Citizen Kane, Declaration of Principles scene. Kane says that he has to make the New York Enquirer as important to the people of New York as the gas in that light.
Still seeking to get a glimpse of the man behind the mask, Singer next asked, “Ok, I guess I’m asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?” In reply, Trump said, “You really want to know what I consider ideal company? A total piece of ass.”
In the first installment of Mourning in America, called “Notes on Trump’s Gaslighting,” I explored the Trump campaign’s gaslighting of the media, as made necessary by the pathological narcissism of the GOP candidate. I said that Trump’s campaign and subsequent victory gave rise to what I called a “gaslighting effect” where millions of people experienced Narcissistic Victim Syndrome (disbelief, defense, depression). I also pointed out that coming to grips with this phenomenon was going to take multiple narratives, and I started by looking at the survivor’s literature (both clinical and first person) as a way to understand the dynamics of this psychopathology, wherein expressions of distress in relation the behaviors only seem only to feed it.
Following this literature, I concluded that the set of behaviors (including gaslighting) that characterize the pathological narcissist need to be understood in the context of the pathological narcissist’s projection of a False Self, which thus must receive constant care and feeding, and that the attention the narcissist seeks is called the narcissistic supply. The pathological narcissist constantly triggers people as sources of supply, defends himself from ‘narcissistic injury,’ by any challenge to his False Self, and always seeks revenge via the release of ‘narcissistic rage.’ In the second installment of Mourning in America, called “Gaslighting and Bullshit” I looked at the gaslighting phenomenon again as a tactic of the pathological narcissist by exploring the family resemblances between bullshitting and gaslighting.
As before, we enter the strange realm of the pathological narcissist by way of the experience of gaslighting, what we call the gaslighting effect, or otherwise, Narcissistic Victim Syndrome.
In this installment, I now turn to consideration of Trump as a pathological narcissist. What is it that continues to fuel the President’s bizarre, deeply anti-social behavior? Why is that we are constantly being told that his behavior is not abnormal? What is it about the pathological narcissist, with his False Self, and his infinite thirst for narcissistic supply, that leads to patterns of relentless abuse and victimization? In this post, the aim is to take a deeper look at the narcissistic disorder as an abnormal response to essential life conflicts, as what has been called “an illness of mourning.”
Trump as Pathological Narcissist
As before, we enter the strange realm of the pathological narcissist by way of the experience of gaslighting, what we call the gaslighting effect, or otherwise, narcissistic victim syndrome. Finding oneself harassed and manipulated, one’s confidence in one’s perceptions of reality undermined, one becomes distressed and protests; in response, the abuser doubles down, insists that the victim is over reacting, is crazy and imagining things (I never said that), and that “everyone agrees with him.” The victim is thus subject to persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying in order to render the victim destabilized.
Through the experience of being gaslighted, the narcissist’s victim knows some fundamental things about the abuser. First, that the abuse is relentless, and that reactivity towards it only feeds it. Constantly confronted with the central characteristics of the pathological narcissist, the inflated sense of self-importance, the entitlement, and the self-love (and concomitant lack of empathy toward others), as well as the false belief in his own omnipotence and omniscience, the threat of narcissistic injury to this false self looms large everywhere. On the one hand, he requires constant admiration and attention, constant narcissistic supply; on the other hand, any challenge to his inflated sense of himself threatens him with narcissistic injury and triggers his narcissistic rage.
Reflecting on Trump’s fitness to be president, Vaknin said that because Trump is a “self-conjured caricature of a self-made man,” he is actually fragile.
In the run-up to the presidential election, a number of experts on pathological narcissism (even some clinicians) wondered publicly about what it might mean for such a person to become President of the United States. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has referred to Trump publicly as textbook narcissist, and clinical psychologist George Simon writes that Trump is so classic that he is archiving video clips of him for his seminars because there is no better example, that he doesn’t have to hire actors because Trump is like a dream come true. In March of 2016, leading authority on narcissism Sam Vaknin said in an online interview that he had reviewed over 600 hours of Trump tape, and that he had the highest density of first person pronoun use he had ever observed in any politician. Following the DSM traits for narcissistic personality disorder, Vaknin hit all the major points that we all know about Donald Trump; that he confabulates and is grandiose; that he lives in a siege mentality, reacting aggressively and vindictively to perceived slights; that he is a compulsive attention-seeker; that he abhors authority, rules, traditions, and “the establishment;” that he is defiant, aggressive, abrasive, thin-skinned, and superior; that he lacks empathy, and enjoys embarrassing and hurting people gratuitously.
