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This OpEd starts with description of what it is like to have a pathological narcissist in your life and then asks what happens if that person is the president.
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A number of Donald Trump’s critics have reached a consensus: We are being governed by a man with a narcissistic personality disorder, almost certainly of the malignant variety, and it’s time to call it by name.
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Drill deeper, and you just get more Trump. He is like a man trapped inside a disco ball. No matter which direction he tilts his head, all he sees is himself.
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“A wide swath of the population has picked up on this without any formal training,” said Diana Diamond, a professor emeritus of psychology at City University of New York who’s just completed a clinical guide to treating narcissistic pathology. “Like many narcissistic personalities, he may cause more severe distress in others than he himself experiences.”
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From the beginning of his presidency (and even before), mental health professionals have sounded the alarm about Trump’s stability — most notably Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale and editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Opinion writers have discussed his narcissism openly; so have administration officials, though only in private.
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The author goes on to briefly describe major points in George Conway's well publicized 11,000 word article which maps out the DSM-5 criteria for pathological narcissism and applies it to Trump in www.theatlantic.com/...) Then she goes onto quote a psychologist who was once a member of Congress.
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“We wake up each day much like the kid of a narcissistic parent wakes up, in the sense that we don’t know what the crazy parent is going to do,” said Brian Baird, formerly a Democratic member of Congress, and before that, a professor of psychology with a private practice in Washington State. “Yet we have to somehow go to work each day and act like things are normal.” ….….….….… But the distressed-children model would explain why congressional Republicans who privately despise the president still support him in public. “They live in fear that the narcissist will turn on them,” said Baird. So they try to manage the unmanageable. They keep two sets of books, function with two different brains, and buy in — at least partly — to Trump’s grandiose message: You’d be worthless without me.
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She next addresses the problems journalists have in covering a president who are used to covering a president who speaks coherently.
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Journalists have a different problem. If pathological narcissists derive their power from attention, we ought not to give it to them. But under ordinary circumstances, almost anything that comes out of the president’s mouth is considered news. Maybe it’s time, in earnest, to re-examine this notion. An Australian journalist, recently writing for The Guardian, noted that we often render Trump more coherent than he in fact is, spinning word salads into orderly sentences, rendering caprice as deliberate policy.
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We’re still playing chess while the president is playing checkers.
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But there are signs that this is changing. Even Fox News, the in-house organ of the executive branch, has begun to buckle under the strain of covering such an impossible personality, and Trump has started to howl in return.
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That’s the trouble with pathological narcissists: You can never love them enough.
These are just words and phrases some from Republicans used to describe Trump’s recent behavior from one article in The Hill:
- “flailing and melting down on national television.” -
- "unhinged" -
- "dog whistle to the deranged" -
- "spiraling out of control" —
- "lashing out" -
- "off the rails”
- “palpably dangerous”
- “volatile moments”
George Conway’s 11,000 word exposition in The Atlantic lays out in gruesome frightening detail what psychotherapists have been warning about for 2 ½ years. There’s a summary of it here. However we really don’t need to get down into the weeds of the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic cookbook (aka the DSM-5).
We don’t have to use psychiatric terms to describe and explain Trump’s behavior. The general public, even many of the brainwashed Fox News watchers, should understand that what everyone is observing from the president is not normal.
As I have written numerous times Donald Trump’s psychopathology is out of control and puts us all at risk,
most recently here.