“I will be so presidential…you will be so bored. You’ll say, ‘Can’t he have a little more energy?'”
Candidate Trump, April 21st 2016. Today Show.Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!
President-Elect Trump, December 31st, 2016: 5:17AM
Is there anybody left out there who doesn’t think we’ve all been played? Certainly, not the majority of Americans who voted for Clinton; certainly, not most Trump supporters who–with their authoritarian personalities–were drawn to Trump like moths to a flame, and took great delight in watching him turn the election into a circus. How then to explain the unprecedented gaslighting that has occurred, except by reference to the seriousness of the candidate’s pathological narcissism? What if ‘playing us’, and thinking he’s ‘so clever,’ is at the heart of his serious illness? Who associates a president’s being appropriately presidential with being boring and low energy? Who continues to taunt and bait the opposition (more than half the country) after winning an election, as part of a happy new year’s wish?
For some days now I have been struggling to figure out how to begin talking about the monumental gaslighting of the mainstream media and electorate that has been perpetrated on America by Donald Trump, his campaign surrogates, and to some degree, also by his supporters. Something has occurred–is occurring–that is very different than what can be characterized as one political party losing ground to another in a straight up contest of ideas, or even a dispute over value orientations. Understanding this happening, coming to grips with it, figuring out how to deal with it, requires processing on multiple levels, and in multiple directions. After much reflection, I conclude that there is no single approach, no single narrative that will lead us directly out of this Crazytown.
Starting with the aftermath: We are told, by surrogates, by pundits, by trolls, and by private citizens, that in displaying our distress and alarm over the campaign and subsequent election of Donald Trump, we are being over-sensitive, imagining things, being irrational, over-reacting, and as such we have no right to be so upset. The president-elect himself continues to reinforce this, with his frequent disrespectful remarks and tweets about what would otherwise be political opponents and the loyal opposition: we are losers, haters, crybabies, weaklings, and last but not least, enemies. There is also the concomitant sense that reacting to this vindictiveness and bullying somehow feeds it, provides the purveyors with a kind of delight (more on this later).
In case there is any doubt, by ‘dance’ I mean gaslighting, or self-conscious manipulation through flat denials, misdirection, projection, attacks on legitimacy, and of course, lying.
Looking back at the campaign: We obviously recall the host of attacks on vulnerable minorities of all kinds, not at all in keeping with a ‘well-ordered society’ under conditions of diversity and value pluralism; not to mention ad hominem attacks on individuals, baiting, and of course, a large helping of word salad. But beyond all that, the worst of it was a remarkably disheartening dance with the mainstream media by the candidate and his surrogates concerning the traditional media fact-checking role, around specific facts, and around the value of truth itself. In case there is any doubt, by ‘dance’ I mean gaslighting, or self-conscious manipulation through flat denials, misdirection, projection, attacks on legitimacy, and of course, lying. The list of topics and issues around which they gaslighted is extensive.
A few highlights: persistent birtherism; the Clinton health scare; overwrought accusations of criminality directed at Clinton and the Clinton Foundation (coupled with a denial of Trump legal and conflict of interest issues); insisting that Clinton was running a campaign of hate; that she had no policy positions; that she was the one who should be censured for name calling; general assertions that facts no longer matter, and that only what people feel to be true matters; that making reasoned arguments based on facts are evidence of elitism; the continued assertion of a rigged election with no evidence; equivocation as to whether the verdict of the electorate would be accepted; insistence that there was widespread illegal voting; refusal to back recounts given this assertion; appointment of Goldman Sachs executives to cabinet posts after railing against Clinton for giving paid speeches to Goldman Sachs.
The Gaslighting Effect
The aim of the list provided is not to be comprehensive; rather, it is to refresh memories as to the incidents in question, so that some overarching aspects of the gaslighting effect can be registered: First, the reason for it – the constant surrogate denials around various outrageous, unfair, inaccurate, false, misleading, or irresponsible comments of the candidate were made necessary by the pathological narcissism of the candidate in the practice of campaigning. Second, the sense in which this gaslighting behavior manifested as game playing, as intentional, without the hint of apology. Quite the contrary, in that the candidate’s and surrogate’s gaslighting were directed as an expression of contempt toward the opposing side, to demoralize and intimidate future critics, and at the media as such, specifically to undermine and discredit the very idea of the fourth estate. In short, despite our prior common bonds as fellow citizens of a constitutional republic, this was anything but politics as usual; this was a game played for keeps, without rules, and winner take all.
Perhaps you question what you think, feel, and believe when confronted with opponents who never miss an opportunity to demoralize you, weaken your community bonds, corrode your trust in institutions and traditions, cast doubt on your cognitive abilities, perception, and memory, and who delight in intentional cruelties of all kinds, and who mime empathy and compassion in the least convincing ways possible. Perhaps you try not to feel the sting, whenever you read and hear crafted statements full of willful distortions, half-truths, lies, exaggerations, contradictions. My reply is that you are right to bristle when the new President says he won the election by a landslide, when he clearly did not; you are right to be incensed when Trump supporters insist that the stock market went down under Obama, when it did not. More importantly, however, you are right to feel that something very disturbing is happening here, when you are told by surrogates and appointed officials that the President isn’t to be taken literally, or that he never said something that we all know is on video.
