Should future Presidents be subject to routine Psychological evaluations?

Clearly they should, yes.

Looks like. I'd also like that examination done for anyone running for Congress.

As long as we keep electing crazy and/or old people to office, yes.

IMO essentially everything about public officials, at least at a certain level, should be made public or at least overseen by a third-party, bipartisan oversight committee. I'm talking mental health, physical health, etc. of the president, VP, cabinet members, and congressmen and senators.

We need to make public service at the presidential level so unappealing that only the truly dedicated and loyal would even consider it.

What will be done with this, or these, evaluations? Do you want direct action to be taken based on them, or just put them out for the public to read?

Who will do these evaluations? Will there be only one "authority" that conducts the evaluation, or will we have multiple "experts" do independent evaluations?

To be honest, this smacks of elitism; i.e. the people cannot be trusted to evaluate candidates without the help of "experts".

i think as long as you can identify an elephant on a piece of paper, you're good to go

Sounds good in theory but I think you end up just politicizing the assessment process. It really ought to be the president's Dr. honestly raising any material concerns in-confidence with the VP around dementia etc.

Other issues should be self evident even to the general public. Can anyone honestly say that Trump is not a pathological liar? That he is not a supreme narcississt? You would have to be a total imbecile not to understand that. All these sycophants and losers know that Trump is a liar and narcissist.

Some of his biggest political supporters are publicly on the record saying exactly that in 2016. Of course these spineless turds quickly shifted gears after he was elected. These people like Cruz and Graham are actually worse than Trump.

Trump is just a truly delusional fucktard who has spent his entire life as a pathetic grifter, liar, and false image builder trying to live up to what he wants to be seen as. Big time Daddy issues. Everyday he has been tweeting lie after lie and in doing so he has been perfectly open and honest about who and what he really is. That's the irony. Nothing matters to him except him. Period. Full stop.

The bigger issue is the complete lack of spine of everyone around him aka his political allies. These people are actually worse because they are deliberate, whereas Trump is just delusional, spontaneous and devoid of any real thought, policy, or grasp of any issues. He is a grown up with the intellect, maturity, awareness, and emotional control of a 4 year old. It is literally just about him.

@comeonman: Well, to be honest I posted this, because I wanted some feedback.

I mean, police officers where I come from in Canada are subjected to this before being hired. They even need to pass a polygraph as well. The intent of the polygraph is simply to detect dishonesty on all of the "have you ever.....?" Type questions they are required to answer as part of the interview process.

I see no reason a public official such as a president, who theoretically wields even more power shouldn't be subjected to the same.

As far as what to do with that info? Thats the tough part.

If I were a US voter, I would really just like to know if I'm potentially voting for a sociopath or not.

So yeah, I guess the results wouldn't need to be made public to be helpful. Just to disqualify certain types of personalities. Sociopaths especially. I do not want to be lead by someone who has no empathy and is simply really good at faking human emotion.

@SUD123456: Pretty sure Trump would have been disqualified from even becoming the nominee, had something like this been in place beforehand.

I'd say so. And not that's not because of party affiliation. The GOP had a lot of candidates to pick from and choose the worst.

Yes. I'm an advocate for mental health advances, and a leader of the United States should be subject to mental evaluation.

Sounds good on paper. Don't know how it'll actually play out.

Interestingly, a fair number of lower level government jobs require psych evals. Private ones, too.

We usually rely on the campaign process to fulfill this function for elected officials, but...

Depends if the evaluators could be considered dependable and uncorruptible and what standards would be agreed on and how they would be set.

@girlusocrazy: Yeah, that's 100% the tough part. How to ensure the evaluators are incorruptible.

Anyone who isn't a Politician shouldn't be qualify to run anything at all and President Trump isn't a political person to begin with, he's a Businessman (a failure really) who has no business running the White House.

Trump didn't even need one for many to see he wasn't mentally fit to be president, or that his personality would have never allowed him to concede the presidency with civility. Remember though, he took a cognitive assessment and thought he was John Travolta in Phenomenon with an unprecedented IQ test. But nonetheless he somehow gets everyone to sing his praises like a North Korean dictator's ass kissing sycophants, like the physicians that did his physicals, or the Walter Reed doctors, or Dr Birks, or even Fauci tried as hard as he could not to offend Trump. Anybody as unfit at Trump would get doctors to say he is exceptionally fit for office.

It would be totally unenforceable. The criteria to determine competency would be subject to review, interpretation, and could never be ratified, in the realm of politics. We're better off keeping it embedded in the 25th amendment as it would require a contextualized judgement call given the scenario.

As others have mentioned, the bigger problem is the enablement of the behavior in the first place. We've got spineless cowards that have allowed an orange faced grifter to assume power through intimidation, and done nothing to prevent it. They're soft unprincipled sycophants. That's the core problem.

@davillain-: What? More non politicians should be voted in, the lifers are what's ruining politics in America and creating unparalleled amounts of corruption.

Yes

While I believe presidents should get a mental evaluation, I don't want it to be an automatic pass or disqualification.

A crazy person can potentially be what we need in some spaces. I think it should just be a piece that's visible for the voter and we make up our own minds by voting.

Yes. Sleepy Joe's term would be over before it even begins.

Depends, I’m a bit undecided on this.

Are we testing solely for cognitive ability, or psychological tendency? Because I can tell you, considering the safety net our Constitution affords (25th, the VP and chain of succession), I would take a president who is borderline cognitively in decline years before I would take one who is pathologically deranged and whose personality traits are a direct threat to democracy and the safety of the nation. We entrust them the power to quite literally destroy the world many times over in their hands and end civilization as we know it.

Then again, I can see a tremendous potential for abuse and partisan meddling, and I also hear the argument that it would stand in direct contravention of the will and discretion of the electorate.

If pushed and after Trump, I’d have to say yes.

@appariti0n:

I'm not sure comparing a hired position, such as police officer, to an elected position is valid. Unless you completely distrust the judgement of the American people, in which case you should be opposed to any form of democratic or self governance.

If you want to use this/these evaluations to determine eligibility for candidacy, I am 100% opposed to that notion. Once someone is elected, I believe we have mechanisms in place to allow the removal of a truly unhinged person, be they president or serve in congress.

One thing that would definitely help would be a functioning press/media that filled its role properly. That died in the US a couple of decades ago.

@MirkoS77:

My thinking was more towards detecting sociopaths and/or psychopaths.

The problem with trusting the American people, is that they can be very hard to detect by the untrained. Psychopaths especially. We have all likely dealt with a few psychopaths in our daily lives and not even known it, as they are often experts at "faking" empathy and emotional connection.

They instead view everyone as simply a pawn to further their own ends, with no empathy whatsoever. I think another name is anti-social personality disorder.

So I guess yeah, I'd be most concerned about the two mentioned above, and also potentially old age dementia, based on the age of some of these folks in power.

There are plenty of other personality types I simply don't like, IE: narcissistic, but I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to find any leader who doesn't have at least a bit of narcissism. So I probably wouldn't screen for those. Except maybe Sadism? But even then, Sadism on its own is fine, as long as the person isn't ALSO a psychopath.