I saw the following headline and it occurred to me that there were some words being used to describe Trump with a frequency that has to be unprecedented.
“Trump’s delusions are about to blow up in his own voters’ faces.” (Washington Post).
One word, of course, is narcissistic. This is a commonly used colloquial word. However "delusional" connotes something far more grave. It suggests that the president is distorting reality, that he is not able to see the facts objectively and to make decisions based on that is really real and not on a reality that he hopes is real.
Once again I go to the Google machine.
Of course, it is only fair to Google “Obama Delusional.” The stories vary but you will see that some don’t suggest he is delusional. They are about other people’s perceptions of him. They tend not to imply or state that he is clinically delusional, rather that he is engaged in wishful thinking.
There is a DSM-5 diagnosis of delusional disorder. Donald Trump does not meet the criteria. His delusional thinking is more at the extreme of believing what he wants, in many cases what he must, believe to support his need to be right all of the time. He lives in a world where everything and everyone revolves around him and his grandiose self-image. He believes he is never wrong. Facts don't matter.
In order to support his off-the-charts egotism, he has to distort contradictory facts. These beliefs are not psychotic delusions. They are indications of confirmation bias, a psychological phenomenon seen in his ardent supporters. Trump uses confirmation bias with his supporters. (Here’s a six-minute video of “Art of the Deal author Tony Schwartz explaining this to Ari Melber. ) Manipulating the confirmation bias of his suppoters comes naturally to him because Trump engages in confirmation bias himself.
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Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias,[Note 1] is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.[1] It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is a variation of the more general tendency of apophenia.
People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. In certain situations, this tendency can bias people's conclusions. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinkingand the limited human capacity to process information. Another explanation is that people show confirmation bias because they are weighing up the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way. However, even scientists can be prone to confirmation bias.[2]
Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts. Wikipedia
Trump is not delusional in any clinical sense. However, he is the poster-boy for confirmation bias.
Related: Once again, the question: Is Trump crazy or crazy like a fox? Or a lab rat?
References:
Donald Trump is a master manipulator of bias. The trouble is, we go along with it
Donald Trump and the Art of Confirmation Bias
Monday, Jul 9, 2018 · 4:17:41 PM +00:00 · HalBrown