We teach our children not to lie, because the likelihood that they will not be believed when they’re actually being truthful increases exponentially with each lie they tell. We proclaim that honesty is a virtue and expect our elected officials to tell us “the whole truth and nothing but the truth” whenever they speak on the public record. We deem perjury a punishable crime even for unelected everyday citizens, because lying without compunction has generally come to be accepted as a betrayal of societal norms and the public trust.
But what happens when a man whose whole existence is predicated on habitually lying to himself and others becomes our president? What happens when for 71 years his entire sense of self-worth and emotional stability has been rooted in his imaginary competence, popularity, and perfection, even in the face of mounting objective evidence to the contrary? If the flagrant patronization and ego stroking on display at Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting are any indication, the most likely occurrence will be his Republican enablers' persistence in fertilizing the soil from which his grandiose delusions grow.
Much like the embattled family and friends of the average narcissist often do, the “yes” people in Trump’s inner circle have necessarily learned the delicate art of temporarily diffusing his rage by echoing the self-serving lies he’s always told the man in his mirror.
Following a week in which his chronic, pre-existing narcissistic injury was exacerbated by record disapproval ratings and fallout from former FBI Director James Comey’s damaging testimony, his closest confidants met for an intervention to feed him the hyperbolic praise his narcissistic supply so desperately needed. As anyone who's ever conducted group psychotherapy can attest, their collective efforts to placate a megalomaniac on constant verge of a meltdown were all too familiar.
Narcissistic injury occurs when a narcissist feels that their hidden, 'true self' has been revealed. This may be the case when the narcissist experiences a "fall from grace", such as when their hidden behaviors or motivations are revealed, or when their importance is brought into question. Narcissistic injury is a cause of distress and can lead to dysregulation of behaviors as in narcissistic rage.
Though his staff somehow successfully managed to separate Trump from his Twitter account during Comey’s testimony, it isn’t hard to imagine the rage he must have felt as the man he claims he fired for being a “showboater” called him a liar five times while no one in the chamber piped up to defend his alleged honor. Turns out he didn’t leave us in much suspense, and predictably took to the Rose Garden the very next day to not only call Comey a liar in return, but to declare that he would gladly testify under oath to rebut his testimony.
Much like Aesop’s infamous boy who cried wolf, he summoned a captive audience to double down on the manipulative threat that he possesses tapes of his meeting with Comey, while again refusing to offer any tangible evidence to prove it. He defensively casts suspicion and derision upon his detractors as retribution for the high crime of wounding his fragile ego with inconvenient truths.
For Kohut, narcissistic rage is related to narcissists' need for total control of their environment, including "the need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means". It is an attempt by the narcissist to turn from a passive sense of victimization to an active role in giving pain to others, while at the same time attempting to rebuild their own (actually false) sense of self-worth. It may also involve self-protection and preservation, with rage serving to restore a sense of safety and power by destroying that which had threatened the narcissist.
In typical schoolyard bully fashion, Donald Trump copes with the ongoing Russia investigation as best he can by attempting to destroy the credibility of the people and institutions that threaten to reveal not only his corruption, but his true self. The water has thusly been muddied to the extent that the American people aren't sure they can believe anyone involved in the scandal, and by more than 70 percent have little to no trust in anything Trump says about Russia. Despite this reality, he’s reportedly even contemplated adding special counsel Robert Mueller, who has been tasked with investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, to the growing list of people he’s fired for lack of loyalty to his con, no matter how increasingly guilty it makes him look.
To the narcissist, the rage is directed towards the person that they feel has slighted them; to other people, the rage is incoherent and unjust. This rage impairs their cognition, therefore impairing their judgment. During the rage they are prone to shouting, fact distortion and making groundless accusations. In his book The Analysis of the Self, Kohut explains that expressions caused by a sense of things not going the expected way blossom into rages, and narcissists may even search for conflict to find a way to alleviate pain or suffering.
The narcissist cries wolf in hopes that his lies will draw attention to the self-induced emotional distress he wants soothed, and away from the self-sabotaging actions he willfully took to create his own dire predicament. Trump relishes in the firestorm his sensational rhetoric creates because it affords him the opportunity to tell more lies about not only himself, but the people who seek to dispel his self-aggrandizing mythology.
Ultimately, Trump’s growing rage at true revelations and his vilification of the whistleblowers who are exposing his impropriety are directly proportional to his lifelong fear of discovery that he isn’t as great as he’s always wanted the world to believe. If he’s never learned to admit the truth of his own flaws and indiscretions to himself, we have no reason to expect that he will ever admit them to us.
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf