Why a CIA Psychiatrist Called Trump Nuts
Jerrold Post said 'the period between the election and the inauguration will be a very dangerous period.'
Dr. Jerrold M. Post was a highly respected trailblazer as the CIA’s first political profiler, the founder of the discipline of political psychology. Post, a psychiatrist who served for two decades at the CIA, died on November 22 of covid-19. He was 86 years old.
In January, just before the start of the pandemic, Post participated in one of his final interviews with Jonathan Winer and me for our podcast, Unconventional Threat.
By that time, his concerns about President Donald Trump had led him to break with the strictures other colleagues felt to produce and publish a profile equivalent to others he had done for the CIA. 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…
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