James Hamblin at the Atlantic has more details about Trump the man. I figure everybody should keep recycling them non-stop so that nobody will forget them.
Hamblin focuses on the question whether Trump is really a psychopath, and says let’s talk about NPD instead.
One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump “textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Psychologist George Simon called Trump “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics.”
Then he says no actually let’s talk about Antisocial Personality Disorder.
According to the DSM, Antisocial Personality Disorder should be diagnosed in a person who meets two criteria about the way they function in the world, and criteria about their personal traits. In the realm of the latter, the person must also demonstrate two other traits: antagonism and disinhibition.
That certainly fits Trump well, doesn’t it. That is in fact why he’s such a terrifying candidate.
As one recent example, Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills” when, in response to perceived unfair questioning, Trump called her a “bimbo” with “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
In a much more prolonged example, writer McKay Coppins wrote a profile of Trump in which he called Mar-a-Lago a “nice, if slightly dated, hotel,” and incurred years of backlash. “He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication—often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day—denouncing me as a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility,” Coppins recalls. “For two years, Trump continued to rant about how I’m a scumbag, or a loser, or ‘just another phony guy.’”
And that is what a lot of people want to see in the White House – a schoolyard bully writ large.
Then there’s lying, callousness, impulsivity, irresponsibility – all terrible qualities for a president, surely. He aces them all, according to Hamblin.
The other domain of Antisocial Personality Disorder is personality functioning, which involves two criteria. First, either one of the following:
Identity: Ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power, or pleasure.
Self-direction: Goal-setting based on personal gratification; absence of prosocial internal standards associated with failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior.
Trump is rather candid about these points. He is rich and powerful, and his business endeavors are primarily undertaken to achieve that end. “I don’t lose! I’ve never been a loser. I like to win!”
And that’s how he sees the world – as winners and losers, with the winners deserving all the spoils and the losers deserving poverty, contempt, and banishment.
Then there’s dominance.
Using dominance or intimidation to control others, though, shows up time and again in Trump’s history. He has done this particularly to journalists, and entire newspapers and magazines. In one incident, he sent The New York Times’ Gail Collins a copy of her column, having circled her photo and scrawled “The Face of a Dog!”
That should be all anyone needs to know about him. Socially he’s another Milo Yiannopoulos, and he shouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of any political office.