From Peter Eisner at SpyTalk.
A veteran Washington reporter, Eisner interviewed Post for his podcast (with Jonathan Winer) Unconventional Threat. The Q&A with Post, reprinted in the SpyTalk piece, is well worth reading
Here is guide to understanding how an intelligence agency assesses a political leader.
Post had created the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the CIA. Over time, he had profiled Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat for President Jimmy Carter prior to the Camp David Accords. He also produced profiles of Kim Jong-Il, Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein, among others.
He now decided to apply the same techniques he had used on world leaders and others to analyze the President of the United States. In so doing, he was breaking a longstanding guideline established by the American Psychiatric Association, known as the Goldwater rule, in which professionals do not diagnose public figures who they have not personally examined and assessed. However, in a long-ranging interview, Post said that Donald Trump represented a clear and present danger to the United States. He said that Trump’s actions in plain sight and his well-known biography made it possible to describe the dangers in psychiatric terms. And he felt compelled to discuss his findings.
Why a CIA Psychologist Called Trump Nuts–SpyTalk
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