The Trauma Didn’t Start With Trump and It Won’t End When He’s Gone

Mark Olmsted
8 min readFeb 5, 2019

I’ve have long felt ambivalent about the term “P.T.S.D.” First, because, I don’t think it’s quite fair to call an intense, long-term reaction to trauma a “disorder,” and second, because the stress of combat is so deservedly specific, I hesitate to use it in another context. But to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, ‘you write an essay with the words you have, not the words you oughta…

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Mark Olmsted

Author, "Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir" about my time behind bars. See GQ dot com “Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” for story of how I got there.