Trump’s psychopathology check-list includes out of control arrogance. Low intelligence isn’t psychopathology, but the fact that Trump isn’t particularly smart means that even if he had the patience to think and plan strategically and consider longer term risks and potential consequences of behavior his impulsiveness would preclude his making wise decisions.
The attempts to "get dirt" on Hunter and Joe Biden is the most recent example of this and the one that will lead to his being, at the least, impeached by the House.
Trump has numerous psychological “blind spots.” This is a phenomenon akin to the blind spot in your car except that when you are driving you know how to compensate lest a vehicle is approaching from behind where you can't see it. In psychology when you have blind spots you aren’t aware of them. Blind spots are part and parcel of the defense mechanism of denial which is one of the most primitive ways people avoid anxiety because it involves distorting or denying reality.
Trump’s personality is such that suffers narcissistic injury easily. The lay term would be that he has a thin skin.
Add this to the fact that he is impulsive to the point of having a clinical impulse control disorder, in lay terms that he is incapable of being a strategic thinker.
As if this isn't enough he has a tendency to paranoid ideation - again in other words that he believes people and forces are out to get him.
He is sadistic and likes to inflict harm and discomfort, which makes him even more irrational when he lashes out.
His deep narcissism and arrogance means he believes he knows it all and thus he won't take advice from those smarter and more savvy than he is.
Trump is a potpourri of psychiatric symptoms adding up to more than malignant narcissism. I illustrated this in a photoshop which I put on Twitter.
He will dig himself deeper and deeper until he is in a hole he can't get out of. He can't help it. It is in his nature.
Jamele Boule wrote the following in Trump Can’t Take a Punch in the New York Times:
The idea that Trump thrives in chaos — that controversy is an asset to his presidency — just isn’t true. Despite his constant bluster, the president can’t take a punch. As soon as it was clear that the House would go after Trump for his actions regarding Ukraine, he panicked — even trying to implicate his vice president in the scandal. “I think you should ask for Vice President Pence’s conversation, because he had a couple of conversations also,” Trump said at a news conference during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York on Wednesday.
Since then, he (along with personal lawyer and co-conspirator, Rudy Giuliani) has done little more than lash out, using Twitter to send angry messages about his political opponents. “IT WAS A PERFECT CONVERSATION WITH UKRAINE PRESIDENT!” Trump shouted in a Friday morning tweet. “The Democrats,” he added a few minutes later, “are now to be known as the DO NOTHING PARTY!” Noted.
Trump is at his weakest when he’s in this mood — erratic and angry, consumed by striking back at his political opponents. You can see this in the polling. His job approval is at its worst when he’s mired in controversy. If you are a Democrat, and if you are thinking strategically, you should see impeachment as a valuable advantage for the upcoming election, since it pushes Trump into the kind of behavior that has kept him from reaping the benefits of relative prosperity. It keeps him off balance at exactly the moment — a re-election campaign — that he needs to be steady.
I agree with Boule when he concludes with suggesting that impeachment will send “Trump into new lows.” Boule notes that he has already joked about executing spies. The fact that Trump would say this with or without knowing it would be recorded and publicized, and that he actually thought it was funny, shows a combination of arrogance and ignorance. It is yet one more demonstration that he is psychologically decompensating at an increasing rate, or to keep it simple, he has become not merely unhinged, that the door that is Trump is barely hanging on by one very loose screw.
Update:
You could say that Giuliani is what Trump would be if he was absolutely unrestrained. In a perverse way I think Trump envies him because he is actually a better rage performer than he is. I have little doubt that Trump enjoys watching Giuliani rant as he attacks anyone who dares to attack the emperor he serves. That Giuliani has become Trump’s only media dog of war says a great deal about the president’s psychopathology. That Giuliani is decidedly unlikable and comes across as certifiably insane helps our cause.
Trump, for his part, has so far shown no sign of upset at Giuliani for helping drag him and his administration into arguably the worst crisis of his presidency. At least during the onset of this whole mess, Trump’s attitude was quite the opposite, in fact. Not long after Giuliani wrapped his prolonged, heavily combative interview with CNN host Chris Cuomo last week—a segment so off-the-rails it went viral and attracted much ridicule from political observers—the president made sure to congratulate his lawyer for taking the fight straight to CNN, according to a source with direct knowledge of their conversation.
Furthermore, President Trump made a specific point of urging Giuliani to keep doing TV and cable news hits in the coming days, so they could train as much media attention as possible on Biden, this source said.
This was mere days before Democrats quickly lined up in favor of an impeachment inquiry. The push to damage Biden had instead exploded in Giuliani and Trump’s faces. From The Daily Beast