The classic symptoms of medium-grade mania
Even chronically insipid David Brooks sees it.
Trump has shown that he is not a normal candidate. He is a political rampage charging ever more wildly out of control. And no, he cannot be changed.
He cannot be contained because he is psychologically off the chain. With each passing week he displays the classic symptoms of medium-grade mania in more disturbing forms: inflated self-esteem, sleeplessness, impulsivity, aggression and a compulsion to offer advice on subjects he knows nothing about.
I hadn’t thought of mania…except maybe subconsciously I had, since I had thought of grandiosity, which tends to remind me of mania. Anyway yes – the guy is high on himself.
His speech patterns are like something straight out of a psychiatric textbook. Manics display something called “flight of ideas.” It’s a formal thought disorder in which ideas tumble forth through a disordered chain of associations. One word sparks another, which sparks another, and they’re off to the races. As one trained psychiatrist said to me, compare Donald Trump’s speaking patterns to a Robin Williams monologue, but with insults instead of jokes.
There’s the Beckett-Joyce style. Oh look, a squirrel!
He also cannot be contained because he lacks the inner equipment that makes decent behavior possible. So many of our daily social interactions depend on a basic capacity for empathy. But Trump displays an absence of this quality.
That, I suppose, is why I keep pointing out, in fear and wonder, that there’s nothing good about him. It’s that complete and utter lack of basic empathy.
He looks at the grieving mother of a war hero and is unable to recognize her pain. He hears a crying baby and is unable to recognize the infant’s emotion or the mother’s discomfort. He is told of women being sexually harassed at Fox News and is unable to recognize their trauma.
…
Trump is underdeveloped and unregulated.
He is a slave to his own pride, compelled by a childlike impulse to lash out at anything that threatens his fragile identity. He appears to have no ability to experience reverence, which is the foundation for any capacity to admire or serve anything bigger than self, to want to learn about anything beyond self, to want to know and deeply honor the people around you.
That’s more insight than I expect from David Brooks.
It’s also why this whole thing is so hideously depressing. It depresses me that so many people are not only not repelled by Trump, they actually like and admire him. As I’ve said before, that’s not even the politics, it’s the nature of the guy himself – the lack of empathy and capacity to admire or serve anything bigger than self.
Well, it’s a common enough problem in human psychology.
We’ll admit to being wrong about something, and even take it as a measure of pride that we had that level of self-assurance and insight to re-evaluate our beliefs.
But Trump is a con-man, and admitting you were conned, that’s almost impossible. Even recognizing it after the fact just means admitting you were a fool, without really giving any evidence that you have gained further insight and won’t get fooled again. Hell, professional con-men actually rely on this reluctance–it keeps victims from going to the police, because that would entail admission.
So the only other route is to double-down. You have to get hyper-enthusiastic; if you can’t manage that, you have to turn around and demonize the other choices. Anti-vaxxers who realize they’ve lost the science battle immediately try to make the conversation about ‘evil Big Pharma’, as if the sins of patent abuse and market jiggering (and yes, even active concealment of side-effects) somehow meant that Andrew Wakefield can be considered a legitimate source. In the same vein, Trumpets bleat about how horrible Hillary is, dragging up ever-more-absurd lies about her, because if they just admit she’s a run-of-the-mill, mostly establishment politician because that’s what the system is designed to produce, then they have to acknowledge that Trump is horrible, and that they have been fooled.
I’m on the same side as David Brooks? :shock: :moreshock: :passed out:
:
The moon has turned into green cheese and it’s raining frogs.
This will all perhaps be comedy in 50 or 100 years. If anyone is still around then and history exists. And comedy has been similarly corrupted in the meanwhile.
Adult child of narcissist here. While I’m not qualified to diagnose, and Drumpf is not my patient, he checks every box for narcissistic personality disorder. This idea of mania is interesting, but I’d suggest that if so his mania is comorbid with NPD.
Although the specifics are sometimes surprising, all of his behaviors are either predictable or explainable by this hypothesis. The fact that he became jealous of a baby stealing attention from him is classic. ACoNs can tell stories of their parents visiting and losing it because a new baby stole their show. “She actually believed I love when a baby cries while I’m speaking.” That’s right: I’M speaking, you rude fucking baby.
He recently accused fire marshals of turning away supporters from in-filled halls. It reads to me as random bullshit triggered by this same stream of consciousness. First he brags about his many fans; then it occurs to him to comment that this is only a small sample of his many many more fans; then he suggests that many more fans were disappointed not to be present; then it hits him that someone must be to blame for that; and of course all detractors and other ego-threats are ultimately manifestations of a single entity (Not-Me), just as most of us are extensions of his ego; therefore the fire marshals can only thwart him if they’re supporting Hillary and probably acting on her direct orders…
For me it’s quite triggering. I’ve rid my life of one malignant person for whom I don’t exist except as an extension of and food supply for his ego, and who will do anything, cause unlimited harm, in service to his ego, without any conscience at all. And here another want to run the entire country I live in, and get his hands on the nuclear football. (My hypothesis predicts that if it were up to only himself, he would nuke a country–or a US city–without hesitation if he perceived it as a threat to his ego. He would survey the smoking ruins and announce that they were losers anyway.)
And worse are the enablers–all the family members who tell you it’s you, not him, and who validate his every narcissistic fantasy. Partly to stay on his good side, and partly because he has made that kind of narcissistic behavior the new normal. We’re now surrounded by millions who simultaneously believe he will build a wall and are prepared to tell us we’re idiots for ever thinking he meant that literally.
Wow. And sympathy for the triggering aspect. I think I feel a faint shadow of that myself, despite not being an adult child of narcissist – his narcissism and bullying make me flinch, emotionally speaking.
Is it ok if I guest post this? I normally don’t ask but this one’s personal.
Absolutely. Thanks for asking.
Great, thank you.
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