{"id":1031,"date":"2016-10-08T14:52:30","date_gmt":"2016-10-08T12:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.AVNER-FALK.NET\/?page_id=1031"},"modified":"2023-02-25T18:02:15","modified_gmt":"2023-02-25T16:02:15","slug":"donald_trump","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/?page_id=1031","title":{"rendered":"Citizen Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Extracted from a full-length psychobiography in progress]<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Donald Trump is Mentally Disturbed but also Emotionally Resilient
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On April 6, 1990, Paula Zahn of CBS television interviewed Donald Trump on the occasion of the opening of his new casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Taj Mahal<\/em>, which Trump <\/span>called \u201cthe largest casino in the world\u201d and \u201cthe eighth Wonder of the World.\u201d As Zahn\u2019s colleague Harry Smith sarcastically pointed out to her before the interview, the name Trump had chosen for his casino indicated that Trump was comparing himself to Shah Jahan (1592-1966), the fifth Mughal emperor of India, who built the Taj Mahal in Agra in 1632\u00a0 out of his \u201ceternal love\u201d for his dead wife, Mumtaz Mahal (1593-1631). \u201cWell, move over mogul Jahan and make room for mogul Donald J. Trump and his version of the Taj Mahal,\u201d said Smith. \u201cNothing serene or pure here, and if there\u2019s evidence of eternal love, it is our eternal love of money and gambling.\u201d (see https:\/\/factba.se\/transcript\/donald-trump-interview-cbs-paula-zahn-april-6-1990<\/a>).
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This statement by Smith took place in Trump\u2019s absence, before Zahn began interviewing him. Trump\u2019s <\/span>marriage and business were falling apart, and he was thought to be anxious, depressed, perhaps even suicidal. Zahn <\/span>asked Trump, \u201cYou are under a tremendous amount of pressure lately.\u201d Trump seemed surprised: \u201cWhy do you say that?\u201d he asked. Zahn added, \u201cBoth in your professional life and your personal life. How are you doing?\u201d Trump replied, \u201cI\u2019ve never heard anyone say such a thing. I\u2019m doing well.\u201d Zahn insisted, \u201cHow are you doing?\u201d and Harris added, \u201cDonald Trump has not been out of the newspaper for \u2014 what? \u2014 three or four months now.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Surprisingly, Trump replied, \u201cI feel great. I\u2019m doing well. This was a very big undertaking, and this has turned out to be far more successful than I had thought, because I never realized the kind of accolades we’d be getting for it and the numbers of people that would be coming. I feel good.\u201d (see https:\/\/factba.se\/transcript\/donald-trump-interview-cbs-paula-zahn-april-6-1990<\/a>). <\/span>Was Trump consciously lying, was he unconsciously denying his emotional state due to his lack of self-awareness, or was he really as resilient as he seemed? <\/span><\/p>\n

In March 2019, when Trump was facing the release of Special Counsel Bob Mueller\u2019s report against him, and mental-health experts warned the world about his extreme dangerousness, Michael Kruse, who had made very important discoveries about Trump\u2019s mother (see https:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2017\/11\/03\/mary-macleod-trump-donald-trump-mother-biography-mom-immigrant-scotland-215779<\/a>, thought that Trump was a lifelong survivor, and that the dire predictions of the mental-health experts about his imminent collapse were exaggerated (see https:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2019\/03\/22\/trump-mueller-report-survive-226101<\/a>).
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 <\/p>\n

The Dread of Shame and Humiliation<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1996 the late Canadian political scientist and psychoanalyst Blema Steinberg (1934-2017) published a book entitled Shame and Humiliation: Presidential Decision Making on Vietnam<\/em>, in which she compared the war-related decisions of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon as commanders-in-chief concerning Vietnam. Steinberg demonstrated the crucial influence of experiences of shame and humiliation on the tragic war-related decisions of Johnson, who entered the Vietnam war, and of Nixon, who prolonged it, costing hundreds of thousands of lives, as opposed to the wise decision of Eisenhower, who had not suffered such experiences, and who had refused to let the French drag the U.S. into that war. (see http:\/\/www.mqup.ca\/shame-and-humiliation-products-9780773513921.php<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump seems to fascinate writers, cartoonists, and biographers. In late August 2016 the Japanese-American journalist Michiko Kakutani (born 1955) reviewed six recent books about the Republican presidential nominee, most of them by journalists, \u201cwritten rapidly as Mr. Trump\u2019s presidential candidacy gained traction\u201d in order to capitalize on his political ascendancy: Trump Revealed<\/em> by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher of The Washington Post<\/em>; Trump and Me<\/em> by Mark Singer of The New Yorker<\/em>; The Making of Donald Trump<\/em> by the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, a former reporter for The New York Times<\/em>; Yuge <\/em>by the cartoonist G. B. Trudeau; Never Enough<\/em> by another Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, the free-lance Michael D\u2019Antonio; and Great Again<\/em> by Trump himself, a recycled version of his book Crippled America<\/em>. Kakutani wrote, \u201cthe latest of these books rarely step back to analyze in detail the larger implications and repercussions of the Trump phenomenon. Nor do they really map the landscape in which he has risen to popularity and is himself reshaping through his carelessness with facts, polarizing remarks and disregard for political rules.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/08\/26\/books\/in-books-on-donald-trump-consistent-portraits-of-a-high-decibel-narcissist.html?_r=0<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The most serious among these books seems to be that of the American writer Michael D\u2019Antonio. His fascinating biography of Donald Trump gives us an important insight into the unconscious sources of Trump\u2019s powerful need to shame and humiliate others. D\u2019Antonio\u2019s book was entitled Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success<\/em> and was re-published in 2016 as The Truth About Trump. (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/09\/27\/books\/review\/never-enough-donald-trump-and-the-pursuit-of-success-by-michael-dantonio.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The original title of D\u2019Antonio\u2019s book was apt: whatever success Trump achieves, his unconscious grandiose self says to him, \u201cThat is not enough!\u201d and demands ever greater achievements. In an interview with a German television station, D\u2019Antonio called Trump a \u201cnarcissistic sociopath\u201d with no empathy or feeling for those around him as human individuals. (see https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=5vmW3GyRjxA<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump has had his share of shame and humiliation. Even if we put aside the strong possibility of his having suffered them in his early life, his adult life has been full of them: his first two marriages broke up; his business companies have suffered no less than six bankruptcies; and he is publicly known not to have paid any federal taxes for many years. (see http:\/\/www.politifact.com\/truth-o-meter\/statements\/2016\/jun\/21\/hillary-clinton\/yep-donald-trumps-companies-have-declared-bankrupt\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

