Viewpoint

The narcissistic personality disorder that is Donald Trump

January 16, 2021 12:58 pm

“Once upon a time, there was a young Greek Nymph named Narcissus, who was distinguished for his beauty. When another lady Nymph fell in love with Narcissus, he rejected her advances. When The Goddess of Revenge heard of the rejection, he decided to punish Narcissus by luring him to a pool of water. Narcissus looked into the pool of water, saw his own reflection and he fell deeply in love with it. Once Narcissus realized that he could not obtain the object of his desire, he died at the banks of the river from his sorrow…”

The Greek story of Narcissus provides the mythical source for the modern concept of narcissism, which is conceived as excessive self-love and the attendant qualities of grandiosity and a sense of entitlement.

One may not be a Clinical Psychologist but Donald Trump cuts the figure of one who suffers from the same infirmity that consumed the Greek Nymph, Narcissus. It is an extremely severe mental disorder, which renders him incapable of attending to any issue beyond his own personal need for adulation; a severe instance of a “Dangerous, Incurable, Narcissistic Personality Disorder!” It might be this condition that makes Donald Trump’s self worth entirely dependent upon admiration from others, makes him incapable of empathy and reason. It might be this condition that makes him so entitled, arrogant, callous and rude.

With a condition as serious as what it appears Donald Trump has, his leadership of the American people is about as pleasantly aromatic as flatulence in an elevator. In a truly wild twist, even for the first week of 2021 (which is saying something), Donald Trump fully showed his hand by giving out one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in living memory and effectively establishing himself as the worst president in U.S. history.

When Trump was elected as U.S President four years ago, many of his critics were afraid that somewhere along the line, he would create a critical constitutional crisis by his actions. They feared this because of the character and personality trait of this man-child of breathtaking vapidity, which seemed especially dangerous, because he carries out and incites bad behavior. And those critics were not wrong. In fact, inside sources claim that, during the 2016 presidential election campaign, three psychiatrists went out of their way to write to, then, President Barack Obama a warning stating that Trump’s widely narrated indications of mental instability led them to question his fitness for office. Not just any office; arguably, the highest and most powerful office in the World. An office that gives him access to nuclear codes that could wipe out millions of people should it be in the possession of an unhinged leader.

But despite the obvious calamity that this Internet Troll posed, Americans went ahead and voted him into that most powerful office in the World. Now, four years on, his refusal to come to terms with his 2020 election defeat and his relentless incitement of his supporters has led to an unthinkable assault on the U.S Capital before the eyes of the World.

After repeating a litany of absurd conspiracy theories about an election that he had fairly lost, this idiot who reasons like a pre-pubescent teen and speaks like a toddler in pre- school, encouraged an angry and disillusioned mob to force its way into the American Capitol Building to disrupt the official certification of his electoral defeat. In calling a spade a spade, what followed was an attempted coup d’état that resulted in five fatalities in America, egged on by a lawless president desperately trying to cling to power. America’s child president had a play date with desperation, whom surely enjoyed providing day care for the Muppet.

In a scene that anyone paying attention for the last few years knew was coming, it was perhaps inevitable that President Trump’s chaotic and incompetent tenure in office would end in civil violence and civil breakdown. And that is what the world watched play out in Washington during the insurrection on the American Capitol on the 6thof January 2021. If anybody had any doubt, this fascist, obsessed with fears of victimization, humiliation and a concomitant cult of strength’s recent shenanigan shows him to be a ferocious menace and a dire danger to society. America will be paying the price for the gargantuan mistake of electing this bitter, twisted narcissist as president for a long time to come. Donald Trump should never have had a seat in the forefront of governance. The whole world knew that. America should be ashamed of electing this man into office in the first place.

Honestly, one wonders what Americans were expecting from Trump? This has been a President who had earlier put everyone on notice about his refusal to accept electoral defeat by stating that, if he didn’t like the outcome of any election, he’ll simply not leave office. And to think that he was taken seriously enough that, high-level military officers actually went to the extent of writing an open letter on the constitutional duty of sending in the American military to remove the President from office if he refuses to leave. Yet this moron was allowed to operate in the dangerous way he did. What exactly were Americans expecting?

Clearly, Donald Trump is a man who seems to have neither respect nor loyalty to anyone but himself. He appears to view people as lesser-beings who deserve to be treated with contempt, a contempt that is ameliorated only to the degree that they can be of instrumental use to him. His contempt for others as lesser-beings can be seen in his disdain towards women, migrants, foreigners, Muslims, Mexicans, the disabled, non-white Americans and anyone who doesn’t look or think like him.

