Donald Trump the leader that America deserves?

I recently purchased The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew and Perplexity summarized the Introduction for me.

Since the 2017 release of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, mental health experts have warned about the president’s psychological dangers, which have since expanded into broader social and political threats. Influential figures like General John Kelly reportedly used the book to manage Trump’s dangerous impulses, including averting nuclear conflict.

The 2024 follow-up, The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, deepened these warnings with more experts and essays, highlighting worsening symptoms and widespread “Trump Contagion.” By 2025, after a destructive election and escalating crises, the latest volume, The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, brings together 50 experts to emphasize the urgent ethical duty of psychiatrists to warn society and advise government, challenging restrictive professional rules that silence expert voices.

Organized around themes symbolized by Greek gods, the book stresses the need to confront political mental pathology, resist violence and misinformation, and promote healing and renewal. The authors affirm that speaking truth and sharing expert knowledge is vital to protecting democracy and humanity’s future.

On October 23, 2024 The Hill published an article, Criticism from ex-Trump officials piles up ahead of Election Day, with dire warnings.

Several former Trump administration officials are speaking out in the final weeks of the 2024 campaign to warn of the risks of electing their onetime boss to a second term.

Former chief of staff John Kelly told The New York Times that former President Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government.”

Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told Bob Woodward that Trump was a “fascist to the core,” and multiple press aides have hit the campaign trail in recent days to warn that Trump is unfit to serve as president.

Mark Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of Defense for 16 months, has spoken out in recent weeks about how Trump might use the military for political purposes in a second term.

John Bolton, who spent 17 months as Trump’s national security adviser, has been a regular presence on television warning that the former president does not have a coherent national security strategy beyond his own self-interest.

And yet 77,284,118 people ignored warnings and voted for Trump. How do we make sense of this? Arielle Friedman wrote Maybe it was… and, understanding complexity, gives many reasons.

I would like to focus on just one possible factor, immaturity.

A Child Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Trump’s Behavior compares the behavior of Trump to that of children.

Preschool kids are normally impulsive, grandiose, self-centered, attention seeking, unable to tell truth from fiction, violate rules and norms, easily wounded, and do not take responsibility for themselves. We spend plenty of time as parents in helping them learn the norms of civility.

But all this is way out of line for a normal teenager. They should be far more developmentally advanced by now.

The problem is that Trump is not a preschooler or a normal teenager. He is the President of the United States.

A recent article on Slate asks Trump’s Like a Middle Schooler?

For far too many commentators, it’s not enough to condemn Trump as a fool or a monster. They have to accuse him of being an adolescent as well.

As a middle school teacher, I am here to say that this middle school bashing should stop. Middle school and middle schoolers have their problems—no one who works with this age cohort every day could deny it. But the worst middle school bully is still better than Donald Trump, an adult who should really know better, and this unrelenting cultural focus on the downsides of adolescence obscures another side to middle school life, one that I am fortunate to witness almost every day. We often think of middle school as a period to simply pass through, an age to get beyond, never to be discussed again, but if we’re paying attention, I think middle schoolers can teach us a lot about how to be better versions of ourselves.

My assertion is this, that the United States of America has an immature President elected by immature voters. And, imo, the immature voters were not mature enough to recognize their own lack of development which blinded them to the reality of Donald Trump. In Part II I will look at my own country, Canada, from this perspective.