For a normal man, such public failures would have been shameful and humiliating; Trump\u2019s biographer, Michael D\u2019Antonio, has found that he is obsessed by shame and humiliation and deeply fears them. To avoid the unbearable pain of shame and humiliation, and the depression that might ensue from them, however, Trump twists reality to view each of his failures as a success: his failed marriages got him the world\u2019s most beautiful woman as a third wife; his Chapter 11 bankruptcies only made him wealthier; he is so \u201csmart,\u201d he says, that he has \u201cbigly\u201d exploited loopholes in the U.S. tax code to pay no federal taxes over decades. (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/09\/27\/books\/review\/never-enough-donald-trump-and-the-pursuit-of-success-by-michael-dantonio.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump is so thin-skinned that he, his companies and his wife have filed some four thousand libel suits against journalists and mass-communication media; this has had a chilling effect on reporters and editors alike. While courageous journalists of high integrity like those at The New York Times<\/em> have stood up to him, others have published retractions and apologies. The scariest thing about Donald Trump\u2019s inability to suffer shame and humiliation is his unpredictable reaction to North Korea\u2019s and Iran\u2019s constant flow of anti-American vituperation. In early January 2017 Trump tweeted that he would not allow North Korea to acquire a missile that could reach the United States; he also insulted China by tweeting, \u201cChina has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won\u2019t help with North Korea. Nice!\u201d Trump\u2019s dread of shame and humiliation could lead to a Third World War that would wipe out our species. (see http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/entry\/trump-north-korea-tweets_us_586b198de4b0eb58648a423e<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Kim Jong-un seems to be as terrified of public humiliation as Donald Trump. The American psychiatrist Dr. Kenneth Dekleva has said, \u201cKim Jong-un has shown a degree of savvy, ambition, and ruthlessness which has shocked outside observers. He has shown such patterns over time, starting with the 2010 sinking of the ROKS\u00a0Cheonan<\/em>, his purges of hundreds of senior personnel, the murder of his uncle Jang Song-thaek, and the assassination of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam […] Kim sees himself and the DPRK as under existential threat from the United States. Such a view is not new, but has likely solidified due to the election of U.S. President Donald Trump […] The recent derogatory rhetoric between Kim Jong-un and President Trump is extremely dangerous,<\/em> more so than even sanctions, and poses a heightened risk of accidental misunderstanding, potentially leading to a pre-emptive first-strike with devastating consequences.<\/em> The DPRK\u2019s leadership has long relied upon a variety of highly-nuanced signals in terms of gauging the United States\u2019 intentions and strategic posture […] Kim Jong-un and the DPRK\u2019s ruling elite are sensitive to nuance and to loss of face.<\/em> \u201d (see https:\/\/thediplomat.com\/2017\/10\/kim-jong-uns-political-psychology-profile\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Trump\u2019s Borderline Personality Disorder<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

On June 9, 2017 the minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, publicly questioned Trump\u2019s fitness for office in her weekly press conference because he did not have the curiosity, discipline and stamina required for the job. The next day U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, urging him to investigate possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump. Feinstein said she was especially concerned after U.S. National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and U.S. National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers had declined to answer questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee about possible undue influence on them by Trump. Feinstein said she did not necessarily believe Trump was unfit for office, as Nancy Pelosi has asserted, but said he had a destabilizing effect on government. \u201cThere’s an unpredictability,\u201d wrote Feinstein. \u201cHe projects an instability.\u201d (see http:\/\/time.com\/4814180\/republicans-trump-comey-tapes\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Emotional instability is the hallmark of the borderline personality disorder, <\/span>a long-term pattern of abnormal feelings and behavior characterized by unstable relationships with other people, unstable sense of self, unstable emotions, dangerous behavior and self-harm, an inner struggle with feelings of emptiness and a fear of abandonment, outbursts of violent rage at seemingly-normal events which are perceived as humiliations, substance abuse, sexual addiction, depression, and eating disorders; one out of ten people with borderline personality disorder commits suicide. <\/span>Few American mental health professionals have suggested that Donald Trump suffers from this disorder, as Adolf Hitler did. Most of my American colleagues think that Trump suffers from a\u00a0 malignant narcissistic personality disorder; in my view, however, he does suffer from a borderline personality disorder.
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Be that as it may, the most predictable thing about Trump is his unpredictability, the most stable thing about him his instability. One can never tell what he is going to do or say next. He can change from a pleasant, smiling fellow with a sense of humor into a mean, growling, humorless bully in a moment. The total lack of connection between his different selves is due to the operation of unconscious splitting. (see http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intelligencer\/2016\/12\/the-radical-unpredictability-of-donald-trump.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1922 Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) wrote his younger writer friend Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) that great writers, such as William Shakespeare, often have deeper psychological insight than psychoanalysts, and that they also express it more beautifully. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a case in point. The protagonist of his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde<\/em> is an upper-class physician of impeccable manners who seeks to prove that every person harbors evil along with good in his soul. To do so he concocts a potion that turns him into an evil beast, Mr. Hyde, who perpetrates all manner of sadistic and violent acts on innocent people. He then drinks an antidote that turns him back into the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a splitting between the two characters in the story; they cannot exist together at the same time. In most people, however, the good and bad aspects of the self are merged in the same personality. When the good and evil aspects of the self are split, when the person can be totally different at different times and in different situations, this is known as \u201cmultiple personality disorder\u201d or \u201cdissociative personality disorder.\u201d (see https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dissociative_identity_disorder<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Some observers have noted Trump\u2019s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, his unconscious splitting, his black-and-white view of the world. For him everything and everyone is either good or bad; there are no shades of gray, nothing and no one can be both good and bad. This is part of his unconscious splitting of both his internal self and external reality. He sees himself as all-good and his opponents as all-bad. The all-white can also become all-black. At first he praised his predecessor, Barack Obama, for having treated him very gracefully during the transition-of-power period; later he repeatedly denounced Obama, one of the best presidents the United States had ever had, for having \u201cdestroyed America\u201d with his \u201cmisguided policies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

All of the southwestern U.S. had been part of Mexico, conquered by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. During his presidential campaign, Trump traveled to Mexico to meet its president, Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto, and was friendly to him; the following day, back in the U.S., Trump viciously attacked the \u201cillegal and criminal Mexican immigrants.\u201d Needles to say, Pe\u00f1a Nieto felt that he had been manipulated and humiliated. The Australian journalist Paul McGeough noted Trump\u2019s \u201cJekyll-and-Hyde performance\u201d on the Mexican issue but did not see that this was the crucial aspect of his character and politics. A few days after Trump\u2019s inauguration he announced again that he would build his two-thousand-mile-long \u201cwall\u201d between the U.S. and Mexico and that Mexico would pay for it; Pe\u00f1a Nieto, who is twenty years Trump\u2019s junior, promptly denied this statement and canceled his scheduled meeting with Trump. Unable to endure this public humiliation, Trump announced that this had been a joint decision and that since Mexico could not \u201ctreat the U.S. with respect\u201d their meeting would have been fruitless. (see http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/world\/us-election\/different-messages-to-different-audiences-donald-trump-on-immigration-in-mexico-and-arizona-20160901-gr68l1.html<\/a> for McGeough\u2019s article and http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/01\/25\/politics\/mexico-president-donald-trump-enrique-pena-nieto-border-wall\/index.html <\/a>for the cancellation of Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2019s visit).<\/span><\/p>\n

