At the start of Trump's first presidency, there was a spirited public debate about his mental state centered on the question whether this was a clear case of narcissistic personality disorder. February 2017 brought a letter to The New York Times, signed by thirty-five mental health professionals, noting traits typical of people who "distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists)." It concludes,
In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump's speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.
The next day brought a rebuttal from another professional: the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, who should know.
I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.
To this non-professional, the requirement of distress and impairment seems odd. Perhaps it's due to the origin of psychiatry in medical science, with its assumptions of suffering and succor. At any rate, Dr Frances's defense of professional standards is by no means a defense of Donald Trump.
He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.
His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.
Take away the technical dispute — which has, in fact, disappeared from the public forum — and the two letters to the editor merge in prophetic accuracy. It doesn't matter whether we think that Donald Trump is having more and greater episodes of mental illness or that he's wreaking havoc in a perfectly normal transport of rage. The successive cases of Donald Trump and Joe Biden dispelled any hope that the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution would ever be invoked when the president was conscious and determined to remain in office, much less when also surrounded by sycophants as Trump is now.
Trump's psychological motivations are obvious, as Dr Frances wrote eight years ago. One might add that psychological motivations are basically the only kind he's got. Intermediate aims such as the demolition of the rule of law and the reduction of the economy to an access racket serve the ultimate purposes of protecting him from the consequences of his undisciplined selfishness and providing a plush nest for his wingless soul. He carries on blighting public life, inflicting pain on innocent people, and isolating America from decent international society because blight, pain, and isolation are personal grievances calling for tenfold revenge.
With Donald Trump, everything is personal; and everything personal is going to be an affront. His first administration showed how he hates the inevitability of having more competent people around him. Even in the clown show that is his second administration, the most ridiculous figure of all is the one at the center. It was an impossibility to surround himself with dimmer bulbs, so he surrounded himself with people who unfailingly pretend that he outshines them.
Consider the letter Trump wrote to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2019:
Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will. I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.
I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.
History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!
I will call you later.
That's the president of the United States conducting direct diplomacy with another national leader. If he'd been capable of writing like a normally intelligent adult, regardless of education, he'd have done so. But, then, if he'd been capable of understanding the task and judging that he wasn't up to it, he'd have let someone prepare a draft for him. That one incident should have ended all speculation and spin about the face Donald Trump presents to the world. It's not a theatrical mask, but the face of an appalling truth: that while other human beings were growing and maturing, he was not. Oh, yes, he knows it. His life has been one frenzied construction project, a ceaseless piling-up of pretenses and distractions before the door of the old nursery where his character died of neglect. He never laughs. If he ever cries, it's for the little fellow curled up in the nursery.
Mary L. Trump's 2020 book about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, bears the subtitle How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. That seemed a bit hyperbolic, at the time. Five years on, the whole world is in fact suffering through the consummation of one man's wretched life.