Reflecting on Trump’s fitness to be president, Vaknin, the author of “Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisted,” said that because Trump is a “self-conjured caricature of a self-made man,” he is actually fragile, his grandiosity based on delusional and fantastic assumptions which are hard to defend. The demons that drive him internally arise from the Kafkaesque trail that is his quotidian existence, in which he stands accused of being a mere, average, not too bright mortal. Under the pressures of the presidency, Vaknin writes, Trump will deteriorate. When faced with opposition, he is likely to react by scapegoating and inciting street or state violence against targeted groups, since anyone who disagrees with him is by definition an enemy of the state.
Writing in June of last year, a blogger who goes by the name of “Psy of Life” also reflected on what a Trump presidency might be like, and concluded that because narcissists spend most of their waking time defending their inflated and unrealistic self-concept, there won’t be much time for much of anything else. The Trump presidency, he concludes, “will have the paranoia of Nixon, the ineffectiveness of Harding, the sheer callous cruelty of Jackson, and the racism of Wilson. But nowhere in the mix will there be any clear policies or agendas to pursue, because Mr. Trump is completely empty and devoid of anything other than a slavish devotion to his own ego and utter fear of the narcissistic wound.”
The (Orange) Man in the Mirror
In June of 2016, Northwestern University psychology professor Dan McAdams published a remarkable “psychological portrait” of Donald Trump in the Atlantic Magazine. McAdams starts with some observations by notable Trump interviewers who also second the opinion of former Trump associates who repeatedly indicate that there is something supremely flummoxing about him. McAdams recounts the anecdote from Marker Singer, whose major piece on Trump came out in the New Yorker in the 90s: Singer wondered what Trump was like when he wasn’t playing the public role of “Donald Trump” and asked him, “what are you thinking about when you are shaving in front of the mirror in the morning?” In response, Trump just appeared completely baffled. Still seeking to get a glimpse of the man behind the mask, Singer next asked, “Ok, I guess I’m asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?” In reply, Trump said, “You really want to know what I consider ideal company? A total piece of ass.”
It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.”
McAdams steps through the elements of his portrait, looking by turns at Trump’s Disposition, his Mental Habits, his Motivations, and his Self-Conception. The purpose is to try to answer the questions, “who is he, really? How might he go about making decisions in office? What does all this suggest about the sort of president he’d be? As for disposition, he cites psychologists “big five” scale for personality assessment, rating individuals in relation to Extroversion, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness, and work done on rating past presidents. George W. Bush, for example, comes out notably high on Extroversion and notably low on Openness (incurious). Trump is notable on the scale (like most presidents) with respect to Extroversion, but is remarkable for his degree of Disagreeableness, exceeding even Richard Nixon. Seeking the common thread that unites Trump’s sky high extroversion and his off the charts disagreeableness, McAdams speculates that the emotional core around which Trump’s personality constellates, the source for both social ambition and aggressiveness, is to be found in his propensity to anger. Anger, McAdams writes, can fuel malice, but it can also motivate social dominance.
In Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, Trump presents, among other things, his personal coming of age narrative. Unlike the coming of age stories of George W. Bush, which is saturated with nostalgia, or Obama’s in Dreams from My Father, which is marked by wonder and curiosity, Trump’s story, McAdams says, is most notable for the sense of danger and need for toughness: The world, the young Donald learns from his father, who took him around with him to collect the rents, is a dangerous place, and it cannot be trusted. As Trump said in a 1981 interview with People Magazine, the fundamental backdrop for his life narrative is this: “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles, ending in either victory or defeat.” Reflecting on what it would mean to have a president even more disagreeable than Richard Nixon, McAdams reaches back to the 19th century to the exemplar of the angry populist demagogue Andrew Jackson, who also came to power on a wave of national fear and resentment, and who was considered equally unfit, intemperate and dangerous. The result was the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears. It is apparently the case that the origin of the donkey mascot for the Democrats derived from Jackson’s opponents repeatedly calling him a jackass. Per McAdams, on the last day of his presidency, Jackson, whose portrait now hangs in the Oval Office, admitted to only two regrets: that he was never able to shoot Henry Clay or hang John C. Calhoun.
In the section on Motivations, his narcissism is addressed admirably with one anecdote: Trump at his father’s funeral talking mostly about himself, and his father’s achievement in raising such a brilliant son. In the part on Trump’s Mental Habits, McAdams writes about the concept of the deal as a central personal schema, and the all-important theme of fighting to win, expresses skepticism that business deal-making alone would be enough to propel Trump to adeptness in solving problems that fall within the purview of the Federal government. You can listen to media of Donald Trump on the campaign trail all day, McAdams muses, “…and you will rarely, if ever, witness his stepping back from the fray, coming home from the battlefront, to reflect upon the purpose of fighting to win—whether it is winning in his own life, or winning for America.” The problem with Trump’s personal narrative, McAdams concludes, is that not only does it not tell us very much about his philosophy of governance, it doesn’t tell HIM very much about it either. Who then, is the man in the mirror? In the end, McAdams can only discern narcissistic motivations and a personal narrative about winning at any cost. “It’s as if Trump had invested so much of himself in developing and refining his socially dominant role” he writes, that he has nothing left over to create a meaningful story for his life, or for the nation. It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.”