After hearing so much in early 2016 about Donald Trump\u2019s misogyny, his rudeness to women, his bad marriages and divorces, his crudeness to beauty queens, his abuse of Former Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and his sexual assaults on beautiful women, there was a big surprise. In March, at a Trump election rally in Wisconsin, a sick woman got up to publicly thank Trump for his generosity to her. She was the terminally-ill former Miss Wisconsin, Melissa Young, who said, \u201cYou\u2019ve saved me in so many ways. In recent years I\u2019ve been struggling with an incurable illness and I\u2019m on home care now and it was caused by a doctor\u2019s medical negligence. In those dark days fighting \u2014 right now all the tubes have been removed and I have a ‘do not resuscitate’ order and I have a seven year old son \u2014 those days in the hospital, I received from you a handwritten letter that says ‘to the bravest woman I know.\u2019 […] It lifted my spirits. He continued to do that, to reach out to check on me, to check on my son to see how he was doing.\u201d In October 2016, at the height of the U.S. presidential race, the dying Melissa Young again told reporters that Mr. Trump was the most generous person upon the face of this earth, that he had helped her in her darkest hour, and that she would love, praise and support him \u201cuntil her last breath.\u201d She added that this was the only Donald Trump she knew, and that she had never experienced any of the abuse that he had reportedly heaped on other women. (see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2016\/09\/30\/politics\/former-miss-wisconsin-trump-darkest-hour-newsroom-costello-intv\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Another woman who trumpeted Donald Trump\u2019s virtues in the past is the First Lady of the United States, his Slovenian-born third wife, Melania Trump. She had been born Melanija Knavs; after immigrating to the U.S. she had anglicized her name to Melania Knauss. In 2004, in one of her first\u00a0 appearances on Trump\u2019s \u201creality\u201d television show The Apprentice, <\/em>the future Mrs. Trump \u201ccommitted the cardinal sin of upstaging her future husband.\u201d Donald Trump and Melania Knauss had been together for four years; despite her \u201ccardinal sin,\u201d they became engaged to be married two weeks after the episode, and were married the following year. Trump believed that he had finally found the right mate. \u201cShe\u2019s shown she can be the woman behind me,\u201d he later told the gossip columnist Cindy Adams. \u201cWe\u2019re together five years, and these five years for whatever reasons have been my most successful. I have to imagine she had something to do with that.\u201d (see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/magazine\/the-mystery-that-is-melania-trump\/2016\/08\/16\/d4f10136-527c-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html?utm_term=.e18706fa197a<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

During the U.S. presidential race of 2016, Melania went all out to defend, protect and promote her husband. She told the senior CNN reporter and anchorman Anderson Cooper that \u201cthe Donald she knew\u201d was loving, generous, and kind, and that he would never do anything of the things he bragged about to Billy Bush, who had \u201cegged him on into boy talk.\u201d It takes a good deal of unconscious denial for a wife not to recognize in her husband what is plain for the whole world to see \u2014 unless Melania\u2019s private Donald is very different from the public Donald Trump whom we all know. (see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2016\/10\/17\/politics\/melania-trump-interview\/index.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

For a while, Donald Trump seemed to be kind to his third wife, Melania, whom he married in 2005. She is still young, slender and beautiful, if somewhat cold, and, above all, satisfies his narcissistic needs; but he inflicted emotional pain on Melania with the revelations of his sexual misconduct during the campaign and, as he told his biographer, being married to him is very tough. During the Al Smith charity dinner following Trump\u2019s third debate with Hillary Clinton, he publicly embarrassed Melania by \u201chumorously\u201d reminding everyone that she had copied her campaign speech from Michelle Obama. Melania smiled, but she was obviously hurt. (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/10\/26\/us\/politics\/donald-trump-interviews.html?emc=edit_ta_20161025&nlid=68054513&ref=cta&mtrref=undefined&_r=0<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

As the 2016 campaign progressed, Melania seemed to grow increasingly unhappy; the American magazine Vanity Fair<\/em> published an article entitled \u201cThe Quiet Tragedy of Melania Trump,\u201d showing how her small acts of defiance and resistance to her husband betrayed her growing unhappiness with him. In November 2016, after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, Melania praised him in a joint family interview with Lesley Stahl on the CBS News program 60 Minutes<\/em> as \u201ctough, confident and strong.\u201d That was shortly after he had embarrassed her publicly at the Al Smith charity dinner. By mid-February 2017, less than a month into her First Lady career, Melania was showing signs of misery. \u201cThe Donald she knew\u201d had made her, as he had his two previous wives, quite unhappy. During their red-carpet walk upon arrival in Israel on May 22, 2017, Melania walked beside Donald, on his left. Donald reached out his left hand to hold Melania\u2019s right hand; rather than take it, she slapped his hand and kept hers to herself. One can only imagine what is going on between the narcissistic president and his unhappy wife. (for the Vanity Fair<\/em> article see http:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/news\/2016\/10\/quiet-tragedy-of-melania-trump<\/a> for the CBS interview see http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/60-minutes-donald-trump-family-melania-ivanka-lesley-stahl <\/a>and for Melania\u2019s unhappiness as First Lady see\u00a0http:\/\/nypost.com\/2017\/02\/15\/melania-trump-is-absolutely-miserable-as-first-lady<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

How can we square the magnanimous Dr. Donald with the mean Mr. Trump? Well, the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality is familiar to psychological professionals. It is based upon what psychoanalysts call an unconscious \u201csplitting of the self.\u201d This kind of splitting develops early in one\u2019s life, as a psychic defense, when the child cannot reconcile the \u201cgood\u201d or pleasurable and \u201cbad\u201d or painful parts of himself. It usually goes along with an inner \u201cobject splitting,\u201d when the child cannot reconcile the \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d parts of its primary emotional \u201cobject,\u201d usually the mother, upon which his very life depends.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201csplitting of the self\u201d was given literary expression in Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while \u201cobject splitting\u201d is given concrete expression in fairy tales, such as that of Snow White, whose protagonist has two mothers, one all good, but dead, the other all bad, cold, narcissistic, who keeps looking at her own image in the mirror. When this unconscious splitting persists into one\u2019s adult life, the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality develops. Indeed, Donald Trump sees his world in split-up, black-and-white terms: to him, there are \u201cvery good people\u201d and there are \u201cvery bad people\u201d who must be denied entry, deported or killed. In reality, most people are both good and bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

How did Donald Trump develop his Jekyll-and-Hyde personality? His alternating, deeply ambivalent, love-and-hate attitude to women gives us a clue. He is fascinated by beautiful women, but his love for them has repeatedly alternated with, or turned into, contempt, hatred and abuse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump can be endlessly generous to dying beauties like Melissa Young, as he was at first to his beautiful Czech-born first wife, Ivana Zeln\u00ed\u010dkov\u00e1, whom he married in 1977; after thirteen years of marriage and three children, however, after she had put on weight and lost her beauty, he tired of her, had an affair with the former Georgia beauty queen, Marla Maples, and divorced Ivana in a notorious trial, in which she claimed that he had been \u201ccruel and inhuman\u201dto her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s second wife, Marla, whom he married in 1993, gave him one child. Their marriage lasted less than four years; once more, his idealization of a woman he loved seems to have turned into a loathing for her, and they had an ugly divorce trial.<\/span><\/p>\n

During Trump\u2019s first two marriages he seems to have sexually assaulted numerous women by kissing, caressing and groping them in the intimate parts of their bodies against their will. No woman has publicly claimed that he had tried to rape her, however. Trump, who lives in a world of his own, may have seen his attacks on women as delightful attempts at seduction. Did he get his orgasms from touching, kissing, caressing or groping beautiful women against their will without having sexual relations with them? Does he suffer from a sexual addiction or, as Hitler did, from a sexual perversion?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Duty to Warn and Protect
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Before going into any further discussion of Donald Trump\u2019s mental health, we need to explore the ethical implications of such a discussion. Are we allowed to diagnose a person we have never seen in our office? Is it ethical to do so? Is it imperative? Do we need to warn the American people against the dangers posed to them by their president\u2019s psychological makeup?
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In 1964 U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater (1909-1998), who, like Donald Trump, liked nuclear weapons, had been the Republican nominee for President, running against the Democratic incumbent, Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973). Some American psychiatrists, alarmed by the prospect of Goldwater becoming President and launching a nuclear war against the Soviet Union that would end life on Earth, gave psychiatric diagnoses of Goldwater to the now-defunct Fact<\/em> magazine, which published T<\/em>he Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater.<\/em> Among other things, the magazine called Goldwater \u201cparanoid, sexually insecure, suicidal, and grossly psychotic.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

