This excellent long and complex analysis is well worth reading. (The NYT requires a subscription beyond a number of free articles.)
Understand that, and you’ll understand what he’s doing in the White House.
When psychotherapists in the duty to warn movement like me write about Trump we take one perspective. The NY Times chief media critic takes another:
This is a futile effort. Try to understand Donald Trump as a person with psychology and strategy and motivation, and you will inevitably spiral into confusion and covfefe. The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.
I mean, O.K., there is an actual person named Donald John Trump, with a human body and a childhood and formative experiences that theoretically a biographer or therapist might usefully delve into someday. (We can only speculate about the latter; Mr. Trump has boasted on Twitter of never having seen a psychiatrist, preferring the therapeutic effects of “hit[ting] ‘sleazebags’ back.”)
But that Donald Trump is of limited significance to America and the world. The “Donald Trump” who got elected president, who has strutted and fretted across the small screen since the 1980s, is a decades-long media performance. To understand him, you need to approach him less like a psychologist and more like a TV critic.
Hopefully those of us who attempt to understand and then explain Trump with psychology have not led you spiraling into “confusion and cofefe.”
Some of us, Justin Frank the psychoanalyst who wrote “Trump one the Couch” for example, have delved into the childhood and formative experiences that made Trump into the malevolent creature he is today. Most of us, however, explain how you can understand why Trump acts the way he does by understanding the symptoms or characteristics of malignant narcissism. It doesn’t make much of a difference whether we actually tack this label onto him and invite the accusations of engaging in distant diagnosis, or just focus on behavior that leads us to conclude that he must have a psychiatric assessment for dangerousness or fitness to make rational decisions, or both.
Mr. Poniewozik concludes with
To ask whether any of this is “instinct” or “strategy” is a parlor game. If you think like a TV camera — if thinking in those reflexive microbursts of adrenaline and testosterone has served you your whole life — then the instinct is the strategy.
And to ask who the “real” Donald Trump is, is to ignore the obvious. You already know who Donald Trump is. All the evidence you need is right there on your screen. He’s half-man, half-TV, with a camera for an eye that is constantly focused on itself. The red light is pulsing, 24/7, and it does not appear to have an off switch.
Who, truly, is the “real” Donald Trump?
He is half-man and half TV.
To fully answer this question you have to grasp both parts. You use psychology to understand the half that is man, and the part of him that is TV to understand that aspect of him. Understand both and you won’t be surprised by the next Greenland or Alabama cofefe.