For Whatever Reason, Rosebud Works!
In 2002, director Errol Morris captured on film a remarkable interview with Donald Trump. Morris was shooting footage for a movie about movies where he interviewed prominent people about their favorite films, and Trump agreed to be filmed talking about Citizen Kane. Interviewed about the Trump interview in October of 2016, Morris said, “there have been moments in my career where people have said things to me that raise all kinds of crazy questions about self-awareness…to what extent is this person aware of what he’s saying?” If I were Trump, Morris goes on, “I would not want to emphasize that connection with Kane. You know, a megalomaniac in love with power crushing everything in his path. The inability to have friends,…to find love.”
The Trump story parallels that of Charles Foster Kane to an amazing degree.
But why would Trump want to emphasize these similarities, given the major messages of the film, unless he were proposing to reflect deeply upon his own shortcomings? Does it make sense to identify clearly with Charles Foster Kane, given that he championed the working man mostly to feel good about himself, drove two wives away because he used them mostly for narcissistic supply without caring about them, and built a palace as a monument to his vanity?
If the film Gaslight, released in 1943, was about the effect of the pathological narcissist upon his victim, and her struggle to free herself from narcissistic victim syndrome with the help of a gallant Joseph Cotton, Citizen Kane, released in 1941, which also starred Joseph Cotton as the reality-based foil, was a cautionary tale about the effect of pathological narcissism on the narcissist himself. The Trump story parallels that of Charles Foster Kane to an amazing degree; both rise to wealth with the benefit of inheritance; both divorced twice; both own monumental Florida estates with fanciful names; both run for office on a platform that stresses personality over policy, denounce the dishonesty of their opponent, and run as populists despite their distance from the working class. Can it be that Trump just likes Citizen Kane simply because it is widely hailed as the greatest film ever made, and he sees himself in it?
In the interview, which you should try to watch all the way through, Trump makes a series of astonishing remarks, as follows: First, he says that the film is about accumulation, and that you learn that “maybe wealth isn’t everything, because he had the wealth, but he didn’t have the happiness.” Retracing the trajectory of the film, he says, “there was a great rise in Citizen Kane. And there was a modest fall. The fall wasn’t a financial fall, the fall was a personal fall, but it was a fall nonetheless.” How is it that dying miserable and alone not having really cared about anything or anyone since childhood represents a modest fall? We learn the answer when Morris asks Trump, “Do you have any advice for Charles Foster Kane?” And Trump replies: “…get yourself another woman!” Apparently, then, the fall of Charles Foster Kane is modest, because, well, it really wasn’t his fault! It all could have worked out, if he hadn’t made poor sexual choices! It must be that, because it couldn’t possibly be because, as Morris writes, “…he’s an empty, hollow man, a simulacrum of a human being, a nothing, nowhere man, who destroys the people around him, who’s incapable of love, incapable of compassion, incapable of self-reflection, incapable of awareness of the world around him save that which suits his own slimy purpose of gathering wealth and power.”
Finally, there is Trump’s idiotic take on “Rosebud.” The word rosebud, for whatever reason, Trump says, has captivated movie goers for so many years…perhaps if they came up with another word that meant the same thing, it wouldn’t have worked. But rosebud works, for whatever reason.” For whatever reason? How about because of what it signifies, specifically, the last thing that the hollow man Kane really cared about? Why am I so scandalized by the spectacle of someone so apparently morally blind in the face of a cautionary tale about moral blindness? As Mark Singer asked in his 1990s interview, who are you, Mr. Trump, when you are alone? Singer walked away with no good answer. As Dan McAdams wrote, “the real estate mogul who would become a reality TV star, and after that, a leading candidate for president of the United States, had managed to achieve something remarkable: an existence unmolested by the rumblings of a soul.”
In asking the question, who is Donald Trump, the answer that comes back, namely that he is a pathological narcissist, is a stubbornly paradoxical one; because when we ask, who is the pathological narcissist, our questioning becomes shipwrecked on the shoals of psychopathology. How do we then examine this broken, rotting hull, half stuck in the mud, in order to answer it? In our next installment of Mourning in America, I move at last to the task of a proposed unraveling of the pathological narcissist’s illness as an illness of mourning.