An enraged Barry Goldwater, who lost the election, successfully sued the magazine\u2019s owners and editors and won $1 million in compensatory damages and $75,000 in punitive damages. The American Psychiatric Association thereupon amended its code of ethics by adding the famous Section 7.3, which reads, \u201cOn occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself\/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement<\/em>.\u201d Section 7.3 is commonly called the Goldwater Rule. Unfortunately, the American Psychiatric Association, rather than discharge its duty to warn and protect, has turned the Goldwater Rule into a gag rule.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On January 27, 2017, a week into Donald Trump\u2019s presidency, U.S. News and World Report<\/em> published an interview with the American clinical psychologist John D. Gartner, author of a psychobiography of Former U.S. President Bill Clinton. Dr. Gartner, who is one of President Trump\u2019s most vocal opponents, offered the following psychiatric diagnosis of President Trump:<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president. Trump has \u201cmalignant narcissism,\u201d which is different from narcissistic personality disorder and which is incurable […] it\u2019s obvious from Trump\u2019s behavior that he meets the diagnostic criteria for the disorder, which include anti-social behavior, sadism, aggressiveness, paranoia and grandiosity. Trump\u2019s personality disorder (which includes hypomania) is also displayed through a lack of impulse control and empathy, and \u201ca feeling that people […] don’t recognize his greatness.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.usnews.com\/news\/the-report\/articles\/2017-01-27\/does-donald-trumps-personality-make-him-dangerous<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Let us examine the terms used by Dr. Gartner. The narcissistic personality disorder is defined by the American Psychiatric Association as \u201ca personality disorder in which there is a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others\u2019 feelings. People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power or success, or about their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them. The behavior typically begins by early adulthood, and occurs across a variety of situations.\u201dMalignant narcissism an extreme variety of narcissism that also includes an antisocial personality disorder, aggression, and sadism. It is characterized by a sense of absolute entitlement, a total absorption in one\u2019s own thoughts, feelings, and needs, and a total disregard for other people\u2019s feelings. Often grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines the organizations in which he is involved and dehumanizes the people with whom he associates. He is fearless, guiltless, remorseless, calculating, ruthless, inhumane, callous, brutal, rancorous, aggressive, biting, merciless, vicious, cruel, spiteful, hateful and jealous; he always anticipates betrayal and seeks punishment; he craves revenge; he can be homicidal. Saddam Hussein of Iraq was a case in point, and so is Donald Trump. On May 25, 2017, for instance, in a photo op at the NATO meeting in Brussels, Trump publicly shoved aside the Montenegrin prime minister, Du\u0161ko Markovi\u0107, as if the latter did not exist, in order to get in front of him and be in the center of the photograph. (see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/05\/25\/politics\/trump-pushes-prime-minister-nato-summit\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

On January 30, 2017 no less than ten other American psychiatrists and psychologists sounded out on the psychopathology of Donald Trump in interviews with Stat News.<\/em> One of them, John Montgomery, a psychologist at New York University, thought that Trump exhibited \u201ca desperate need to keep from feeling, even fleetingly, that he might not be superior to everyone else\u201d and that Trump \u201cderives deep satisfaction from abusing and hurting people.\u201d Many of his colleagues echoed this view. Four months later, thanks to Dr. Gartner\u2019s Duty to Warn campaign, the number of mental-health professionals who publicly demanded Trump\u2019s removal from office due to his emotional illness had grown to several thousand. (see https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2017\/01\/30\/trump-mental-health\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The American journalist who interviewed Dr. Gartner observed that \u201chis comments run afoul of the so-called Goldwater Rule […] But Gartner says the Trump case warrants breaking that ethical code.\u201d In my own mind and in that of many other mental-health professionals, however, the psychiatric Goldwater Rule conflicts with the judicial Tarasoff Rule of 1976, which resulted from the fatal stabbing in 1969 of a Russian-born female student, Tatiana Tarasoff, by a mentally-ill Indian-born fellow graduate student, Prosenjit Poddar, in the University of California at Berkeley. Tatiana\u2019s bereaved parents used the university because its psychologist who had treated Poddar had not warned them of the imminent danger to their daughter\u2019s life.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California<\/em>, the Supreme Court of California held that mental health professionals have a duty to protect individuals who are being threatened with bodily harm by their patients. A lower court decision two years earlier had mandated warning<\/em> the threatened individual, but the ruling by the California Supreme Court also called for a duty to protect<\/em> the intended victim. Under this ruling, the psychological professional may discharge this duty in several ways, including notifying the police, warning the intended victim, or taking other reasonable steps to protect the threatened individual. While Donald Trump is not my patient, of course, nor that of any other mental-health professional, in my view, and in that of many of my colleagues, he does threaten our entire species, not only with bodily harm, but also with total annihilation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mental health professionals have a hard time choosing between the Tarasoff Rule and the Goldwater Rule. The American Psychoanalytic Association says its members are \u201cfree to comment about political figures as individuals,\u201d while the American Psychiatric Association says \u201cIt is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.\u201d While Donald Trump at times seems like a walking psychiatric textbook, as far as we know no psychiatrist has ever seen him in his office, which is a prerequisite for an accurate psychiatric diagnosis. Nonetheless, among mental health professionals, the Tarasoff Rule has trumped the Goldwater Rule. <\/span><\/p>\n

On February 18, 2017, less than a month into Trump\u2019s presidency, my U.S. colleague Howard Covitz, speaking for a group of American mental health professionals called Free Citizen Therapists, addressed a public appeal to the members of the U.S. Congress to impeach their president under the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which deals of the removal of the President due to his inability to discharge his duties, declaring Trump unfit for his office:<\/span><\/p>\n

Speaking as citizens who are trained to observe human behavior and recognizing that we cannot offer a definitive diagnosis except, if you would, \u201calmost certainly unfit to carry a weapon or to leave a Mental Health Professional\u2019s office with such a weapon,\u201c we (who have worked on this letter) ask the Houses of the U.S. Legislature to act on their mandate to protect (for such a mandate can be no less than that assigned to the Executive Branch) and to remove the President under our 25th Amendment or to require him to submit to psychiatric and psychological evaluation […] whether Donald J. Trump is suffering from Pathological or Malignant Narcissism, a Delusional Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder or some Hypo-manic combination of two or more of these disorders or something else are a concern for treatment but not for his fitness to serve as a guardian of safety in a dangerous world. (see https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/722444487922770\/permalink\/723151327852086\/?comment_id=723154607851758&notif_t=group_comment&notif_id=1487442169640810<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

It took time for the U.S. mass-communication media to recognize and decry the severity of Trump\u2019s emotional illness. On May 15, 2017 David Brooks of The New York Times<\/em> wrote that the world was led by a seven-year-old child:<\/span><\/p>\n

