By David Winch
Local Journalism Initiative
Donald Trump is dominating the news these days, “flooding the zone”, with multiple and often conflicting actions. News coverage is so intense, one wonders: is there anything to add? —But wait!
There are several angles on Trump that are worth highlighting.
During Trump’s first term, a couple of books impressed me. One was a work of politics, the other of psychology. These come to mind again today.
To start, the Mueller Report of 2019 on election interference and foreign influence was a lengthy (758 page), and very detailed FBI report. I read every page, reference and footnote.[1] It dominated headlines, was briefly debated, then disappeared.
The other book I often consulted was a work of psychology, one which helped explain why Trump’s actions often seemed incongruous or disturbing. The work, titled Our Inner Conflicts, was published in 1945 by a German-born psychotherapist, Dr. Karen Horney. I had picked it up in a Psych course at college, and her thesis struck me as insightful.
Damaged by conflicts
Horney posits, after her long history of clinical work, that many people are damaged by conflicts as children and cannot resolve these intense issues.
Such damaged people are often hobbled by inner tensions but still must navigate daily life. Horney concludes that they adopt one of three semi-conscious “coping strategies”: they may systematically move away from people (withdrawal) or move towards people (submission and compliance). Finally, they may reflexively move against people (assertiveness and aggression).
The symptoms of the latter, “move against” strategy define Trump to a T. They provide a key to understanding many inscrutable actions.
Why does he constantly pick fights? Why is he so mercurial and unpredictable? Canadians might wonder: Why does Trump make enemies of people he should befriend?
Dr. Horney’s analysis of such “conflicted” cases explains well Trump’s obsession with pointless fights (asserting his independence), his spontaneous dislikes (asserting dominance), and his unpredictable enthusiasms (defying others’ predictions).
It’s worth another read.
In 2017, a group of psychology professionals argued that Donald Trump was ill-suited to the Presidency.
‘Dangerous case’
However, a more recent set of psychiatric specialists have commented directly on “the case of Trump”.
Early in his first term, in 2017, a group of US psychiatrists protested the rule against psychiatrists trying to diagnose public figures. Called the “Goldwater Rule”, this professional guideline stood for nearly 60 years. The clinicians argued that this President was a mortal threat, and they needed to alert the public as to his psychic state.
The group published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President (2018). In that collection of essays, the authors proposed that he was “impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganised, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving”. Whew.
(There was some criticism that these mostly liberal psychiatry professionals were as much about politics as medicine. No conservatives were included saying, for example, that they liked Trump’s Republican policies, but were troubled by his personality.)
Trump’s re-election campaign prompted another protest. In October 2024, an open letter condemning Trump was signed by 233 psychology professionals and ran in the New York Times.
The signatories contended they had “an ethical duty to warn the public” that Donald Trump showed “symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder—malignant narcissism— that make him deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous. He is grossly unfit for leadership”.
In a new collection, titled The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2024),psychology professionals again argued that the Goldwater rule was ill-suited to the present and full of loopholes.
Most of the authors agreed that Trump grew up under a tyrannical father who belittled his sons relentlessly. His father’s disapproval likely led to alcohol abuse by Trump’s older brother Fred.
One essay in The More Dangerous Case particularly caught my attention. Its author focused on “malignant narcissism” and its personal manifestations. As it turned out, the writer is a Canadian psychologist now living in Stratford, Ontario, Dr. Richard Wood. I contacted him and we had a wide-ranging discussion.
In his essay, Dr. Wood notes the rough upbringing Trump experienced under a demanding and hard-nosed father: “Becoming tough and ruthless like father and as relentlessly acquisitive was a Faustian bargain indeed. In order to be safe, Trump had to be willing to sacrifice his connection with others and his very humanity. To ensure he could never be invaded again and defined by someone else, he had to hold himself apart from meaningful engagement with other people, maintaining a tough guy posture, much like his father had, that denied need, dependence, and recognition of his own flawed humanity”.
In another essay, Wood had underlined that a child growing up this way “becomes implacably mistrustful, anticipating rapacity from others rather than love or generosity”.
Wood quotes psychologist Erich Fromm, who stated that malignant narcissism denoted “a grotesque expansion of grandiosity and omnipotence that produced profound distortions of the human character”.
Wood adds that psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg, who made “a deep investment in understanding malignant narcissism”, similarly found that it led to “grandiosity, extreme self-centeredness, and a remarkable absence of interest in and empathy for others”. In spite of this, those suffering from it can be politically successful as they “are still very eager to obtain admiration and approval from other people”.
While the contributors to The More Dangerous Case collection set out varied analyses, Wood notes that they agreed on the basics of malignant narcissism: “damaged or absent empathy, impaired thought process, and prominent paranoid elements”.
Malignant narcissism “tends, over a lifetime, to escalate the damage it imposes on the self”. No happy ending is evident.
We have been warned.
[1] The Mueller Report delivered a message that many U.S. observers found counterintuitive. As special prosecutor and former FBI head Robert Mueller wrote in his executive summary, “the investigation could not establish evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence”. That basically ended Congressional investigations and led to a separate impeachment process focusing on Ukraine.