Looking back at the record on the Web from across 2016, one sees a significant body of material concerning gaslighting by the Trump campaign, and about the alarming textbook signs of narcissistic personality disorder in the GOP candidate. However, the need to understand this phenomenon, in its distinctiveness, takes on enormous importance in the wake of the Trump victory, because these things, which might have been written off as unique to the campaign season, show no signs of abating.
If we seriously want to understand what is happening now in Trump’s America, why ‘Orange is the new crack’, I believe we should turn to the abundant survivor’s resources (both first person and clinical) that are readily available.
Our urgent need is to understand ‘the gaslighting effect’ itself, because all attempts to deal with it thus far have been an abysmal failure. The POTUS is a pathological narcissist. He and his flying monkeys continue to gaslight the electorate. Expressions of distress at these behaviors, do nothing to deter it. In fact, it seems to be the case that our being triggered only feeds it. What is it that continues to fuel the President’s bizarre, deeply anti-social behavior? Why is it that we are constantly being told that his behavior is not abnormal, and that it should instead be accepted, as the new normal? Why is it that those of us who object, who complain, who bargain are the problem instead? Why is it that his grandiosity, his shallowness, his lack of empathy, his thin-skinned vindictiveness, his utter contempt for the culture and practice of democracy, are now supposed to be taken as public virtues?
(Mr.) Orange is the New Crack
Over the course of the 2016 election cycle, all sorts of people wrote nervously about what it might mean if Donald Trump actually did have a severe narcissistic personality disorder, and could somehow win the presidency; and all sorts of people watched the gaslighting of the media by the Trump campaign, and scratched their heads, wondering who the hell these people where, and why they wouldn’t behave like normal media commentators. It’s only with Trump’s victory that millions of people felt suddenly radically disempowered, and so experienced the shock and disbelief, and then depression, associated with Narcissistic Victim Syndrome. Near the beginning of this post, I said that I believed that we needed multiple narratives in order to adequately confront the gaslighting effect. If we seriously want to understand what is happening now in Trump’s America, why ‘Orange is the new crack’, I believe we should turn to the abundant survivor’s resources (both first person and clinical) that are readily available. Our aim is to confront these behaviors, so we need to listen to people who look at the tactics of the narcissistic abuser and the experience of the narcissistic victim at the same time.
Before picking out a few concepts and dynamics for special attention, it is important to pause and consider the first-person survivor, to hear her voice. The survivor is called a survivor because she has found her voice and confronted her abuser, broken free, and overcome the immediate threat to her existence–psychologically, spiritually, and physically. People who have been through this see the Trump phenomenon clearly, in my view. Clearly grasping this in his October piece in Salon, subtitled, “Exposing Trump’s pattern of lies, abuse and victim-shaming has lessons that reach far beyond the 2016 campaign” Paul Rosenberg directs attention to the textbook ‘survivor’ response to Trump’s non-apology for the misogynist Access Hollywood tape, the line-by-line blog post dissection of Trump by Leah Mcelrath that went viral in October. Before anyone rolls their eyes about the invocation of self-help literature, they should read this thing. To date, this is still the single best performance of gaslight rejection that I have seen anywhere.
Over the course of the 2016 election cycle, all sorts of people wrote nervously about what it might mean if Donald Trump actually did have a severe narcissistic personality disorder, and could somehow win the presidency.
So, to repeat: the survivor’s concepts are practical concepts; they are things one need in order to understand something that is beyond understanding (psychopathology). To begin with one must learn to recognize the clinical characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) in action. There are a number of recitations of these, with more or less granularity of detail. The basic elements, however, are a grandiose sense of self-worth and importance, extreme preoccupation with the markers of success/power/brilliance, etc., possessive of a seemingly bottomless need for attention and adulation, an enormous sense of entitlement, inter-personally exploitative, lacking in empathy, and arrogant. It is easy, when reading this list, to think that most people might fall under this category to a greater or lesser extent. However, there is of course such a thing as normal narcissism, which is necessary and important in childhood ego development, and persists as part of the basic human condition, and this is not NPD. The set of behavior’s that characterize the pathological narcissist are the product of their projection of a fundamentally False Self. Because the False Self of the narcissist does not correspond to reality, and the narcissist has attached all value to its care and feeding, the pathological narcissist is at once at war with the world, and desperate for constant recognition. The attention the narcissist seeks is known as the ‘narcissistic supply.’ Seeking always to defend the emptiness of the False Self, the pathological narcissist is constantly triggering ‘sources of supply,’ and defending himself from narcissistic injury to any challenge to his False Self, and always seeking revenge via the release of narcissistic rage (coined by Heinz Kohut in ‘Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage,’ 1972).
Donald Trump’s Gaslighting and Pathological Narcissism
Accounts of Trump’s narcissistic personality abound on the Web. Many of them include interviews with psychologists, who, after providing a disclaimer that it is improper to diagnose a mental illness without examining the patient, go on to review the case, usually with a recognition of the grave importance of the question (what if the most powerful person on earth has a severe personality disorder). In the next installment of this post, I look more closely at the gaslighting phenomenon, as a tactic of the pathological narcissist, and then to consideration of Trump as narcissist per se, as seen in Dan McAdam’s far reaching piece in the Atlantic in June of 2016, “The Mind of Donald Trump: Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency.” The purpose here is not simply to pile on, but rather to set the stage for a deeper look at the narcissistic disorder as an abnormal response to essential life conflicts, as what has been called an ‘illness of mourning.’