First, most adults have learned to sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around the classroom. Trump\u2019s answers in these interviews are not very long \u2014 200 words at the high end \u2014 but he will typically flit through four or five topics before ending up with how unfair the press is to him. His inability to focus his attention makes it hard for him to learn and master facts. He is ill informed about his own policies and tramples his own talking points. It makes it hard to control his mouth. On an impulse, he will promise a tax reform when his staff has done little of the actual work. Second, most people of drinking age have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself. \u201cIn a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care,\u201d he told Time. \u201cA lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber,\u201d he told The Associated Press, referring to his joint session speech. By Trump\u2019s own account, he knows more about aircraft carrier technology than the Navy. According to his interview with The Economist, he invented the phrase \u201cpriming the pump\u201d (even though it was famous by 1933). Trump is not only trying to deceive others. His falsehoods are attempts to build a world in which he can feel good for an instant and comfortably deceive himself. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/15\/opinion\/trump-classified-data.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The next day Brooks\u2019s colleague Ross Douthat called for Trump\u2019s impeachment under the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. His column read as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

The presidency is not just another office. It has become, for good reasons and bad ones, a seat of semi-monarchical political power, a fixed place on which unimaginable pressures are daily brought to bear, and the final stopping point for decisions that can lead very swiftly to life or death for people the world over. One does not need to be a Marvel superhero or Nietzschean \u00dcbermensch to rise to this responsibility. But one needs some basic attributes: a reasonable level of intellectual curiosity, a certain seriousness of purpose, a basic level of managerial competence, a decent attention span, a functional moral compass, a measure of restraint and self-control. And if a president is deficient in one or more of them, you can be sure it will be exposed. Trump is seemingly deficient in them all. Some he perhaps never had, others have presumably atrophied with age. He certainly has political talent \u2014 charisma, a raw cunning, an instinct for the jugular, a form of the common touch, a certain creativity that normal politicians lack. He would not have been elected without these qualities. But they are not enough, they cannot fill the void where other, very normal human gifts should be. There is, as my colleague David Brooks wrote Tuesday, a basic childishness to the man who now occupies the presidency. That is the simplest way of understanding what has come tumbling into light in the last few days: The presidency now has kinglike qualities, and we have a child upon the throne. It is a child who blurts out classified information in order to impress distinguished visitors. It is a child who asks the head of the FBI why the rules cannot be suspended for his friend and ally. It is a child who does not understand the obvious consequences of his more vindictive actions \u2014 like firing the very same man whom you had asked to potentially obstruct justice on your say-so. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/16\/opinion\/25th-amendment-trump.html?_r=0<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Taking its cue from its U.S. colleagues, on May 26, 2017, during Donald Trump\u2019s first visit to Europe as President of the United States, the influential German magazine Der Spiegel<\/em> called for his removal from office. The headline read, \u201cA Danger to the World. It’s Time to Get Rid of Donald Trump<\/strong>. Donald Trump has transformed the United States into a laughing stock and he is a danger to the world. He must be removed from the White House before things get even worse.\u201d The body of the article, written by the magazine\u2019s fifty-year-old editor-in-chief, Klaus Brinkb\u00e4umer, began as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn\u2019t read. He doesn\u2019t bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees. He is a man free of morals, the type used to be known as a psychopath or a sociopath. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are. But if they apply to anyone, they apply to Trump. And one of the media’s tasks is to continue telling things as they are: Trump has to be removed from the White House. Quickly. He is a danger to the world. (see http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/world\/donald-trump-is-a-menace-to-the-world-opinion-a-1148471.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

On July 12, 2017, the California Democratic Representative Bradley James Sherman formally introduced an article of impeachment, House Resolution 438, accusing the president of obstructing justice regarding the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. In late October, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI Director appointed to investigate Russia\u2019s interference in the U.S. presidential election that brought Trump into the White House, indicted Trump\u2019s former campaign manager Paul Manafort <\/span>and his longtime associate Rick Gates for hiding their lobbying work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party, using elaborate schemes to funnel more than $75 million through offshore accounts to conceal their activities and avoid paying taxes on the proceeds. <\/span>The main focus of the indictment was on Manafort\u2019s and Gates\u2019s apparent corruption prior to joining the Trump campaign. Trump himself was no indicted. (https:\/\/www.vox.com\/policy-and-politics\/2017\/10\/30\/16570262\/paul-manafort-indictment-trump-russia-mueller<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In early June 2016, during the U.S. Presidential election campaign of that summer, The Atlantic<\/em> had published a special issue on Trump, in which the American psychologist Dan P. McAdams (born 1954), a professor at Northwestern University, analyzed the personality of Donald J. Trump (born 1946), the Republican presidential candidate). Among many other complex \u201cpersonality traits\u201d (rather than psychopathology) McAdams found Trump extremely extroverted, incredibly disagreeable, ambitious and aggressive in a very angry manner, highly narcissistic, and very grandiose. No reference was made in the long and scholarly piece to the professional ethics of discussing a presidential candidate\u2019s personality in public. (see https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2016\/06\/the-mind-of-donald-trump\/480771\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

