The greatest danger, as we saw with Nixon, is that pathological narcissists can lose touch with reality in subtle ways that become extremely dangerous over time. When they can’t let go of their need to be admired or recognized, they have to bend or invent a reality in which they remain special despite all messages to the contrary. In point of fact, they become dangerously psychotic. It’s just not always obvious until it’s too late.
Just like narcissism and most traits or conditions, psychosis lies on a spectrum. On the low end, people become “thought-disordered,” that is, use tortured logic, deny embarrassing facts, and show horrendous judgment. On the upper end, they may have auditory and visual hallucinations and paranoid delusions. As their special status becomes threatened, people with NPD bend the truth to fit their story of who they are. If reality suggests they’re not special, but flawed, fragile, and—even worse—mediocre, then they simply ignore or distort reality.
Did Nixon’s psychotic deterioration, for example, lead to more carnage in Vietnam? One biographer claims he bombed the country, at least once, to impress his friends, and that Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, kept Nixon’s rashest decisions in check, making sure any escalation of conflict cleared a committee of military experts.
Did Nixon foment more unrest internally than the U.S. would have seen otherwise? Certainly, his “the press is the enemy” mantra, which dated back to his anger over the slush fund scandal, pitted the administration against the people. Paranoia is easy to catch when the POTUS suffers from it; everyone starts looking over their shoulders for danger when the free world’s leader says it surrounds us. Turmoil, rage, and distrust swirled through the 1970s. Are we living through that again?
Did Nixon make decisions of state while drunk, drowning the pain of his persecution, imagined or real? Given the widespread reports of how much he drank, it’s hard to imagine he didn’t. Multiple biographers report his staff scrambling to contain his threatened actions, including IRS audits, against the people on his burgeoning “Enemies List.”
Did Nixon ever draw counsel from the paintings he spoke to? Did he follow it?
These all constitute dangerous functional impairments for a leader. They’re the foreign and domestic policy equivalent of leaping from a building, believing you can fly. And they’re all part of the psychotic spiral that afflicts pathological narcissists confronted with the troubling truth that they’re not as special as they think they are.
The Psychotic Spiral
If we wish to preserve the safety of our country and the world, we have to remain vigilant to the signs of the psychotic spiral in pathologically narcissistic leaders:
Increasing Paranoia
Increasing Paranoia: Pathological narcissists abhor admitting to vulnerability—feeling scared, insecure, unsure of themselves—because they don’t trust people to support them when they’re upset, a problem called insecure attachment in the research. They don’t even like people knowing they’re upset (except over feeling attacked). So they divide the world into good and bad, friend and enemy, in simple black-and-white terms, the advantage being that if they want to feel safe again, if they want to feel assured of their special status, all they need do is flee (or eliminate) their enemies and cozy up to their friends.
In other words, pathological narcissists in a psychotic spiral project, imagining the danger they feel inside themselves (anxiety, panic, confusion, doubts) is coming from outside, so that they can escape or destroy it. Unfortunately, because the sense of danger is internal (their insecurity), they have to step up their efforts to attack their enemies in order to feel safe.
Imagine this on a global scale, where enemies are Communists or Muslims or immigrants or any kind. Nixon was far happier complaining about Communist threats than recognizing his errors and correcting them. How often did that lead to additional violence in Vietnam? Could such “splitting” as it’s called lead to unnecessary violence again?
Impaired Judgment
As pathological narcissists become increasingly thought-disordered, their vision becomes clouded. That’s because if you see the world not as it is, but as you wish or need it to be in order to preserve the belief you’re special, you lose touch with crucial information, brute facts, and harsh realities. On a global scale that means, as it did with Nixon, that if it feeds your ego, step up military action. The precariousness of the world or careful assessments of the dangers of a military assault don’t matter at this point; displays of power and superiority are soothing when pathological narcissists feel like they’re falling apart inside.
The resulting chaos can be hard to keep up with (and fruitless in the end) as we saw with Nixon’s staff chasing after his drunken calls and egregious rants about the Jews working against him. In a startlingly parallel lapse of judgment, Trump reportedly boasted to the Russian ambassador about the impressiveness of his intelligence assessment, spilling secrets Israel shared (without their permission).
Volatile Decision Making
This sign of a psychotic spiral is particularly troubling. Impaired judgment naturally leads to reactivity and ill-conceived plans. If all that matters to a pathologically narcissistic leader is any action that preserves their special status (at least in their mind), then reality, circumstance, and facts cease to matter. Which means that what a leader says from day to day or even hour to hour may shift based on what feels best, not what’s best for the country.
Right after his staff and appointees spread the message that Trump fired FBI director James Comey, who was investigating his campaign’s and administration’s ties to Russia, for incompetence and on the recommendation of the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, the president blithely contradicted the statement.
“I’d already decided to fire him,” Trump proudly proclaimed, as though what mattered most was proving he could make his own decisions, not the appearance, at least, of neutrality or a separation of powers. Trump went on to call Comey “crazy, a nut job” and said that firing him relieved the “pressure” of the Russia investigation.
Whether or not this is a sign of thought disorder, at the very least, it shows a remarkable lack of self-preservation. Trump totally ignored that Nixon, too, fired those investigating him—and with fatal consequence.
