We are all at the Mercy of Our Narcissist-in-Chief
To say that we find ourselves in a dysfunctional relationship is an understatement
Opinion Columnist
- Oct. 11, 2019
If, by some grievous misfortune, you should happen to have a pathological narcissist in your life — a drain on your soul, a bottomless chute of need, a roaring outboard motor of jealousies and delusions and self-regard — there’s no shortage of literature offering advice, and most of it preaches the same thing: Never take the bait. If you can disengage, by all means do; if you cannot, keep clear boundaries. Even if it means building an alligator-filled moat.
This advice works fine if the pathological narcissist is a neighbor, a childhood friend, even a cousin or a colleague.
But what do you do if that pathological narcissist is the president of the United States?
A number of Donald Trump’s critics have reached a consensus: We are being governed by a man with a narcissistic personality disorder, almost certainly of the malignant variety, and it’s time to call it by name.
There was an understandable reluctance to say so, at first. In 1964, Fact magazine surveyed thousands of psychiatrists about Barry Goldwater, wondering — not entirely innocently — whether he was psychologically fit to be president. About half of the respondents deemed the Arizona senator unsound. Goldwater, unsurprisingly, sued the magazine for libel and won; the American Psychiatric Association, duly chastened, enshrined the “Goldwater Rule” into its code of ethics, forbidding its members from idly speculating about the mental health of public figures they’d never met.
But the case of Trump has, like virtually everything about his presidency, forced a radical departure from precedent. Perhaps a private consultation would add an extra layer of nuance to our understanding of his disordered personality, but the bottom line is the same: Drill deeper, and you just get more Trump. He is like a man trapped inside a disco ball. No matter which direction he tilts his head, all he sees is himself.
“A wide swath of the population has picked up on this without any formal training,” said Diana Diamond, a professor emeritus of psychology at City University of New York who’s just completed a clinical guide to treating narcissistic pathology. “Like many narcissistic personalities, he may cause more severe distress in others than he himself experiences.”
From the beginning of his presidency (and even before), mental health professionals have sounded the alarm about Trump’s stability — most notably Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Opinion writers have discussed his narcissism openly; so have administration officials, though only in private.
But last week, the lawyer George Conway decided it was time to write the definitive if-it-walks-like-a-duck analysis of Trump’s pathologies for The Atlantic. (Conway is a conservative, but about as bearish on Trump as his wife, Kellyanne, is bullish.) Poring over the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, he notes that the telltale characteristics of a pathological narcissist map perfectly onto Trump’s personality, ocean for ocean, tree for tree.
Has an exaggerated sense of his talents? Check. (See “in my great and unmatched wisdom,” “I alone can fix it,” etc.) Requires excessive admiration? Check. (See the infamous cabinet meeting in which members came not to brief Trump but to praise him.) Has a stupefying incapacity for empathy, is interpersonally exploitative, suffers excessively from envy and envies excessively? Check, check, check.
Conway argues that narcissistic personality disorder is crucial to framing the way we understand both this president and his presidency, which is true.
But it is also crucial to understanding the electorate’s response to Trump — particularly the traumatized majority that opposes him.
“We wake up each day much like the kid of a narcissistic parent wakes up, in the sense that we don’t know what the crazy parent is going to do,” said Brian Baird, formerly a Democratic member of Congress, and before that, a professor of psychology with a private practice in Washington State. “Yet we have to somehow go to work each day and act like things are normal.”
And there’s the rub: You can no sooner quit your president than you can quit your family. If you look at the children of pathological narcissists, noted Baird, their symptoms look a lot like many of ours: “Anxiety, foreboding, depression, anger, frustration, fear, bewilderment at the state of the universe.” Their minds have been annexed; they doubt their perceptions. “What they know to be real,” he said, “is itself challenged by this person’s actions and statements and deeds.”
(Online, in fact, there’s a shadow universe of children of pathological narcissists, who argue that “what’s happening on a national level is activating and retraumatizing a lot of people who have been gaslighted in the past,” in the words of the writer and memoirist Ariel Leve.)
Naturally, there are limits to how far one can take this analogy. Trump got 46 percent of the vote in 2016, and polls say that roughly 43 percent of Americans still support him. They most likely feel emboldened by the president, not traumatized by him. But the distressed-children model would explain why congressional Republicans who privately despise the president still support him in public. “They live in fear that the narcissist will turn on them,” said Baird. So they try to manage the unmanageable. They keep two sets of books, function with two different brains, and buy in — at least partly — to Trump’s grandiose message: You’d be worthless without me.
Journalists have a different problem. If pathological narcissists derive their power from attention, we ought not to give it to them. But under ordinary circumstances, almost anything that comes out of the president’s mouth is considered news. Maybe it’s time, in earnest, to re-examine this notion. An Australian journalist, recently writing for The Guardian, noted that we often render Trump more coherent than he in fact is, spinning word salads into orderly sentences, rendering caprice as deliberate policy.
We’re still playing chess while the president is playing checkers.
But there are signs that this is changing. Even Fox News, the in-house organ of the executive branch, has begun to buckle under the strain of covering such an impossible personality, and Trump has started to howl in return.
That’s the trouble with pathological narcissists: You can never love them enough.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/opinion/trump-narcissism.html
(accessed 12 Oct 2019).