He also comes across as having an acute paranoia, which is characterized by a worldview that sees other people as inherently untrustworthy. And any information that does not comport to his worldview simply cannot be processed in his mind. Divorced from the ability to fact-check the reality around him, his internal world is populated with fact-free conspiracies that fit with his emotional needs.

History suggests that leaders with the kind of mental condition Trump exhibits tend to view themselves as world figures capable of bending history to their will, and that they harbor simplistic pathological fantasies for reshaping the world in their own disordered image. This was certainly the case with Hitler, who’s pathological narcissism fuelled his vision of Germany as a “master race” that needed to be cleansed of the germs of the disabled, foreigners and Jews. Mr. Trump, like Hitler, has the personality of a grandiose-paranoid dictator who would destroy all he saw as his enemies while endangering the nation that he supposedly was advancing through his leadership.

In the last four years, Donald Trump has ruled like an authoritarian who strived to consolidate their power for the longer term by cultivating ties within the structures of government that are based primarily on loyalty to his person rather than to the rule of law or democratic norms. He doled out responsibility to people who don’t threaten him by surrounding himself with a gallery of sycophants that who wouldn’t dare contradict them. He ignited the flames of a cultural civil war within the US that benefited him by polarizing America and mobilizing his base. And he succeeded in discrediting institutions and individuals who might hold him accountable in the eyes of a substantial proportion of the American population. Donald Trump has done great damage to America. As he is pushed out the door, he leaves behind a nation deranged.

Another thing that one can surmise from his politically potent character trait is that, the selfishness that comes with it allowed him to do things that would have jabbed the conscience of other political leaders. He had no shame about almost everything. When people whine about Trump being politically in correct, being unpleasant and breaking norms, what they are really saying is that, he is doing things that predecessors would have been ashamed to do. What they mean is that he normalizes bad behavior. But Trump often doesn’t know his civics well enough to recognize them as violations, and he doesn’t have any shame. None whatsoever. In days bygone, the prescribed method for avoiding shame was behaving well. By contrast, the Trump method for avoiding shame is not acknowledging it and not giving a hoot. The Age of Trump has been the attempted annihilation of shame in a huge way!

This sad, embarrassing wreck of a man used social media to bully people, take over his political party and spread inflammatory messages. He indulged in a stream-of-consciousness rants and posted horrible, immature and mean descriptions of his opponents. He related with his followers and admirers through a barrage of tweets, by turns pugilistic, hyperbolic and verbose filled with unproven assertions and carelessly sensitive use of extreme negative emotion. It is no wonder that Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Instagram have now all shut down Trump’s accounts after wanton lies and incitements.

Watching the Dung-Show that is the presidency of Donald Trump is outrageously aggravating. He is a huge baby who is having a hissy fit and throwing his toys out of the pram over his inability to accept defeat in an election, which he lost. He is a liar whose lies don’t trigger any kind of internal emotional crisis in him. He is a man that believes in skyscraping misconceptions about his own competences and believes in the preeminence of his instincts over and above abstract and collective reason. But in truth, the grandiosity of his personality belies an extreme fragility where his ego is as fragile as a Graphite specimen on a bad day.

Honestly, Donald Trump has so abused the power of his office that for him to remain in the White House, even if it is for a few more days, is a threat to American democracy. Stopping further chaos in America by removing Trump is an absolute necessity. His intentional American carnage requires urgent accountability.

The truth is that the media have over the last four years normalized Donald Trump’s rubbish and tried to understand him as a psychologically healthy human being. But Donald Trump is not a psychologically healthy human being and considering him as if he were, sanctions him and his nonsense and disempowers people of reason.

If Donald Trump does not score low on any narcissistic personality dimension, then probably nobody does. Trump is the very personification of the malevolent and menacing narcissist, a world-class paradigm of this miserably unpleasant personality.

Donald Trump can go ahead and continue to behave in a manner where all of his actions revolve around feeding the false self of himself in his own time and off the mantle of leadership. After all, that will only lead him to the very place he belongs, a pit of a self malignant love, which will never grow, and always dies in infamy.

Thank God we are about to see the end of this chapter of this obese, orange, disastrous fool who would give Narcissus a run for his money on excessive self-love and the attendant qualities of grandiosity and a sense of entitlement any day!