Psychopathy describes personality disorders characterized by chronic lying, manipulation, an inability to empathize with others, childlike impulsiveness and abnormal or violent social behavior. I am a firm believer that Donald Trump is a certifiable psychopath.
A number of mental health experts have indicated that Trump is likely afflicted with a serious case of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Clinical narcissists usually come across as conceited, boastful and pretentious — they monopolize conversations, belittle people they consider inferior and get angry and impatient when they don’t receive special treatment. Narcissists have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and their achievements, are obsessed with their image and maintain superficial relationships for personal gain. A quick glance at his endlessly entertaining and shamelessly self-aggrandizing Twitter page offers plentiful evidence to diagnose Trump as a clinical narcissist. In Psychology Today, Randi Kreger, a leading author on NPD, went through the symptoms and incidents where Trump displayed narcissistic tendencies. A severe personality disorder alone, however, is insufficient for establishing psychopathy. The other key component is perpetual demonstration of “abnormal or violent social behavior.”
One of the most egregious examples of Trump’s psychopathy emerged during his first marriage, to Ivana. In 1989, Ivana claimed that Trump became enraged after a scalp reduction surgery. Blaming Ivana’s plastic surgeon recommendation, Trump allegedly shouted: “Your f—— doctor has ruined me!” then grabbed his wife’s arms, pulled her hair, ripped off her clothes and “jammed his penis inside her for the first time in sixteen months.” Trump’s response to the accusations, first published in a 1993 book called Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, was typically Trump-ish, and indefensibly crazy. Trump asserted: “It’s incorrect and done by a guy without much talent. He is a guy who is an unattractive guy who is a vindictive and jealous person.”
The deeper you delve into Trump’s history the more apparent it becomes that he is a lunatic. Mark Singer’s 1997 profile on Trump in The New Yorker ultimately concludes that Trump “aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury — an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.” As a real estate developer, Trump’s soulless existence was relatively benign, dealing the most damage to himself and those unfortunate enough to have to put up with him regularly. I’m gravely concerned that in his role as a political leader, Trump’s psychopathic inclinations could incite serious social upheaval.
Trump has repeatedly insinuated that his supporters would riot if he lost the Republican nomination. When asked in a town hall interview with Chris Matthews how he would mitigate the potential for violence if he doesn’t win the nomination, Trump said “I can’t really tell you what happens … I think you’re going to have some very unhappy people. I hope nothing bad happens, but you are going to have some very, very angry and unhappy people.” That sounds to me not like a denouncement of violence but rather a conditional call to arms. Prior to his rise, I would have been skeptical of the willingness of any significant number of Americans to ever answer such a call, but in light of his appalling popularity, I’m no longer so confident.
The success of Trump’s crazy campaign is partly attributable to his connection with the growing, hitherto untapped masses of other psychopathic people in this country. Dr. Robert Lindner, in his seminal book Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, stated: “Psychopathy … is assuming more and more the proportions of a plague; it is today ravishing the world with far greater ill effect than the most malignant of organic diseases.” Lindner postulates that the proliferation of psychopathy in modern society is primarily attributable to population density, the absence of personal and familial privacy, economic stresses, lack of educational opportunities and stark social and occupational contrasts within society, or, “in a word, by social disinheritance.”
This isn’t to say that all Trump supporters are psychopaths. Some are simply ignorant, and some, I assume, are good people. But the percentage of probable psychos in that demographic is alarming. We are witnessing a maddening shift in our country’s moral attitudes and norms toward politics. Behavior considered intolerable at the onset of Trump’s bid for president, like denouncing entire groups of people as rapists and murderers, has become commonplace.
We are now at a critical juncture where we must decide whether we are willing to allow the psychopathic tendencies of a minority to possess the will and arrest the actions of a nation. We’ve seen what becomes of societies that allow themselves to be led into a false reality by the self-serving professions of a charismatic psychopath. America and the world cannot afford to share this fate. For now, we can avoid it by not electing Donald Trump, but eventually we will need to address the root causes of psychopathy in our society and quell the spread of this plague.