You don’t need a weatherman…
by Tom Sullivan
“[Y]ou don’t need to be a mental-health professional to see that something’s very seriously off with Trump,” George T. Conway III wrote this week in The Atlantic. The acting president of the United States is emotionally stunted, pathologically needy, and mentally unbalanced. That was clear from the moment Donald J. Trump announced his run for president. It is even clearer now that he is deploying federal resources around the planet trying to generate evidence to support conspiracy theories.
The New York Times last October unspooled a mountain of his father Fred Trump’s business records detailing an extensive pattern of tax evasion and under-the-table payments made to keep Donald’s floundering enterprises afloat. In its wake, sister Maryanne Trump Barry retired from her job as a federal appeals court judge. Voluntary retirement ended an ethics investigation into alleged misconduct arising from participation in the family’s efforts to evaded inheritance taxes revealed in the Times expose.
All Fred’s heir Donald knows is how to run a corrupt family business. Desperate to ensure what is buried in his taxes stays buried, he now treats the U.S. government’s executive branch as an extension of the Trump Organization. He demonstrates no ability to comprehend the duties of public service nor any interest in defending the constitution he swore a solemn oath to uphold. Every day, his every act, is about himself.
Conway examines the narcissistic personality and antisocial personality disorders ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals. The first, for which there is a fountain of public evidence, makes it impossible for Trump to put the needs of the country before his own. His inability to act as a national fiduciary makes him unfit for office, Conway argues.
As for the second, Conway cites Lance Dodes, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (emphasis mine):
In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism. Take the pathological lying. Extreme narcissists aren’t necessarily pathological liars, but they can be, and when they are, the lying supports the narcissism. As Lance Dodes has put it, “People like Donald Trump who have severe narcissistic disturbances can’t tolerate being criticized, so the more they are challenged in this essential way, the more out of control they become.” In particular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.
The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality. As Craig Malkin puts it, when pathological narcissists “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,” and they “can lose touch with reality in subtle ways that become extremely dangerous over time.” They can become “dangerously psychotic,” and “it’s just not always obvious until it’s too late.”
Trump’s repeated (and obviously false) assertion that the whistleblower complaint got “almost everything” wrong about his July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky demonstrates, as with brags about the size of his inauguration crowd, he invents his own reality. He — the President of the United States — has posted two dozen tweets since late last night in a desperate attempt to fortify the psychic bubble he’s built around himself and to wrestle back control of the national narrative.
Cabinet members and defenders on Capitol Hill have bet their careers, their reputations, their legacies (and perhaps their freedom) on defending a mad, would-be king.
Jennifer Rubin asks Republicans with a residue of self-respect:
This is why you ran for office (or joined the staff of someone who did) and what you’ll tell your kids and grandkids you did in office — vouch for a raving narcissist who betrayed our democracy? When you made the pact with the Devil, you might have imagined a Democratic president would have hurt the economy or nominated judges not to your liking (wouldn’t Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have stopped them anyway?), but you cannot honestly say they would have tried to corrupt our democracy to the extent this president has. You cannot honestly say that a tax cut (whose effect is drying up) was worth all this.
So really, what are you doing? Trump will be impeached, and if he remains on the top of the ticket will lose, bring down the entire Republican ticket and stain the party for the foreseeable future. The only question is what you are going to do. Unless you want to be one of the lawmakers hiding from voters and reporters until 2020 and/or tagged as enabling impeachable conduct, you have three rational choices: announce you are retiring; denounce the conduct and call on the president to resign or at least refrain from running for reelection; or support impeachment.
Trump (and his accomplices) will not stop unless “the Mafia presidency” is stopped by members of Congress more committed to serving their country than in serving their careers or their party.
Late adopters? You will draw only more scorn. To borrow from John Fogerty, looks like you’re in for nasty weather.
