This year’s (2018) Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States fell on the 55th commemoration of the tragic assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35th President. During his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, he challenged us all to contribute to the good of our nation in his now-famous words:
Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.
This Thanksgiving and on each day of our 45th President’s tenure, Donald John Trump has reversed and distorted Kennedy’s challenge by figuratively demanding:
Ask not what I can do for my country – ask what my country can do for me.
Several times each day, political historians and pundits label Trump’s statements and actions during his run for the U.S. presidency and throughout his residency in the White House in such terms as “unprecedented,” “abnormal,” and “surprising,” and describe him as “breaking norms,” “going against transitions” and “standard practices,” “violating rules,” “being a disrupter” and “a street fighter.”
Though Trump’s conduct is certainly unprecedented and surprising in the annals of presidential history, when examined under the psychological lenses of personality disorders, it comes into clear focus and as just another day at the office.
One does not have to have earned a Ph.D. in psychology to identify Donald Trump as someone suffering from personality disorders because he clearly manifests many if not all of its symptoms.
The American Psychiatric Association defines a personality disorder as:
…a way of thinking, feeling and behaving that deviates from the expectations of the culture, causes distress or problems functioning, and lasts over time….Without treatment, the behavior and experience is inflexible and usually long-lasting.
The pattern is seen in at least two of these areas:
- Way of thinking about oneself and others
- Way of responding emotionally
- Way of relating to other people
- Way of controlling one’s behavior
APA enumerates 10 specific types of personality disorders organized under three categories or “clusters.” Most associated with Donald Trump are two disorders within Cluster B’s “dramatic, emotional, or erratic behavior” summarized as:
Antisocial (a.k.a. Sociopathic) Personality Disorder: repeatedly discounts or infringes on the rights of others, and is unreliable. A person with antisocial personality disorder often violates social norms and rules, constantly and pathologically lies, manipulates, cheats, betrays others, acts rashly or impulsively, lacks remorse, shame, and guilt, needs constant emotional and physical stimulations, is often paranoid, and acts as an authoritarian.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
According to Greek legend, a young man was so fascinated, awestruck, and enraptured by his own image reflected on the surface of a pool that he sat lovingly gazing at water’s edge for so long that he succumbed to his own vanity and eventually transformed into a flower that carries his name, “Narcissus.”
The American Psychiatric Association, in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual II (DSM) lists “Narcissism” as an emotional problem and “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD) with a number of characteristics. These include:
- An obvious self-focus in interpersonal exchanges
- Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
- A lack of psychological awareness
- Difficulty with empathy
- Problems distinguishing the self from others (having bad interpersonal boundaries)
- Hypersensitivity to any insults or imagined insults
- Vulnerability to shame rather than guilt
- Haughty body language
- Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them
- Detesting those who do not admire them
- Using other people without considering the costs of doing so
- Pretending to be more important than they actually are
- Bragging and exaggerating their achievements
- Claiming to be an “expert” at many things
- Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people
- Denial of remorse and gratitude
While Trump has not transformed into a beautiful fragrant flower as did the character in the Greek legend, we, nonetheless have to ask some critical questions.
How did Trump as someone who clearly suffers from serious personality disorders garner so much support from the electorate to have vanquished 16 Republican candidates and his Democratic challenger to win the right to occupy the most important and powerful position in the world?
Does Trump’s meteoric ascendancy reflect collective Sociopathic and Narcissistic Personality Disorders in the larger U.S. body and personality politic?
Trump has appealed to a nationalist strain in the United States, an “America first,” “we are the best and last great hope for the world,” “a shining city on a hill,” “a beacon of freedom, liberty, and hope to the entire world,” because we are an “exceptional nation.”
Nationalism emphasizes excessive and aggressive jingoism or chauvinism, an attitude of infallibility and dominance. This notion of “American exceptionalism” (also read “American superiority”), this mantra drilled into us as soon as we exit the womb, does it not reflect a narcissistic psyche or personality disorder on a national scale?
The Church convicted physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei on the charge of heresy by insisting that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than, as per Church teaching, that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe with the Sun revolving around the Earth. The Church forced Galileo to spend the remainder of his life into the 16th century under house arrest. Ultimately, the Church saw the error of its teaching.
The concept of “American exceptionalism” attempts to position the United States as the immovable center of the planet with all other countries revolving around us. While the United States can be seen as a great country with strengths and weaknesses, so too can many other countries around the globe.
Review the symptoms for Antisocial and Narcissistic Personality Disorders, but this time see whether they apply as well to the personality or the psyche of the U.S. body politic.
This collective attitude of “exceptionalism,” though, separates our country and our residents from people of other nations by giving us the image of the “arrogant Americans,” which often engenders ridicule and scorn around the world.
What will ultimately save the United States from its current “leader” and from itself, though, are the brilliantly enduring institutions and, when employed, its checks and balances as demanded by We The People.
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