"I'm not sad. I have a HUGE smile on my face"
Disclosure: I’m not a mental health professional, and all of the below is just my opinion. My armchair psychology is gloriously informed in Dunning-Kruger-ness, and this is mostly a way for me to blow of steam.
Many people say that Trump is a textbook example of someone with narcissistic personality disorder. Of course, many of those people aren’t actually psychologists., but feel free to look over the traits and feel free to come to your own conclusion. I do want to point out that this is a man who once boasted that the stack of papers that make up his tax returns were bigger than Mitt Romney’s.
“I remember with Mitt Romney four years ago, everybody wanted his, and his is a peanut compared to mine. It's like a peanut. It’s very small. Not nearly as big a document. I mean, mine, you saw the picture where it's two or three feet high,”
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I’m writing this assuming that many people are correct. With that in mind, running for president will turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Donald Trump. It’s been well documented that Trump is driven by a strong desire to prove his wealth and power[1]. For at least three decades, Trump has been trying to do that through an ostentatious lifestyle and constant bragging in the press and media. After his well documented ups and downs in real-estate and other businesses, Trump found himself living the narcissist’s dream life. On the Apprentice, he got to pretend to be a boss on a TV game show where sychophantry was an important winning strategy for the contestants For over ten years, he had people fawning over him on network TV. What more could a narcissist want?
A complete and utter lack of criticism or insults. Well, you can’t always get what you want.
Trump is the perfect target to be lured into the Fox News alternate universe. He’s an older rich white guy with a history of racism and a complete indifference to taking in information that doesn’t suit him. Compounding the issue, narcissists don’t like being disagreed with. To even imply that they could be wrong is risking making an enemy for life. Trump has the luxury of having enough money to surround himself in a cocoon of yes-men (yes-people?) and enablers. I doubt he’s been challenged on any decision since the early 80s.
Those who have narcissists in their lives know that you can never win an argument with them. No matter how obviously and blatantly wrong they are, they will dig in, double down, Tu quoque, ad hominem, switchtrack, blame shift, or any other dozens of tactics to preserve their ego. The last thing they will do is take ownership and accept responsibility. It is always someone else’s fault.
Sound familiar? So, of course, Trump decides that leading the birtherism charge is a great idea. With no one there to save him from himself, he charges ahead and is mocked, while simultaneously appearing to do well in 2012 presidential polls.
Then he got Carrie-ed at the 2011 White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
I linked to the article below, but to summarize, Trump was invited as a guest of the Washington Post. His success in the polls lead him to believe he was being regarded as a Serious Person. Instead...well...
On the night of the dinner, Trump took his seat at the center of the ballroom, perfectly situated so that all 2,500 lawmakers, movie stars, journalists, and politicos in attendance could see him. He schmoozed and bragged and glad-handed and backslapped his way through four courses, reminding everyone who would listen that he was here “with Lally” (as in Washington Post heiress Lally Weymouth). But as soon as the plates were cleared and the program began, it became agonizingly clear that Trump was not royalty in this room: He was the court jester.
The president used his speech to pummel Trump with one punchline after another, then delivered Apatow’s haymaker in a droll deadpan.
“Obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience,” Obama said, immediately prompting laughter from the crowd. “For example, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice [laughter] at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil Jon or Meat Loaf. [laughter] You fired Gary Busey. [laughter] And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. [laughter] Well handled, sir. [laughter] Well handled.”
Most people don’t like being mocked. Even fewer would like it to happen on TV. Unfortunately for Trump, Obama’s beat-down was literally historic. There will be uncountable numbers of psychology and poli-sci PhD candidates who base their theses on Trump’s public humiliation.
But right at that moment, Trump had not yet formulated his face-saving plan. So when a reporter caught him on his way out and asked if he liked the jokes, Trump couldn’t come up with anything to say but the truth.
“No,” he replied, unusually quiet. “Not really.”
Many people say[2] that this is the biggest catalyst that got Trump to run this year. But even at the very end, he was teetering. It took Trump’s True Believers to seal his fate.
Trump’s advisers took turns making appeals to his ego, to his patriotism, to his lust for TV cameras — anything they could think of. What finally seemed to do the trick, according to Nunberg, was floating the notion that his haters might get the final word on him in the history books. “I don’t know what’s going to happen in this election,” he recalled telling Trump. “But no matter what, they’re gonna write about it a hundred years from now. And they’re never gonna be able to say you didn’t run.”
From everything I’ve read, I don’t think Trump really entered this hoping to win the GOP primary. I think he entered this hoping to get a respectable showing in the polls to show that he finally was a Serious Person, while boosting his TV profile for better ratings. Little did he (or any of us, really) know was that his message of racism and fear was exactly what a large chunk of the GOP voters wanted to hear. Once it became apparent that he could win, he was stuck. He doesn’t want to be a loser.
So, here we are. Trump was never prepared for this. This is probably the first time in his adult life that his ideas, opinions and beliefs were seriously challenged by anyone. Any time he is aware of someone possibly insulting him or even disagreeing with him, he lashes out. This is duly reported by the media, which causes more criticism while simultaneously stoking his main-stream media hating base. He lashes out even more. This gets more coverage. More criticism. More rage. More coverage. More encouragement by his Breitbart-reading fan club. We are witnessing a positive feedback loop of Crazy.[3] He will only get more unhinged as his behavior drives more insults, denunciations, and mockery. I think there’s a chance he will not even make it to the election. We may even see the first presidential candidate to go into seclusion, communicating only via surrogates.
Donald Trump craves praise, respect, adoration, etc. Instead, he is running a campaign so terrible, so embarrassing that it will be actually be taught in history classes. He is getting schlonged by a candidate who was on the receiving end of three decades worth of propaganda-fueled hatred. He wants his name to be associated with luxury. Instead, it will be forever associated with epic failure. It will be a verb to describe a team scoring an own-goal to lose the World Cup. If, say, a bomber pilot accidentally bombs his side, killing most of the officer corps, the only way to describe it will be to say “well, he sure Trumped” that one.”
Of course, I could be wrong and he is just running an scampaign.
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[1]Read this Fascinating rundown by McKay Coppins and this interview Trump's ghost writer Tony Schwartz for more detail
[2]Yes I’m doing a thing here.
[3]I’m coining this term if no one has.
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