On Tuesday April 4, at 2:15 pm former president Donald Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in a New York City courtroom on charges of one or more crimes. In a perfect world this would happen quietly, in reasonable accordance with a reasonable law. However, in this imperfect world, the event will generate hysteria “unlike the world has ever seen.” The media, all media, will be apoplectic. The American people will be ginned up, riled up by political passions right, left, and center. And the world will be, despite numberless bigger fish to fry, riveted by the spectacle. Trump is the consummate showman, and this will be his biggest show yet.
This post focuses on one man, one leader, Trump. It does not focus on his followers, his enablers who are, of course, integral to the story, especially prominent Republicans who in recent days have crept like lemmings again to defend him. I focus here on Trump because it’s worth being reminded at this critical juncture of how aberrational he is. How mentally unstable; how deviant and delusional; how paranoid and narcissistic. He is not normal, he is abnormal. Still,he has realized his wildest and yes, fondest dream: being stage center, the center of global attention.
This post is short and simple. It’s no more than – but no less than – a reminder of Trump’s extreme paranoia and deep-seated narcissism. Just before the circus starts it’s appropriate remind ourselves yet again of how psychologically unstable and unfit for public life is our former president.
Points on Political Paranoia
The principal components of political paranoia are:
- Suspicion – Trump tirelessly engages in a relentless search for the enemies that he assumes without question are out there somewhere. (Which by now of course they are. Even paranoids have enemies!)
- Centrality – Trump’s world is one in which everything has meaning only as it pertains to him.
- Grandiosity – Trump believes that he alone knows the whole truth and nothing but. And he has no tolerance, none, for dissent or disagreement.
- Hostility – Like all paranoids, Trump is angry and aggressive; bellicose and belligerent; inordinately defensive and perennially poised to attack.
- Fear – Of all Trump’s many fears, his worst is loss of autonomy. For him even to conceive of giving in is intolerable, as is the idea of being less than the dominant agent.
- Delusion – Trump clings to his habitual lies, deceits, and false beliefs, even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
- Conspiracy – Trump’s thinking is extreme thinking, conspiratorial thinking. He sees the world as essentially a struggle between evil on the one hand, and good on the other.
- Certainty – The absolute certainty with which Trump radiates his many hatreds is compelling to his followers This includes but is not limited to those who otherwise have lost their moorings.
Points on Pathological Narcissism
The principal components of pathological narcissism are:
- Lack of empathy – Trump is, literally, unable to consider the needs, wants, wishes, and feelings of others.
- Entitlement – Trump is convinced of his own centrality which is why he always assumes he owes nothing and is owed everything.
- Exploitation – Trump badly needs other people around him for the primary purpose of making him feel special. He does not, because he cannot, return the favor.
- Impaired judgement and volatile decision making – Trump exhibits both. Both are symptoms of pathological narcissism and both are especially dangerous in political leaders because of their potentially enormous impact on others.
- Mary Trump on Trump’s narcissism – “His deep-seated insecurities have created in him a black hole of need that constantly requires the light of compliments that disappears as soon as he’s soaked it in. Nothing is ever enough. This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism. Donald is not simply weak. His ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered at every moment because he knows that deep down he is nothing of what he claims to be.” (Mary Trump is Trump’s only niece. She is a clinical psychologist.)*
“I alone can fix it,” Trump famously said at the 2016 Republican National Convention. More accurate would have been, “I alone can break it.”
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*This post has drawn on three books: 1) Robert Robins and Jerrold Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitcs of Hatred; 2) Bandy Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President; and 3) Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.