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THE VIEW FROM HERE - As this column has explained for years, Donald Trump suffers from two personality disorders: He is a histrionic and a narcissist . The public is clueless about histrionics, while others have a misleading idea about a narcissist, e.g. that they are enraptured with their own beauty. Both terms are classifications of personality traits based on observations and catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Histrionics and narcissists are personality disorders which are highly resistant to change, whereas a depressive disorder can often be handled with medication.
One should not take the DSM-5 as some ultimate truth – it is an evolving collaboration of mental health practitioners’ attempting to classify various abnormal mental behaviors. One serious drawback is that the DSM focuses only on personality maladaptive patterns. That limitation is bound to change. One benefit is that its categories are reliably predict behavior patterns. A histrionic will not become cautious nor deeply analytical. The last thing a narcissist will be is flexible and accepting of disagreement. Rather, a narcissistic will have involuntary “narcissist rages” when rejected or there is significant dissent.
One feature to histrionics and narcissists is that they do not hide their personalities, as a depressed person may put on a happy face and then pull a Richard Cory who put a bullet thru his head ...Thus, Trump’s diagnostic traits have been on constant display for decades and are the same behaviors which family members describe.
He Craves Being the Center of Attention and is Easily Influenced by Others
These features explain why Trump is trapped – MAGA supporters are who the vast majority of his crowd love him because he expresses their grievances and they wildly cheer when he crassly insults people whom they hate. If Trump were to say, “Let’s calm down and realize that the Dems have policies with which I disagree, but by and large they are decent people,” there would be no cheers. We could call this the John McCain Mistake; McCain gently corrected the old woman who said Obama was an Arab. Unless Trump hits the loco MAGA memes, they will not cheer. If Trump all of a sudden used facts as oppose to flamboyant lies, MAGA would be disoriented and then angry. Listen to any Trump speech and he speaks in false conclusions and then manufacture lies to support what he said. Trump is famous for his obsession with crowd size; that’s due to his histrionic craving to be the center of attention – but histrionics also crave superlatives. Thus, his crowds have to be the largest ever and his opponents must be the worse ever. Everything he has done is the best, the biggest, the grandest; his economy was the best; he has done the most for Black people, while Biden is the worst President ever. Rational people do not habitually think this way.
While his histrionic personality was the dominant one for his first term, upon losing the 2020 election, he flew into a never-ending narcissistic rage. Thus, to this day, Trump still suffers from the delusion that he won the election. A mentally balanced person who thought he had won would have turned towards the future so that his next campaign would do better. But, all Trump’s work with the state election officials has been to put into place the most craven, immoral people in American history. Due to total submission to Trump, they will falsify the election results. One can see that Trump is caught in a narcissistic rage over his 2020 loss, making it impossible to comprehend Centrists who are alienated by his obsessions with the past.
We did see some of Trump’s narcissistic rage as far back as 2019 over Zelenskyy’s refusal to intervene in the 2016 election to help Trump. His narcissistic fixation has done great harm to the GOP prospects, which needs to be strongly pro-Ukraine.
His two personality disorders force Trump to believe that people must be personally loyal to what Trump demands no matter how absurd. Thus, he’s mad at Bibi Netanyahu because as Prime Minister of Israel, he congratulated Joe Biden as the next President of the United States. Because Trump had done several extremely beneficial things for Israel, which objectively made the Middle East a far better place than under with Obama (or under Biden), Trump cannot comprehend why Netanyahu would congratulate Biden. With Trump’s histrionic - narcissistic world view, personal loyalty to him is of paramount importance. This is not a conservative value. His oath of office is to support the Constitution. I am confident that his advisors have explained the situation to Trump over and over and over; yet, it clearly has not fully sunk in.
When one watches the pro-Trump news channels, a recent theme is the split between the GOP campaign plan and Trump’s behavior. No matter how proactive the GOP was with no personal disparagement of Kamala Harris, Trump calls her “stupid,” which she is not, and then he bizarrely insisted before the National Association of Black Journalists [NABJ], that Kamala did not use to identify as Black but only as Indian. Then, he had his false story about the helicopter ride where Willie Brown said bad things about Kamala Harris. His histrionic and narcissistic personalities made him say such nonsense. As a histrionic, Trump is impulsive, he exaggerates things, and he assumes close relationships with people. Assuming Willie Brown had negative things to say about Kamala, he certainly would not confide in Trump. It takes a shallow-thinking, impulsive person to tell such a story since a rational person would foresee that it would be totally debunked – FACT: Trump never was even in a helicopter with Willie Brown. Also, due to narcissists’ grandiose sense of importance, Trump often believe that because he says something, it is true. Since Trump believes these falsehoods, they may be classified as delusions. More dangerously, Trumps believes that he has close relationships with Putin (who detests Trump), with Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea, and with Xi Jinping, China’s leader.
Not only is Trump psychologically incapable of staying on-script, he cannot deliver a centrist message with congruence. Furthermore, centrists tend not to cheer loudly even when they do agree. The Dems face a similar problem in not being true centrists, except both “Asian Kamala” (LOL) and Coach Walz can feign centrism.
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. You may email him at [email protected])