A few days later the U.S. online magazine Fife Thirty Eight<\/em>, which takes its name from the number of members of the U.S. Electoral College, which elects the president after the votes of the states are tallied, published an article entitled \u201cPsychiatrists Can\u2019t Tell us What they Think About Trump,” which included interviews with prominent American psychiatrists and psychologists about the ethics of \u201cpsychoanalyzing\u201d Trump in public. The interviewees included Prof. McAdams, who pointed out to the interviewer\u00a0 that he had deliberately stayed away in his Atlantic<\/em> article from medical words like \u201cdiagnosis,\u201c and \u201cpsychiatric\u201d because of the so-called Goldwater Rule. (see https:\/\/fivethirtyeight.com\/features\/psychiatrists-cant-tell-us-what-they-think-about-trump\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In mid-February 2017 a British Muslim psychiatrist, Kamran Ahmed, had weighed in on the issue of Trump\u2019s mental health with a piece in The Guardian. <\/em>Dr. Ahmed thought that understanding<\/em> Trump\u2019s narcissism was the key to removing him from office. <\/em>One can sense that this psychiatrist is torn between his professional ethics and his realization that President Trump is a very dangerous leader who needs to be removed from office if humanity is to be saved. (see https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2017\/feb\/17\/donald-trump-narcisissm-mentally-ill-personality<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Bandy Lee, a courageous Yale University psychiatrist, believes that the duty to warn and to protect of the Tarasoff Rule trumps the gag order of the Goldwater Rule. In early 2017 she teamed up with Dr. John Gartner, the founder of Duty to Warn,<\/em> an organization of mental health professionals that considers it its professional duty to warn the American public and the entire world against the grave dangers posed by Donald Trump\u2019s presidency. Along with Dr. Gartner, Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired Harvard psychiatrist, initiated an online petition by mental-health professionals demanding that Trump be removed from office under the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. By mid-April 2017 the petition had gathered nearly fifty thousand signatures. After the petition\u2019s signatures had passed the 10,000 mark, Dr. Gartner and Dr. Dodes appeared on the U.S. television show Late Night with Lawrence O\u2019Donnell,<\/em> where many millions of viewers\u00a0 watched them pronounce Trump very dangerous as U.S. president due to his mental illness. On April 20 Dr. Gartner represented Duty to Warn<\/em> at a \u201ctown-hall\u201d meeting at Yale University Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, hosted by Dr. Lee; its panelists included the ninety-year-old, highly-respected Yale psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, author of many books about the psychology of politics and history. They publicly warned the Yale meeting against Donald Trump\u2019s mental unfitness to govern. (see http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intelligencer\/2016\/04\/yale-psychiatrists-cite-duty-to-warn-about-unfit-president.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Gartner is also a courageous man. On May 7, 2017, he battled a very hostile interviewer named Jesse Watters on a Fox News television show. Watters viciously attacked Gartner, attempting to make him lose his composure, but the psychologist stood his ground and kept his cool. In the face of death threats from Trump supporters, Gartner continues to push for Trump\u2019s removal from office due to his mental illness. On May 12 Gartner published an op-ed article in the New York Daily News<\/em> entitled \u201cPsychologists have a duty to warn the country about Trump: We can no longer pretend that he is stable.\u201d Gartner compared Trump in the White House to a bomb on an airplane waiting to explode. (see http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/opinion\/psychologists-duty-warn-country-trump-article-1.3160022<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Like myself, Dr. Gartner is a psychologist, and thus not bound by the Goldwater Rule, which only binds psychiatrists. Moreover, many psychiatrists object to the gag order of the Goldwater rule because it restricts their freedom of speech. Furthermore, there does not seem to be any ethical violation in discussing a public figure, as no confidential doctor-patient information is being disclosed. Finally, for a psychological professional to alert people to the dangerous personality of an emotionally-disturbed leader who may, Hitler-like, plunge their country and the entire world into an all-out war, which, in Trump\u2019s case, could end our species, seems to be an ethical imperative rather than an ethical violation. (see https:\/\/www.statnews.com\/2017\/01\/30\/trump-mental-health\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Mothers and Bombs
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In early 1991, during the first Gulf War, the murderous Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein declared that his people\u2019s war on the United States was \u201cthe mother of all battles.\u201d The phrase quickly entered the English language. In April 2017 U.S. President Donald J. Trump ordered the \u201cmother of all bombs\u201d dropped on an Islamic State stronghold in Afghanistan. This ten-ton bomb was the most powerful non-nuclear explosive device in the world. Ninety-four Islamic \u201cmilitants\u201d were killed. The real purpose of the bombing, however, was to warn Syria, Iran and North Korea of what was in store for them if they continued to threaten the U.S., that is, Donald Trump.<\/span><\/p>\n

How did Donald J. Trump become the very dangerous man that he is, the man who may destroy our species in a nuclear Holocaust? The French say, cherchez la femme<\/em> (search the wife); psychoanalysts say, cherchez la m\u00e8re<\/em> (search the mother). This in no way means blaming the mother for her son; it means trying to understand how Donald Trump became what he is and what unconscious role his mother may have played in this. It is no accident that two of Donald Trump\u2019s three wives have been beautiful foreign immigrants; his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, whom he has called \u201csmart as hell,\u201d had been one herself. Sigmund Freud thought that exogamy was an unconscious defense against incestuous wishes. Trump\u2019s repeated choice of foreign wives may express both his unconscious incestuous wish and his defense against it. (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The relationship goes much deeper and much farther back, all the way to Donald\u2019s birth, infancy, and childhood. When he was a child, Donald\u2019s mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump (1912-2000), called him \u201cDonny,\u201d and the nickname stuck into his adulthood. The mother tended to \u201cinfantilize\u201d her son and did not like to see him grow up and become independent of her. \u201cDonny\u201d Trump idealized his \u201csmart\u201d mother and identified with her \u201csmartness.\u201d Under this idealization, however, as we shall see below, lay unconscious narcissistic rage at a mother who, on the one hand could not let him separate from her, and on the other, let his father send him away from home when he was a teenager.<\/span><\/p>\n

In The Art of the Comeback,<\/em> published in 1997, Trump praised his \u201csmart\u201d mother and criticized the other women in his life. \u201cPart of the problem I\u2019ve had with women has been in having to compare them to my incredible mother, Mary Trump. My mother is smart as hell.\u201d Donald dropped his mother\u2019s middle name, Anne, in this sentence; if her name was Mary rather than Mary Anne, then she was not his sister Maryanne\u2019s namesake. In his first TV debate with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump boasted of how \u201csmart\u201d he was in not having paid any U.S. federal taxes.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s unconscious identification with his mother Mary Anne goes deep. Trump has named a room at his Florida estate of Mar-a-Lago after his mother. She and Donald shared a penchant for dramatic hair sculpting: \u201cFor years Mary Trump appeared in photos with a dramatic orange swirl. Slight in frame, she took to New York City\u2019s streets draped in furs and jewelry, a far cry from the teen-age girl who set sail during the Great Depression.\u201d His praise for his mother permeates his books. (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Along with his conscious idealization of his mother, however, Donald harbors unconscious rage at her. We can get some insight into this darker side of Trump\u2019s relationship with his mother from the fact that Mary Anne MacLeod had been a poor immigrant, and that in August 2005 Trump published an immigration plan in which he railed against poor immigrants being allowed to enter the United States:<\/span><\/p>\n

The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working-class Americans \u2014 including immigrants themselves and their children \u2014 to earn a middle-class wage. Nearly half of all immigrants and their US-born children currently live in or near poverty, including more than 60 per cent of Hispanic immigrants. Every year, we voluntarily admit another two million new immigrants, guest workers, refugees, and dependents, growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 million immigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers.<\/em> (see http:\/\/ijr.com\/2016\/02\/546532-donald-trump-turned-down-hundreds-of-american-workers-and-hired-immigrants-instead\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Hannan wrote ironically, \u201cHow inconvenient for the would-be president that \u2018low-earning worker\u2019 was exactly the status of [his mother] Mary Anne MacLeod when she emigrated from Scotland to the USA in 1930.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.thenational.scot\/news\/an-inconvenient-truth-donald-trumps-scottish-mother-was-a-low-earning-migrant.17822<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1987 Donald Trump published a best-selling book entitled The Art of the Deal<\/em>, written by himself and by the journalist Tony Schwartz, who later asserted that he, not Trump, had actually written the book, and that he regretted his involvement with Trump. On pp. 79-80 of that book Donald wrote, \u201cLooking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The forty-year-old Trump recalled that his mother had been \u201centhralled\u201d by the pomp and circumstance of the Queen Elizabeth II\u2019s coronation in 1953, which she watched on television, glued to the set the whole day, while his father Fred \u201cpaced around impatiently, saying, \u201cFor Christ\u2019s sake, Mary, enough is enough, turn it off.\u201d Ironically, the father\u2019s middle name was Christ. The British queen\u2019s coronation, however, took place when \u201cDonny\u201d was only seven years old. Did he really recall his mother\u2019s \u201centhrallment\u201d when he was a child? Was she as childish as she seems from this recollection? (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother didn\u2019t even look up,\u201d Trump wrote, implying that she was the stronger of the two parents. \u201cThey were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.\u201d While Donald became a wealthy businessman like his father, on a deeper level he identified more with his mother; like his mother, he loves splendor and magnificence; and, like her, he has a knack for dramatic hairdos and a flair for dramatic showmanship, with constant exaggeration and endless lying. (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

