I recently wrote an editorial making the case that Donald J. Trump scores extraordinarily high on the fascism scale originated by political scientist Lawrence Britt who enumerates 14 tenets of fascism.
Since that editorial, his longest serving Chief of Staff when Trump was President, General John Kelly, said that he meets the definition of a “fascist.”
Retired Army general and former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, Mark Milley, told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is a “fascist to the core.”
Several times each day beginning during his entry into the presidential sweepstakes after descending his golden escalator at Trump Tower in the summer of 2015, political historians and pundits have described Trump’s statements and actions in terms such as “unprecedented,” “abnormal,” and “surprising,” and describe him as “breaking norms,” “going against transitions” and “standard practices,” “violating rules,” “a disrupter” and being “a street fighter.”
Whenever we think Trump can no longer go any deeper into the sewer of invective, lying, and acting out his distorted sense of perceptions by placing our nation and the world at greater risk, he always stuns, though not surprise us by taking out the digging equipment to plow ever further down into the endless toxic chasm.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic in 2020 exposed further broken ground in Trump’s inexorable excavation to the bottom.
Goldberg detailed Trump’s utter contempt for the U.S. military and the personnel who risk everything for love of country. Trump referred to people who join the military as “suckers” and those caught or killed by the enemy as “losers.”
This might not be as serious had Trump remained in his gold tower on Fifth Avenue filling out additional Chapter 11 bankruptcy forms. In his role as the dysfunctional Commander in Chief, though, the pain and suffering to Gold Star and Blue Star families and the hit to military morale ultimately impacts us all.
Though Trump’s conduct is certainly unprecedented and surprising in the annals of presidential history, when examined under the psychological lens of personality disorders, it comes into clear focus and not as simply just another day in the Oval 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:Â 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
Trump, though, has not transformed into a beautiful fragrant flower as did the character in Greek legend.
A distinguished group of leading mental health clinicians, researchers, and practitioners originally broke the glass and pulled the alarm in what they considered was their duty to report the clear and present dangers to the body politic posed by the personality disorders of Donald J. Trump two years into his presidency in 2017.
The group published a book titled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President in their “duty to report” the dangers posed and enacted by this President. Instead of retaining extreme power, Trump requires care and treatment so that he no longer poses so much danger to himself and the world.
Reporter for The Bulwark, Tim Miller added that
“Donald Trump checks all the boxes of a person with narcissistic personality disorder, but the mainstream press goes out of its way not to cover his apparent pathologies—and ends up normalizing them.”
Miller interviewed George Conway, Board President for the Society for the Rule of Law and President of Anti-Psychopath PAC, on Miller’s podcast for The Bulwark, August 2, 2024:
“He is a quintessential narcissistic sociopath and with that, you understand essentially everything about him,” said Conway. “You understand his racism; you understand his misogyny; you understand his authoritarianism; you understand his criminality; you understand his erraticness: Everything about him, once you understand his personality type.
Within the social climate of the United States, at least some of the stigma posed on those with emotional and mental disorders has diminished somewhat over the past few decades. Some individuals who have the means to afford treatment actually boast, or at least no longer feel the shame that others not-so-long ago experienced in seeking help.
I once felt this shame and lived in the shadows that others might discover my diagnoses in the areas of psychological disorders. Though I have sought treatment for over 40 years, only during the last decade or so have I “come out of the closet” in talking with others.
My post-traumatic stress disorder, moderate agoraphobia (fear of leaving my home, fear of open spaces), social stress disorder, bulimia (a dangerous eating disorder), and misophonia (certain sounds – eating sounds, some consonants in spoken words — trigger extremely negative emotional or physiological responses).
With years of psychological therapy, today I lead a relatively good and productive life. But then again, neither do I have, nor have I ever wanted the type of monetary resources, visibility, and power of the President of the United States.
Donald Trump’s documented disorders, however, make clear that his motivation to attain the highest office in the land is based on enriching his personal fortune and status, and his current run is motivated by his desire to stay out of jail for the serious criminal charges directed against him.
Trump’s grifting was evidenced by his attempt to pressure the British to sponsor its national golf tournament at his Scottish golf course and resort, by attempting to hold a G-7 conference at his Mara-Logo resort, by giving massive tax cuts to himself and his wealthy friends, by pushing for severe relaxation of environmental quality and fair trading standards to benefit corporations and industry at the peril of our climate and health, by engaging in nepotism in hiring family members, by flagrantly violating emoluments laws, by his alleged “mishandling” of campaign and inaugural funding, and by hiding this by never exposing his tax forms.
His so-called “America First” policies act as a veritable political agoraphobia isolating our nation from the remainder of the world and separating us from our strong former alliances.
Trump’s narcissistic sociopathic personality disorder with his inability to feel empathy coupled with his incompetence has resulted in needless deaths during the COVID epidemic under his “watch.”
Political pundits have predicted Trump political demise many times, from his misogynistic “Access Hollywood” taped statements, to his referring to John McCain as not being a war hero because he was captured, to his denial on the stage in Helsinki, Finland directly next to Vladimir Putin that the Russians did not interfered in the 2016 presidential election, to referring to some of the neo-Nazi white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia as “good people,” to failing to acknowledge and call out the Russians for placing bounties on our military personnel, to calling members of our armed forces “suckers” and “losers.”
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 in 2016?
Does Trump’s meteoric ascendancy reflect a collective Narcissistic Sociopathic Personality Disorders in the larger U.S. body politic?
Is there a line over which his supporters will not cross as he descends further into the abyss? The upcoming election may answer these questions.
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