The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
Ed. by Bandy Lee
Psychology is not an exact science, and diagnosis at a distance or as filtered through the media might be expected to make for an even fuzzier picture. Nevertheless the “27 psychiatrists and mental health experts” who contributed to this collection of essays on Donald Trump and the “Trump effect” do their best, working with and interpreting the same small set of data points.
I doubt anyone will find the results all that surprising. Narcissism is a label that gets used a lot, sometimes with “malignant” attached to it. The basic idea is that Trump has delusions of grandeur and a lack of empathy. Underlying this is a nasty and narrow world view that sees everyone categorized as either winner or loser, con-man or sucker. In layman’s terms, he’s a selfish, paranoid, mean-spirited bully.
Given his wealth and power he has been able to construct an alternate reality or bubble to live in, surrounded by enablers and flattering courtiers. This is the dark side of the much-ballyhooed priority such people place on loyalty. The sad, or Sad!, thing is that there is nothing exceptional about Trump but perhaps the intensity of his anger and the degree of his delusions. In his essay “Pathological Narcissism and Politics,” Craig Malkin harkens back to the gold standard of bad presidents to tell us that “Nixon displayed a combination of intense ambition, authority, grandiosity, arrogance, entitlement, subterfuge, and self-importance that appears to have been common in the Oval Office throughout history.”
It all works until it doesn’t. By which time any warnings or second thoughts come much too late.
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