In his Jan. 8 op-ed “We don’t need a wall to ensure better border policy,” David Dodson does an excellent job of outlining why the United States needs to adopt a comprehensive reform of immigration laws. However, in doing so, he inadvertently makes the mistake of underplaying the nefarious use that Donald Trump makes of so-called dangerous immigrants among us to rally his base and to frighten Americans about what is happening at the border and in our cities. The use of a targeted group to encourage hatred in a national white-majority population is a well-known maneuver of dictators and totalitarian leaders throughout history.
My chapter in the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” called attention to the similarity of thought patterns found in other totalitarian leaders, such as Hitler and Stalin, and those manifestly obvious in how our president thinks, talks, and tweets. Here I am not attempting to call attention to actions that can be compared with those enacted by Hitler and Stalin; however, this kind of grandiose paranoid thinking in a leader needs to be recognized as disqualifying for someone serving as the president of the United States.
While immigration reform may actually be needed, it is important that it not be allowed to serve as a cover for the president’s attempts to use hatred of immigrants as a means of increasing the influence of his antidemocratic thinking and leadership.
Dr. Henry J. Friedman
Cambridge
The writer is an associate professor of psychiatry, part time, at Harvard Medical School.
