Trump indisputably meets the criteria
Linda Charnes and Dahlia Lithwick at Slate argue that Trump is a malignant narcissist and narcissists never stop being narcissists, so we should stop paying attention to his narcissistic tantrums and focus only on what he’s doing to us.
The problem is not that journalists are especially narcissistic, as [Jon] Stewart says, but that Trump is pathologically so. Trump indisputably meets the criteria for severe narcissistic personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Many psychiatrists and psychologists have said as much, although they can’t formally diagnose him because they haven’t personally examined him, which triggers the Goldwater rule.
We say, Goldwater rule be damned, the writing is on the national wall. The “logic” of a narcissist is always bent, and Trump is no different. He sucks the media into what we might call a faulty causal loop. Psychologists who specialize in narcissism have a name for this phenomenon: DARVO, which stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.” It’s both effective and infuriating: Every time Trump kicks someone and the press calls him out on it, he screams, “OW, they’re attacking me.”
There was another one today or yesterday: reporters asked him about something Michelle Obama says in her new book, which is that she’ll never forgive him for the “birther” lies and the way it put her children at risk. His answer? Wull he can’t forgive Obama, either, for not spending enough on the military. So stupid, and so narcissist. He will not absorb any criticism, and if he won’t absorb it he can’t learn from it. He appears to literally think he is always right and always the best at everything. It’s immensely frustrating. It’s also just how it is with narcissists.
The challenge for the press is similar to the broader problem we all face: how to grapple with a man whose only concern is himself? We think it’s time to stop wondering what motivates Trump and focus instead on what compels people to react so strongly to him.
Okay hang on. There’s one obvious answer to that question and it outweighs all the others combined. We react so strongly to him because he’s the fucking president of the US. I would love to be able to ignore him because he’s just some puffed-up asshole who was a reality tv star for a few years. I went many happy years ignoring him, until July 2016 when I belatedly realized he was no longer a joke.
So that’s why we react so strongly to him. It’s the only reason that counts. Yes, he’s uniquely infuriating and uniquely terrible, but if he were back in the tiny world he belongs in, that would be his family’s problem but not ours. Well, his family’s and his employees’ and his tenants’ and his customers’ and his business partners’ and so on – a lot of people, to be sure, but still not the whole damn world.
Given that most journalists and reporters want to report factual events, it’s not surprising that many fall into the time-suck of disproving one lie after another while also trying to defend their reputations as professionals. Putting people on the defensive and forcing them to explain themselves over and over again is how clinical narcissists manipulate their victims. So how is a good journalist to avoid getting stuck on the narcissist’s causal loop? MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow offered up a partial model when, in 2017, she stopped allowing her show to cover Trump’s fleeting tweets or efforts to engage the media in conflict and instead focused her coverage on what he actually does.
I get it, and that may be the best way to go, but I would also point out (not for the first time) that all this saying he does is also what he does. I do think journalists have to document that too. Not all of them; it’s fine for Maddow to ignore that part, but I think when he calls black reporters and Congressional Representatives stupid, I think some journalists should be on that story.
Maybe the media could divide the duties. Some could deal with what he says, and others, like Maddow, with what he does. They overlap a lot, so there would need to be a lot of collaboration, but we need to get the whole, awful picture out there so people can see the loathsome whole in its…loathsome wholeness.
He certainly is a loathsome hole.
“Journalists” need to stand up to their editors.
These articles about Whittaker should be headlined “Trump’s pick for AG has history of threatening investors”.
But the headlines are always back-pedalled, or even irrelevant. And the stories are always dumbed down.
Every political article in mainstream outlets follows utterly outmoded traditional structures where a huge pre-amble buries anything of significance. They should lead off with the documented threats he made to an investor, then piddle down to the back story.
People who have bought into the TrumpGOP will never read far enough into these stories to see what they are actually about – the (editorially inserted?) dog-whistles make it too easy for them slip back into their cognitive-dissonant fog – they never read/hear the facts until they have been twisted by a sanctioned TrumpGOP mouthpiece (there’s a potential graphic that would be hard to forget)
So why does the “free” press present the stories this way?
Without exception the editorial boards and owners of every major “news outlet” are personally gaining from the GOP’s apotheosis of Corporate Personhood. Mainstream editors personally support non-existent taxes, zero oversight of corporate collusion, little or no return to investors, and never attempting to curb or punish any form of corporate malfeasance.
No editor can resist dumbing down a story that stands against their personal interests. While their are the occasional high profile Krugman types who can slip the odd openly critical piece through, every other outlet will “temper” their output.
The late-night comedy approach often puts the problems out front where they belong, calling out the truth, but sarcasm is something that automatically causes most people to discount what’s being said, and TrumpGOPpers are probably the most irony deficient creatures to ever walk the earth.
The rich-white-guy-editor filter always removes any indication of why the substance of these stories matter to every citizen, and substitutes tit-for-tat straw-men. Then un-decided (aka uninformed) citizens instantly flag these stories as “just politics” and simply ignore them. So many people have been burned by bad business practices that they now consider them normal, so when yet another borderline-criminal white-older-businessman is put in power over them, they think its just the way it has to be.
Can “journalists” start formatting stories properly, naming liars as liars, hi-lighting the massive malfeasance that defines bank-rolled corporatism, and calling out the corporate minion toady-hood that currently defines our governments?
It comes down to honesty and integrity. Their may be two sides to a story, but it is not the journalists job to find and display both sides, it is the journalists job to uncover and proclaim the truth. As long as the kow-tow to their corporately appointed editors that isn’t going to happen.
For now our only way forward is the tried and true method of person-to-person campaigning.
Oh, he’s still a joke. A very dangerous joke, but a joke nonetheless.
P.S.
“The Story” not the story. Facts must come first, “narrative” is secondary.
The urge to tell a story or maintain a cohesive narrative must never obscure the facts.
If a journalist can not ascertain, identify, verify and clearly present facts, they should not be filing a story, and they probably have no business in journalism.
Examples of how the story buries the facts to support an editors agenda are plentiful. One of the nastiest specific examples is the elevation of a demonstrably unsuitable candidate to the SCOTUS – despite committing multiple perjuries that were recorded and televised nationally. This elevation was possible because journalists repeatedly and systematically refused to clearly report facts:
fact – the process was to choose a new judge for the Supreme Court of the United States.
fact – a supreme court judge must uphold truth, honesty, integrity, and the law without partisanship or prejudice of any type
fact – a supreme court judge is required to recuse themselves from any judgment that they may be personally engaged in
fact – testimony at Senate Confirmation Hearings is sworn under oath
fact – candidate repeatedly perjured himself under oath
fact – candidate repeatedly invoked and portrayed extremely partisan views
fact – old not very close “friends” saying someone is a nice guy, is merely a character reference
fact – statements of witnessing repeated drunkenness and abusive behaviour are potential testimonial evidence, and should lead to investigation
fact – someone whipped the GOP to guarantee that the candidate was appointed, in spite of the previous facts
fact – the Executive Branch of the United States Government systematically restricted the scope of a federal investigation
fact – investigations into the possible past wrong doings of a candidate for the Supreme Court were blocked for political reasons
Damning as every other horrible thing that came out may be, those are the facts that should have been the lead in every story. But those facts were never presented clearly as facts. Every story “published” in the main-stream focused on describing the clouds that obscured the facts, the clouds of common misogyny, emotional narrative, narcissism, and partisanship.
The editors made sure that the pertinent facts were pushed aside; headlines ignored the perjuries and obstructions – descriptive narratives of the horse race took precedence over any facts, allowing a story that obliterated the relevant truths – yet another false story that too many people are accepting