But this is not the most important aspect of Donald Trump\u2019s psychology. The crucial effect of Mary Anne MacLeod Trump on her son was her unwitting part in the creation of his Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. Donald Trump has told many stories about himself and his parents; his tales about his father and his fortune are well known, while those about his mother less so. One of them is that his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, came from Scotland to America \u201con vacation\u201d and overstayed her tourist visa; in fact, Mary Anne MacLeod made three voyages from Scotland to the United States in her youth: the first was in 1929, when she was seventeen, to visit her married elder sister, who had already immigrated from Scotland to America; the second trip was in 1930, when she herself came to the U.S. as an immigrant; and the third voyage was in 1934, when she returned to Scotland for three months before sailing again to New York.<\/span><\/p>\n

The mother\u2019s first visit to America was discovered in June 2016 by the American journalist Mary Pilon, who mistook it for Mary Anne\u2019s immigration voyage; the second and third voyages had been found the month before by the Scottish journalist Martin Hannan, who described Mary Anne MacLeod as \u201ca penniless Scot who traveled to America as an immigrant when she was eighteen,\u201d in 1930, seeking a better life. She left Scotland with only $50 to her name to work in New York as a \u201cdomestic,\u201d meaning a servant or a maid; and she was not only fleeing poverty but also her family. (see\u00a0http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a> and http:\/\/www.thenational.scot\/news\/the-mysterious-mary-trump-the-full-untold-story-of-how-a-young-scotswoman-escaped-to-new-york-and-raised-a-us-presidential-candidate.17824<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The Scottish journalist thought that Mary Anne MacLeod was fleeing a family scandal. In late 1920, when Mary Anne was eight years old, her elder sister Catherine MacLeod Reid, known affectionately as Kate or Katie, had given birth out of wedlock to a baby girl in Scotland; she named her daughter Annie. As Mr. Hannan put it, \u201cIt is difficult in this modern age to convey just how absolutely scandalous and shameful such a birth occurring to an adherent of the very strict Free Presbyterian Church in a tight-knit community would have been.\u201d Soon after that event, in 1921, Catherine fled to America, where she married, and was followed by three of her sisters in succession. Mary Anne was the fourth MacLeod daughter to leave home and her native land. (see http:\/\/www.thenational.scot\/news\/an-inconvenient-truth-donald-trumps-scottish-mother-was-a-low-earning-migrant.17822<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Hannan did not ask why Catherine had had an illegitimate child, however, nor why four daughters of the MacLeod family fled their homeland for America. Was it possible that they also escaped an unhappy family? Could it be that, as well as fleeing her \u201cfamily scandal\u201d in Scotland, Mary Anne MacLeod also hoped to replace an unloving mother with a loving, embracing motherland? Her three back-and-forth voyages between Scotland and America may indicate an unconscious quest for a good mother in the shape of a new motherland. Let us see why Mary Anne may have searched for a good new motherland to \u201cadopt\u201d her.<\/span><\/p>\n

The youngest of ten children, perhaps an unwanted child, Mary Anne MacLeod had been born on May 10, 1912 in the fishing village of Tong on the Scottish isle of Lewis, the daughter of a Presbyterian fisherman-crofter named Malcolm MacLeod and his wife, Mary Smith MacLeod. Mary Anne\u2019s mother was an orphan who had never known her own father; Duncan Smith had drowned in a fishing accident when she was a year old. Donald\u2019s maternal grandmother had been raised by her bereaved, widowed mother.<\/span><\/p>\n

How much love could Mary Smith MacLeod have received from her grieving mother? How much love could this orphan mother have given her own children, especially Mary Anne, her last child, whom she may not have wanted, given the nine other children that she had had to raise and take care of?<\/span><\/p>\n

Mary Anne MacLeod seems to have left Tong for Glasgow as a teenager; three of her sisters were already married and living in the United States by the time she was seventeen and made her first voyage to America in late 1929: Christina MacLeod Matheson, Mary Joan MacLeod Pauley and Catherine MacLeod Reid. In November 1929 Mary Anne MacLeod sailed from Glasgow to New York, returning to Scotland a month or two later. In May 1930 she sailed again for New York, this time with an immigrant\u2019s visa; after landing there she stayed with her sister Catherine in Glen Head, Long Island. Mary Anne MacLeod then worked as a \u201cdomestic\u201d with wealthy families in New York for four years. In June 1934, perhaps homesick for her mother, or motherland, she sailed back for Scotland, but returned to New York in September; had she not received the kind of love from her mother that she had pined for?<\/span><\/p>\n

A Father Named Christ<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Mary Anne MacLeod was slender and pretty in 1935, when she moved as a \u201cdomestic\u201d into the Trump family residence at 175-24 Devonshire Road in Jamaica, Queens, New York, a multi-family house built ten years earlier; in early 1936 she wed the American businessman Frederick Christ Trump (1905-1999) at Manhattan\u2019s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. It is not clear whether it was Mary Anne\u2019s elder sister Catherine who introduced them. Mary Anne MacLeod was a servant; Fred Trump was an established businessman, builder and developer seven years her senior. Why did the wealthy thirty-year-old American businessman chose to marry a poor twenty-three-year-old immigrant far beneath his station?<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump uses the word \u201csmart\u201d for himself and for manipulative people like him who excel at using others, and the American legal, political and economic system, to achieve their own ends. In 1997 he published his second book, The Art of the Comeback<\/em>, where he greatly idealized his old mother: \u201cPart of the problem I\u2019ve had with women has been in having to compare them to my incredible mother, Mary Trump. My mother is smart as hell<\/em>. I remember once, a long time ago, my sister Maryanne, a highly respected federal judge in New Jersey, told me that my mother is one of the smartest people she ever met. At the time it didn\u2019t make much of an impact on me, but I didn\u2019t really understand why she said it. All I knew was that my mother was a really great homemaker and wife to my father […] but now I fully understand why Maryanne made that statement, and it is 100 percent true.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

By implication, Donald\u2019s father Fred was not as \u201csmart\u201d as his mother Mary Anne. Did the \u201csmart as hell\u201d Mary Anne MacLeod manipulate Frederick Christ Trump into marrying her, using his sexual attraction to him, his idealization of her, or both? (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1937 Mary Anne Trump gave birth to their first child, whom she named, significantly, Maryanne, after herself; their first son, born in 1938, was named Fred Jr. after his father. In 1940, while the Second World War raged in Europe and East Asia, the FDR administration conducted a population census in the United States. Mr. Hannan found that \u201cFred and Mary Anne Trump played fast and loose with the American authorities on their census return in 1940, stating that Mary Anne Trump was a naturalized [U.S.] citizen when records openly available to researchers show that she was not naturalized until 1942.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

From 1937 to 1947 Frederick Christ and Mary Anne Trump had five children, whom they named, successively, Maryanne, Fred Jr., Elizabeth, Donald John, and Robert. Donald was born in 1946, the fourth child, a year before Robert. It is not clear whom Donald\u2019s mother named him after; it may have been a brother or an uncle whom she loved. Donald seems to have been his mother\u2019s favorite son. He idealized his mother as \u201cvery smart\u201d and seems to have identified with her more than he did with his father, both in his hair-styling and in his \u201csmart\u201d manipulations of everyone and everything he encountered.<\/span><\/p>\n

