I think that the narcissism of our soon-to-be Commander in Chief of our nukes on four minute standby until launch and drones which can incinerate targets all over the world, is the least of our worries. The demonstrable facts are that he has, to put it in non-psychological terms:
- a severe problem thoughtfully mediating his angry impulses,
- a tendency to feel slighted, minimized, or insulted easily,
- and a belief in conspiracy theories that makes Nancy Reagan’s belief in astrology look harmless.
His demagogic proclivities have prompted frighteningly accurate comparisons to Hitler and lesser despots.
- His narcissism, hedonism, and misogyny don’t make him dangerous.See footnote. Addressing these issues didn’t loose him a single voter, and even now prove to be a distraction from the serious issues.
Still he is a narcissist par excellence so sometimes I take a break from writing diaries that scare the crap out of me .
It was interesting to see him cheek by jowl at the useless press gaggle in Mara Lago yesterday (well not quite as literally as in this photo at right) with another narcissist, one who wears his internal self-aggrandizement on the outside as well as the inside.
The image of Don King himself was obscured by the large Trump pin (see below right).
I wonder whose doing that was.
I expect Republicans will take the photo of Mt. Rushmore off the walls where President Bush’s portrait used to hang and replace it with a photo of Dear Leader.
I also wonder how long it will take before a Trump flag to fly under the Stars and Stripes in available online. Made in China of course...
Footnote:
Therapists and others who are psychoanalytically informed know that extreme narcissism is thought to be caused by certain kinds of emotional deprivation in childhood. Children who didn’t get appropriate nurturing in childhood often try to make up for it as adults by finding ways to validate themselves and compensate for their injured self-worth.
Do you seeDonald Trump in the following?
The narcissistic personality has become accessible, as a live human being, to psychoanalytic treatment; but the term "narcissism" is now more vague and ambiguous as a hypothetical construct and as a nosological entity—"the narcissistic personality disorder". It has in fact become almost a kind of operational watershed which is used to describe those individuals whose object relations are characteristic of the developmental level of mental representation that Anna Freud (1969) calls "need satisfying", that Mahler (1972) describes as "magical omnipotence", and that Immanuel Kant might consider a systematic violation of his categorical imperative; individuals who experience other people as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. The defining qualities are most often described in the psychoanalytic literature as a triad of vanity, exhibitionism, and arrogant ingratitude, which for better or worse (Lasch, 1979, p. 33), is what the word "narcissism" has come to mean in popular usage.
….
What keeps the person going, and often able to manage the external appearance of a relatively well-functioning life, is an internal structure referred to in the psychoanalytic literature as a "grandiose self" (Kernberg, 1975); (Kohut, 1971). Its main job is to be perfect (See Rothstein, 1980); that is, to achieve approbation, to never be dependent, and to never feel lacking in any way. Although there is theoretical disagreement as to how this "grandiose self" is established, most analysts pretty much concur that it conceals beneath it a self image described by Kernberg (1975) as “a hungry, enraged, empty self, full of impotent anger at being frustrated, and fearful of a world which seems as hateful and revengeful as the patient himself (p. 233) ... The greatest fear of these patients is to be dependent on anybody else because to depend means to hate, envy, and expose themselves to the danger of being exploited, mistreated, and frustrated (p. 235).
www.wawhite.org/...
addendum:
Most of you have heard the name Don King associated with boxing, and if you saw him standing beside Trump yesterday when he fielded a few questions from the press, you may have been curious as to why Trump is so attracted to him.
If you saw this on some TV shows you may have heard the reporter say he was a convicted murderer. This is true. He served four years for non-negligent manslaughter. But there’s more to this unsavory character than that.
The following is from Wikipedia:
King has been investigated for possible connections with organized crime. During a 1992 Senate investigation, King invoked the Fifth Amendmentwhen questioned about his connection to mobster John Gotti. In public, however, King has strongly denied any connections to organized crime and has responded to mob allegations by calling them "racist".
Mike Tyson, the former undisputed World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, says of his former manager, "(King is) a wretched, slimy, reptilian motherfucker. This is supposed to be my 'black brother', right? He's just a bad man, a real bad man. He would kill his own mother for a dollar. He's ruthless, he's deplorable, he's greedy ... and he doesn't know how to love anybody.”
Among his numerous boxing lawsuits:
Muhammad Ali
King has been involved in many litigation cases with boxers that were focused on fraud. In 1982 he was sued by Muhammad Ali for underpaying him $1.1 million for a fight with Larry Holmes. King called in an old friend of Ali, Jeremiah Shabazz, and handed him a suitcase containing $50,000 in cash and a letter ending Ali's lawsuit against King. He asked Shabazz to visit Ali (who was in hospital due to his failing health) and get him to sign the letter and then give Ali the $50,000. Ali signed. The letter even gave King the right to promote any future Ali fights. According to Shabazz, "Ali was ailing by then and mumbling a lot. I guess he needed the money." Shabazz later regretted helping King. Ali's lawyer cried when he learned that Ali had ended the lawsuit without telling him.
Larry Holmes
Larry Holmes has alleged that over the course of his career King cheated him out of $10 million in fight purses, including claiming 25% of his purses as a hidden manager. Holmes says he received only $150,000 of a contracted $500,000 for his fight with Ken Norton, and $50,000 of $200,000 for facing Earnie Shavers, and claims King cut his purses for bouts with Muhammad Ali, Randall "Tex" Cobb, and Leon Spinks, underpaying him $2 million, $700,000, and $250,000, respectively. Holmes sued King over the accounting and auditing for the Gerry Cooney fight, charging that he was underpaid by $2 to $3 million. Holmes sued King after King deducted a $300,000 'finder's fee' from his fight purse against Mike Tyson; Holmes settled for $150,000 and also signed a legal agreement pledging not to give any more negative information about King to reporters.
Donald Trump event controversy
On September 21, 2016, King caused controversy when introducing Donald Trump at a campaign event at a black church in Cleveland by using the word "nigger" seemingly by accident. In King's speech he was giving his thoughts on how black people can't achieve success in America by acting like white people, stating that "If you're poor, you are a poor negro -- I would use the n-word -- but if you're rich, you are a rich negro. If you are intelligent, intellectual, you are intellectual negro. If you are a dancing and sliding and gliding nigger -- I mean negro -- you are a dancing and sliding and gliding negro”.