Gaslighting
Often, people with NPD resort to an insidious strategy called gaslighting—a term drawn from the 1938 play about a man who persuaded his wife she was crazy by, among other means, dimming the gaslights and claiming he’d never touched them. As people with NPD become increasingly psychotic, they’re determined to convince others that they’re the “crazy” ones who can’t see reality for what it is. Gaslighting reassures pathological narcissists that their own grip on reality remains firm because they can’t bear to acknowledge their sanity is slipping away. We might ask if we’re seeing this now, as Trump and his closest advisers appear on TV claiming he didn’t make statements that journalists often simply play back—or if it’s a tweet, flash an image—to prove that he did indeed say what he said.
Lately, these incidents have become commonplace. Many in the press and public at large now refer to them as alternative facts, alluding to Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway’s now infamous “explanation” for why Sean Spicer had berated the press for misreporting Trump’s inauguration size: “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” Spicer peevishly told a stunned press corps. This turned out to be patently false, though Conway defended the statement, saying Spicer had simply been providing “alternative facts.”
Those who embrace Trump’s reality, where the mainstream media lies and remains “the enemy,” signify their support with red hats bearing the inscription MAGA (Make America Great Again). Those who believe what the news reports about Trump have donned the symbol of resistance—pink pussy hats, a reference to his now infamous hot mic comments about women, “I just grab ’em by the pussy…”
That the country is currently split—
and our shared reality with it—seems without question at this point.
Spotting Lethal Leaders: How to Save the World
Currently, it’s up to you to decide if the evidence cited points to functional impairments in Trump or any other politician. That’s not something mental health professionals in the United States are allowed to do—not yet.
Nevertheless, we have in our midst people already trained to provide functional and risk assessments based entirely on observation—forensic psychiatrists and psychologists as well as “profilers” groomed by the CIA, the FBI, and various law enforcement agencies. They spend their whole lives learning to predict how people behave.
We could, if we wish, assemble a panel of politically independent specialists within government to provide these assessments. That means suspending the Goldwater rule—or at least allowing risk assessment (to the country, to the world) to take precedence over the sanctity of current ethics.
If pathological narcissists, in their reality-warping efforts to feed their addiction, bring themselves to the precipice of disaster, why should we, as nations, allow them to pull us into the abyss with them?
It’s this urgent existential question that faces democracies throughout the world today.
Craig Malkin, Ph.D., is author of the internationally acclaimed Rethinking Narcissism, a clinical psychologist, and Lecturer for Harvard Medical School with twenty-five years of experience helping individuals, couples, and families. His insights on relationships and narcissism have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Time, the New York Times, the Sunday Times, Psychology Today, Women’s Health, the Huffington Post, and Happen Magazine. He has also been featured multiple times on NPR, CBS Radio, and the Oprah Winfrey Network channel, among other stations and shows internationally. Dr. Malkin is president and director of the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based YM Psychotherapy and Consultation Inc., which provides psychotherapy and couples workshops.
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I WROTE THE ART OF THE DEAL WITH DONALD TRUMP
His Self-Sabotage Is Rooted in His Past
TONY SCHWARTZ
Why does President Trump behave in the dangerous and seemingly self-destructive ways he does?
Three decades ago, I spent nearly a year hanging around Trump to write his first book, The Art of the Deal, and got to know him very well. I spent hundreds of hours listening to him, watching him in action, and interviewing him about his life. To me, none of what he has said or done over the past four months as president comes as a surprise. The way he has behaved over the past two weeks—firing FBI director James B. Comey, undercutting his own aides as they tried to explain the decision, disclosing sensitive information to Russian officials, and railing about it all on Twitter—is also entirely predictable.
Early on, I recognized that Trump’s sense of self-worth is forever a
t risk. When he feels aggrieved, he reacts impulsively and defensively, constructing a self-justifying story that doesn’t depend on facts and always directs the blame to others.
The Trump I first met in 1985 had lived nearly all his life in survival mode. By his own description, his father, Fred, was relentlessly demanding, difficult, and driven. Here’s how I phrased it in The Art of the Deal: “My father is a wonderful man, but he is also very much a business guy and strong and tough as hell.” As Trump saw it, his older brother, Fred Jr., who became an alcoholic and died at age 42, was overwhelmed by his father. Or as I euphemized it in the book: “There were inevitably confrontations between the two of them. In most cases, Freddy came out on the short end.”
Trump’s worldview was profoundly and self-protectively shaped by his father. “I was drawn to business very early, and I was never intimidated by my father, the way most people were,” is the way I wrote it in the book. “I stood up to him, and he respected that. We had a relationship that was almost businesslike.”
To survive, I concluded from our conversations, Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world. It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him: You either dominated or you submitted. You either created and exploited fear, or you succumbed to it—as he thought his older brother had. This narrow, defensive outlook took hold at a very early age, and it never evolved. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now,” he told a recent biographer, “I’m basically the same.” His development essentially ended in early childhood.
Instead, Trump grew up fighting for his life and taking no prisoners. In countless conversations, he made clear to me that he treated every encounter as a contest he had to win, because the only other option from his perspective was to lose, and that was the equivalent of obliteration. Many of the deals in The Art of the Deal were massive failures—among them the casinos he owned and the launch of a league to rival the National Football League—but Trump had me describe each of them as a huge success.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Page 7
