What Is Wrong with This Man Who Is Our New President?
Let’s look at the obvious first. So, the president-elect appears to pride himself on his unpredictability, using it as proof that he is his own man. The way he continually claims ownership of whatever is proposed or suggested on any subject by anyone else, he demonstrates most certainly that he’s not a team player. He is known to reject good advice if he feels it disregards his perception and way of doing things. He presents his contrariness as a strength rather than a liability and appears to believe he knows more about everything than anyone else. That’s just the surface. Let’s dig in a bit.
Of course, I have not spoken with Donald Trump myself. So, even though I’m a clinical psychologist and have lots of experience working in a psychological setting where psychological and diagnostic assessment is performed on a daily basis, I wouldn’t presume to make a definitive diagnosis of the man’s psychological level of functioning without administering psychological testing and a thorough verbal evaluation of him. But being a trained professional, it is certainly within my purview to say he appears to me in such and such a way without saying with certainty that his mental health is thus and so.
In that sense, Trump appears to experience a sense of grandiosity or a view of himself that borders on omnipotence and omniscience. This appearance might be said to sum up much of his character. It certainly illustrates how enamored he is of his intellectual prowess. However, the danger for our country, when he persists in viewing himself in such an unrealistic and fanciful way, is great because no amount of new information, no amount of potential harm to segments of society outside his view, and no amount of fresh thinking can affect him if his ideation is bizarre or out of touch with reality, as it has frequently over the last decade. That scenario appears more like a psychotic break than an independent mind.
Okay, nearly everyone is noting his narcissism in the clinical sense. But the reason he has not been labeled psychotic is his shrewd ability to pivot and redefine his opinion as a mere figure of speech or joke and something not to be taken literally, when the backlash and opposing data are so overwhelming that he’s backed into a corner. But what happens under stress? We’ve seen him decompensate, verbally flailing for relief by attacking the media or his opponent or the physical traits of anyone he can one-up. Considering how progressively stressful the job of being president of the United States truly is, such a recalcitrant and cagey mind that tendency to decompensate could very likely become paranoia, a trait historically present in leaders of totalitarian regimes that have become overwhelmingly dangerous to others.
Even though paranoid personalities are usually not wholly delusional, their beliefs can border on the delusional. Comments that Trump has made in the past—that Obama is a foreign Muslim, that he alone will defeat ISIS, or that Russia had nothing to do with hacking the DNC, among numerous other outlandish statements—are clearly delusional in the face of empirical and evidentiary reality. If challenged, he doubles down until it becomes impossible to do so. Then his pattern is to back off from his fanciful statement, as if to indicate he is fully in contact with mainstream reality. When Trump is under continual stress, as he will be when he takes office, his statements will undoubtedly inflame tender balances that don’t need the burden of proof or US approval ratings to tip into chaos, at which point he could easily decompensate or deteriorate from his usual pattern of functioning and become truly delusional, believing things that are not true and taking the country to action. Will we then say that he has lost contact with reality? If he allows his impulses to pose a danger to others, who will be positioned to ask, “What is wrong with this president and can we intervene?”
Trump’s dismissal of the CIA’s reports of Putin’s involvement in the illegal hacking of the DNC’s emails is a case in point. He said, deflecting reality itself, “I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove.” Then he added, cryptically, that he also knows, “things that other people don’t know, so they can’t be sure of the situation,” indicating his sense of omniscience and omnipotence. But when pressed, he made a clever attempt to confuse the audience instead, asking, “If our government had trusted the CIA about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and discovered that was not true, why should we believe them today?”
Well, who can argue with that? We could expect a completely delusional person to present us with more simply bizarre and illogical explanations, but Trump did not do that. Instead, after a few days of evasion, he had the wherewithal to utilize the ego defense mechanism of rationalization, and thus he provided a plausible reason—though, in keeping with the mechanism, not the real reason for his dismissal.
Of course, there is always the possibility that it was tactical and not psychological at all. In point of fact, the CIA did not say definitively that Iraq had WMDs; that was how President Bush and Vice President Cheney characterized the intelligence to the public back in 2002 and 2003 to manipulate the country’s support of their desire to go to war. Over the last week, however, the nation’s top intelligence agency’s declassified report shared overwhelming evidence that Russia tried to influence the presidential election results, indicating Vladimir Putin was trying to help Trump beat Clinton in the general election.
ABC correspondent David Wright reported on January 7, “The declassified version of the report says, ‘We assess Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. The goal, to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him.”
But Trump equivocated. And then he went further, attacking not the content but the existence of news itself.
Wright reminds us, “Before the classified briefing Trump repeatedly cast doubt on the Russian hacking story; afterwards, he released a statement that didn’t even mention Putin. Trump did concede that ‘Russia, China and others are consistently trying to hack a variety of American institutions,’ but rejected any assertions this might have influenced the election results.… Well, this morning Mr. Trump tweeted there was absolutely no evidence that the hacking affected the election results. He is now calling for a congressional investigation, not into the Russian hacking, but rather into how reporters have obtained a leaked copy of the declassified report even before Trump himself had had the briefing.”
Let’s recall the presidential debate when Trump said, “Maybe there is no hacking, and the reason they blame Russia is because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia.” Once it was proven that there was hacking, however, he imagines the implication arising that he didn’t win the presidential election fair and square, but rather, it was Russia hacking the DNC and the dissemination of negative information about Clinton that helped get him elected. His tendency to personalize everything turns to paranoid innuendo, and this is what disturbs him so much now.
We know that Trump is very concerned that Clinton won 2.8 million more popular votes than he did; otherwise, why would he be claiming 3 million fraudulent votes by undocumented immigrants? We heard him say the day after the election that he no longer cared if the election wasn’t rigged, since he won. But now he’s angry he didn’t win the popular vote, so he’s providing delusional reasons for that. His concern about his image and the need to have trounced his presidential opponent at the polls is so important to him that he’s willing to offer a plausible but false reason—“the election was rigged”—rather than the real situation, which is that he beat her based on the electoral college but not the popular vote. He can’t cope with the hypotheses that she might have beaten him electorally if Russia had not significantly influenced the election, the validity of which is impossible to prove.
As Trump persists in equivocating, we find ourselves wondering if his issues are psychological or tactical. Does he do this because he’s delusional or because he’s incorrigible? Certainly, if we were holding him to either optimal mental health or trustworthy behavior, as we would any other public servant at any other time in history, his typical responses would be considered cause for concern. He would be ordered to “get help.”
Instead, Trump’s fanciful and unsubstantiated assertions about any number of issues that can be understood by only him—from the CIA to Meryl Streep—continue to preoccupy much of the news and continue to be the central political story, having little relevance to the real news of the day, which is what Congress is doing “behind the scenes” to diminish even more of the services, opportunities, and chances for justice for all in the country. These activities, including the fast-tracked confirmation hearings for the new cabinet, should be the center of public discussion even if we are not to collectively agree that something is very wrong with Donald Trump.