Malignant narcissism revisited
Mindwar’s Jim Stewartson used No Kings Day to review what differentiates a garden-variety narcissist from a malignant narcissist. If you couldn’t recognize both before, you can now. And in the sleep you’re not getting.
The DSM-5 defines Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) by the following characteristics:
At 1-2 percent of the population, such people see others’ needs as a nuisance. “They have a perpetual need to be seen as the best, and to take the spotlight on every stage,” Stewartson explains. “They brag, exaggerate, and lie about themselves to get ahead—and have no shame about it.”
And then there are those with Antisocial Personality Disorder, about 2-3 percent of the population. ASPD (your basic sociopath) carries some overlapping symptoms:
Stewartson continues:
But when you combine ASPD with NPD, you may get what renowned psychologist Erich Fromm coined in 1964 a malignant narcissist—a different creature altogether. This is a narcissist who is also sadistic, paranoid, and sociopathic. It is a person who is compelled, through the dynamics of their own psychology to increase their power forever—and to change the world around them to match their internal reality.
Fromm wrote:
A particular instance of narcissism which lies on the borderline between sanity and insanity can be found in some men who have reached an extraordinary degree of power. The Egyptian Pharaohs, the Roman Caesars, the Borgias, Hitler, Stalin, Trujillo—they all show certain similar features… It is a madness that tends to grow in the lifetime of the afflicted person. The more he tries to be god, the more he isolates himself from the human race; this isolation makes him more frightened, everybody becomes his enemy, and in order to stand the resulting fright he has to increase his power, his ruthlessness, and his narcissism. This Caesarian madness would be nothing but plain insanity were it not for one factor: by his power Caesar has bent reality to his narcissistic fantasies.
The nature of the malignant narcissist is that they have no limits. Because they assign their inflated self-worth to immutable characteristics—status, race, gender, etc.—they see their supremacy as absolute.
Handing a live grenade to a toddler
Or as we’ve said here for years, they have no bottom. There is no self-regulation. They will do anything to win and maintain their delusion, suggests Fromm:
…when his narcissism is wounded, he feels threatened in his whole existence… only the destruction of the critic—or oneself—can save one from the threat to one’s narcissistic security. —Erich Fromm
Ultimately, every malignant narcissist wants to take the world with him when he dies. But very few have the power to do it.
Americans twice handed that power to Donald John Trump, a knot of personaility disorders Fromm would instantly recognize. We might as well have handed a live grenade to a toddler.
Stewartson references a story I saw the other day but thought so typical of Trump that I did not comment on it:
On Wednesday, Donald Trump had a Cabinet meeting in which he bragged about a non-existent negotiation with Sharpie for four minutes, and uncorked one of the most incomprehensible screeds ever heard in the White House—an epic, winding journey through the mind of a malignant narcissist who has lost his ability to regulate his behavior.
In the middle of a war, with his entire Cabinet around him, including the “War Secretary” and the Secretary of State, Trump desperately tried to burnish his self-image in the eyes of his sycophants and followers by exhibiting his dominance in the areas of property management, building materials, and lawsuits.
Trump boasted endlessly about his ballroom, Jerome Powell, the renovation of the Fed, and whatever else slipped into his stream of… consciousness, for seven straight minutes while his Cabinet tried to figure out when he wanted them to laugh.
Last night, I watched the first two episodes of Daredevil: Born Again. The writers had a lot of Trump to work with in the interim between the original series cancellation in 2018 and when they began production in 2023. Also, we see ICE mirrored in the series by Wilson Fisk’s (The Kingpin) ultraviolent Anti-Vigilante Task Force (AVTF). In those first two episodes, we see the same look in the eyes of several of Fisk’s staff that we see in Trump’s Cabinet bootlicks. Those who are not themselves amoral degenerates realize that they work for one. They must quickly calculate how they are expected to react to his ramblings for fear of having their skulls crushed, at least figuratively.
The Kingpin in one scene does the pose Trump put on his coin. The show is in places too close to reality for comfort. Except for Trump’s physical cowardice.