Trump's Mental Illness

The prospect of Donald Trump in the White House gives cause for concern. It's widely recognized that Trump is a narcissist. Most of us have a touch of it, some more than others. Yet extreme narcissism is a recognized mental illness - narcissistic personality disorder. It resembles an unduly self-centered sociopathy.

There's this handy synopsis from the Mayo Clinic:

Narcissistic personality disorder is one of several types of personality disorders. Personality disorders are conditions in which people have traits that cause them to feel and behave in socially distressing ways, limiting their ability to function in relationships and other areas of their life, such as work or school.


If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement — and when you don't receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having "the best" of everything — for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.

At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior. Or you may feel depressed and moody because you fall short of perfection.

Do these traits ring any bells when you think of Donald J. Trump?

DSM-5 criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance

Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it

Exaggerating your achievements and talents

Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate

Believing that you are superior and can only be understood by or associate with equally special people

Requiring constant admiration

Having a sense of entitlement

Expecting special favors and unquestioning compliance with your expectations

Taking advantage of others to get what you want

Having an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others

Being envious of others and believing others envy you

Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

So he's a proper arsehole, so what? Why can't a narcissistic chump be president? Why can't he be trusted with the nuclear codes? You might find helpful this paper from the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. This brief passage might give you pause:

NPD and psychopathy are considered to be overlapping constructs, both expressing symptoms of grandiosity, compromised empathic functioning, and callousness. In fact, Kernberg2 suggested that narcissism might be the core of psychopathy. 51-53 Psychopathic individuals generally display an inability to form genuine relationships; limited (ie, grandiose) affective processing, especially with respect to anticipatory anxiety and remorse; an impulsive behavioral style involving a general failure to evaluate anticipated actions and inhibit the inappropriate ones; and a chronic antisocial lifestyle that entails great costs to society as well as for the affected individual. 54 While both affective and behavioral characteristics are important elements of psychopathy, the affective deficits have traditionally been considered to be the root cause of the psychopath's problems.

It's tough reading for the layperson but interesting nonetheless. I wonder how many assessments of Trump are being run by America's national security agencies? How do they read his stability, his mental health? Would these masters of the Dark Arts really tolerate someone unhinged in the Oval Office? Prominent Republicans from these services signed an open letter a few months ago in which they pronounced Trump a threat to American security and world peace. Today he's acting ever more irrational, unsteady.

Think back to Richard Nixon's final days in office when Kissinger and the security services questioned their president's mental fitness to the point where measures were taken to prevent him from accessing America's nuclear codes, the "football."

UPDATE:

Don't take it from me, a self-styled progressive. Listen to these prominent Republicans:

“Donald Trump is not of sound mind,” conservative Stephen Hayes wrote two weeks ago in the Weekly Standard.

“Have we stopped to appreciate how crazy Donald Trump has gotten recently?” liberal Ezra Klein wrote last week on Vox.

He “appears haunted by multiple personality disorders,” conservative David Brooks wrote last week in the New York Times.

“We can gloss over it, laugh about it, analyze it, but Donald Trump is not a well man,” Stuart Stevens, chief strategist to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote last week on Twitter.

Stevens, the most prominent political figure to persistently broach the subject, conceded that he is “no doctor or psychiatrist.” But he said in an interview that the available evidence leads to two possible conclusions: either Trump has a substance abuse problem, which appears unlikely, or “there is something definitely off about him.”

“At best, this is a very damaged person,” Stevens said. “And there’s probably something more serious going on.”

And then there's this diagnosis from veteran Republican and modern day neoconservative, Robert Kagan:

Why denigrate the parents of a soldier who died serving his country in Iraq? And why keep it going for four days? Why assail the record of a decorated general who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan? Why make fun of the stature of a popular former mayor of New York? Surely Trump must know that at any convention, including his own, people get up and criticize the opposition party’s nominee. They get their shots in, just as your party got its shots in. And then you move on to the next phase of the campaign. You don’t take a crack at every single person who criticized you. And you especially don’t pick fights that you can’t possibly win, such as against a grieving Gold Star mother or a general. It’s simply not in your interest to do so.

When you boil it all down you're left with what appears to be a serious personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, a creepy variety of sociopathy. The NPD "force" is obviously very powerful in Donald J. to the point that, as Kagan observes, he's compelled to resort to self-destructive behaviours. 

Donald Trump is no longer just a bombastic blowhard and a compulsive liar. He's off his nut.