It's almost a crime to follow that with the subject at hand, but, if the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe Donald Trump was a very, very, very sick man, this article may put that thought front and center. Where, I honestly believe, it belongs. By far the most "nailed it" examination of Trump I've read to date. I believe this has been staring us in the face ever since he descended that escalator in Trump Tower and announced his intent. I have to assume this will seem over the top to his supporters here, but I believe it lays him bare.
It's a long piece. I want to excerpt the whole darn thing, it's as good as it gets if you're at all worried that we might be about to elect a truly unstable personality. But below is but a snippet. And yeah, I know the other option has her own deserving thread, but friends, this man is very, very, very sick.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-north-patterson/too-sick-to-lead-the-leth_b_10086768.html
..."But there is nothing more “current” or important than Donald Trump’s psychological fitness to be president. All the hyperventilation of the media - parsing his “positions”, pontificating on his” strategy” and intuition- is a poisonous form of the “political correctness” he otherwise deplores, normalizing the abnormal by shoehorning him into the usual analytic boxes. And what it yields is, in great part, rubbish.
There is only one organizing principle which makes sense of his wildly oscillating utterances and behavior - the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder.
The Mayo Clinic describes it as “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.” This is bad enough in selecting a spouse or a friend. But when applied to a prospective president, the symptoms are disqualifying.
With Trump ever in mind, try these. An exaggerated sense of self-importance. An unwarranted belief in your own superiority. A preoccupation with fantasies of your own success, power and brilliance. A craving for constant admiration. A consuming sense of entitlement. An expectation of special favors and unquestioning compliance.
A penchant for exploiting or disparaging others. A total inability to recognize the needs of anyone else. An incapacity to see those you meet as separate human beings. An unreasoning fury at people you perceive as thwarting your wishes or desires. A tendency to act on impulse. A superficial charm deployed to disguise a gift for manipulation.
A need to always be right. A refusal to acknowledge error. An inability to tolerate criticism or critics. A compulsion to conform your ever - shifting sense of “reality” to satisfy your inner requirements . A tendency to lie so frequently and routinely that objective truth loses all meaning.
A belief that you are above the rules. An array of inconsistent statements and behaviors driven by your needs in the moment. An inability to assess the consequences of your actions in new or complex situations. In sum, a total incapacity to separate the world from your own psychodrama.
Recognize anyone?
Then how, his admirers say, do you account for Trump’s “success” in building a business and branding his persona? That’s simple enough: in some areas of life, at least to a point, narcissism and self-aggrandizement serve success. All that is required is a certain intelligence and a sense of how a lack of behavioral constraints can overwhelm more normal folk.
Thus Donald Trump. If your life’s work is building hotels and casinos, this pathology can work for you -especially if your dad has started you out with a few million dollars in chips. You can bully subcontractors, sue your enemies, and bury your misjudgments in a slew of bankruptcies and self-glorification. You can make Trump University sound like Harvard. You can use the media to create your own reality and sell it to the credulous. You can leverage your money to make your own rules.
The annals of business are filled with such people, some of whom wind up in jail, others of whom die rich. But however puissant they become in their chosen realm, their sickness of mind and spirit cannot ruin a country. That power is reserved for presidents.
Indeed, Trump’s rise simply swells his unwarranted belief that he can stride the world like a colossus- naked of judgment, knowledge, temperament or preparation. This reflects a fatal deficit in those who suffer this disorder - they cannot see themselves as they are.
To the contrary, their grandiosity is a defense against feelings of inadequacy too deep and painful to acknowledge. By the consensus of mental health experts, this emotional impairment has a last fatal ingredient - there is no cure. For a man like Donald Trump, life offers no lessons, no path forward save to continue as you have until, like Icarus, you fly too close to the sun.
This disability involves far more than a set of discrete character flaws, however grave, including those which suggest a lack of trustworthiness. We survived the dishonesty and paranoia of Richard Nixon, after all, albeit at considerable cost and only after forcing him from office.
But in many ways Nixon was well - equipped for the presidency, capable of navigating the larger world and understanding complex situations and people - as in China and its leaders. He did not reflexively substitute a grossly inflated sense of self for knowledge, strategy or preparation. His tragedy, and ours, was that his crippling inner wounds outstripped his proven strengths.
Donald Trump is altogether different -and infinitely more dangerous. He is afflicted with a comprehensive and profound character disorder which leaves no corner of his psyche whole. And this dictates - and explains - every aspect of his behavior."
..."Which brings us to a central problem of Trump’s warped psychology - he believes that filling the presidency requires nothing but the wonder of himself. This gives the lie to GOP’s most craven rationalization of its own capitulation: that a suddenly docile Trump will, as president, defer to a cadre of wise and experienced advisors drawn from the party establishment.
This is pernicious nonsense. Consistent with his character disorder, Trump proudly insists that his chief advisor is himself. Even were he so inclined, in order to learn from others he must know enough to discern good advice from bad. But such is his pathology that he feels no need to learn much of anything from anyone. And so, from the beginning, he has plunged us down the bottomless rabbit hole of his intellectual emptiness.".....