What kind of mother was Mary Anne to her son Donny? We can hazard an informed guess by looking at the photographs of the former New York \u201cdomestic.\u201d Mary Anne\u2019s photos from the time of her first voyages to New York show a beautiful, slender, smiling young woman, looking forward to reaching her new motherland; her picture from her socialite heyday shows a cold and stern face; her snapshots from her older age show an overweight lady with an elaborate hairdo.<\/span><\/p>\n

When \u201cDonny\u201d was two and as half years old, his mother Mary almost died from complications following the birth of his youngest brother, Robert<\/em>. Severe hemorrhaging necessitated an emergency hysterectomy, which led to a serious abdominal infection, which led to more surgeries. \u201cFour operations in two weeks,\u201d Donald\u2019s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, told Trump\u2019s biographer, Gwenda Blair. It was uncertain whether Mary Trump would survive. \u201cMy father came home and told me she wasn\u2019t expected to live,\u201d Maryanne said, \u201cbut I should go to school and he\u2019d call me if anything changed. That\u2019s right\u2014go to school as usual!\u201d (see https:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2017\/11\/03\/mary-macleod-trump-donald-trump-mother-biography-mom-immigrant-scotland-215779<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

At that point \u201cDonny\u201d was a toddler. That age was too young for him to comprehend the event but not too young to unconsciously internalize the dread experience his near-loss of his mother. \u201cDonny\u201d clung to his mother for dear life, but she did not want to care for a demanding toddler when she herself had just gone through a traumatic near-death experience. The cold mother rejected her little son, but he could not live without her.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a pathological love-hate symbiosis. Donald Trump never succeeded in going through the separation-individuation phase of his early development. Dr. Mark Smaller, the past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, said, \u201cA 2\u00bd-year-old is going through a process of becoming more autonomous, a little bit more independent from the mother. If there is a disruption or a rupture in the connection, it would have had an impact on the sense of self, the sense of security, the sense of confidence.\u201d (see https:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2017\/11\/03\/mary-macleod-trump-donald-trump-mother-biography-mom-immigrant-scotland-215779<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s narcissistic-borderline personality disorder, marked by black-and-white thinking, by his endless need to be loved and admired, and by extreme instability and unpredictability, his well-known \u201cmisogyny,\u201d which is actually a volatile mix of sexual attraction, love, hate, and alternating idealization an denigration of women, his idealization of America as a great good mother, his denigration of \u201cshithole countries,\u201d his hatred of poor immigrants, can all be traced back to his pathological relationship with his mother. His unconscious rage at her is as great a his public praise of her. And that rage is unconsciously displaced to all poor immigrants.<\/span><\/p>\n

As he was growing up, the handsome young Donald Trump may have watched with concealed disappointment and anger, how his idealized \u201chousekeeper\u201d mother changed from a thin and beautiful young woman into an old and fat one. Is it surprising, then, that the change that Miss Universe Alicia Machado underwent from a slender beauty queen into an overweight woman reminded Trump of his mother and made him so furious that he attacked her as \u201cMiss Piggy\u201d and \u201cMiss Housekeeping\u201d? As we have seen, Donald Trump has called his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, \u201csmart as hell.\u201d She may have \u201coutsmarted\u201d her own children as well, using them for her own needs. Was the \u201csmart\u201d little Donny her favorite child because he was the one who was most like her?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Psychological Father<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s father, Fred Trump, was a strict disciplinarian. He was on Donald\u2019s school board when \u201cDonny\u201d was expelled at the age thirteen for having insulted his music teacher. Rather than protect his son and keep him in school, the father supported his expulsion. Had the sassy and rebellious Donny insulted his father as well?<\/span><\/p>\n

Later, in his twenties, Donald found a new “father\u201d in the person of Roy Marcus Cohn (1927-1986), a homosexual American Jewish attorney who had become famous during Senator Joseph McCarthy\u2019s investigations into Communist activity in the United States during the \u201cSecond Red Scare.\u201d Cohn had gained special prominence during the Army-McCarthy hearings. He was also a member of the U.S. Department of Justice\u2019s prosecution team at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in the electric chair.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Three days before the U.S. Election Day in 2016, the American journalist Kathy Kiely (born 1955) published an interview with her colleague David Cay Johnston (born 1948), who had been studying Trump for thirty years and authored The Making of Donald Trump,<\/em> about the relationship between Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. Here is an excerpt from that interview:<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1927, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan meeting in Queens \u2014 something his son has tried furiously to deny, but, said Johnston: \u201cI have the clips.\u201d Later, as Johnston details in his book, the elder Trump, in trouble once before with the feds for allegedly bilking a federal housing program for returning GIs, was ordered by the federal authorities to stop discriminating against African-Americans who were trying to rent apartments he owned. The settlement came only after Donald Trump tried unsuccessfully to get the allegations of racial bias thrown out by the courts \u2014 a lawsuit in which he was represented by Roy Cohn, former longtime aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), the disgraced Communist witch-hunt perpetrator. Johnston sees Trump\u2019s association with Cohn \u2014 who, he said, \u201ctaught Donald how to hurt people\u201d\u2014 as part of a disturbing pattern. \u201cWe have never had a major party candidate for president with the kind of relationships Donald Trump has,\u201d Johnston said. While some past presidents have had unsavory friends and business associations, Johnston continued, \u201cThey were not the mob. They were not drug traffickers.\u201d (see http:\/\/billmoyers.com\/story\/making-donald-trump-told-journalistic-nemesis\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Serial Exogamy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Sigmund Freud thought that exogamy was an unconscious defense against incest. Donald Trump has been married three times; his first and third wife have been \u201cforeigners\u201d from Eastern Europe. When Trump married the Czech-born Ivana Zeln\u00ed\u010dkov\u00e1 in 1977, his lawyer was none other than Roy Cohn, who told Trump to put a special clause in his pre-nuptial agreement with Ivana saying that should the couple split, she would return everything \u2014 cars, furs, rings \u2014 that Mr. Trump might give her during their marriage. Roy Cohn had become Donald Trump\u2019s psychological father. As one journalist put it, \u201cIf Fred Trump got his son\u2019s career started, bringing him into the family business of middle-class rentals in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Cohn ushered him across the river and into Manhattan, introducing him to the social and political elite while ferociously defending him against a growing list of enemies.\u201d Roy Cohen died of AIDS in 1986 after being disbarred for flagrant ethical violations. It was from Roy Cohn that Donald Trump learned his \u201cwrecking ball of a presidential bid \u2014 the gleeful smearing of his opponents, the embracing of bluster as brand.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/06\/21\/us\/politics\/donald-trump-roy-cohn.html?_r=0<\/a> and ther astute comment by Prof. Gordon Fellman at the end of this article).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Death of An Elder Brother<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Donald\u2019s elder brother, Freddy, who had been born in 1938, died at the age of forty-three from alcohol addiction. The American journalist Jason Horowitz thought that Freddy\u2019s addiction had been caused by his \u201cperfectionist\u201d father, Fred, and by his fiercely competitive and aggressive younger brother, Donald. Horowitz called Freddy \u201ca fun-loving airline pilot with a gift for imitating W.C. Fields.\u201d adding, however, that \u201cthe story of Freddy, a handsome, gregarious and self-destructive figure who died as an alcoholic in 1981 at the age of 43, is bleak and seldom told […] The painful case of Freddy Trump, eight years his brother\u2019s senior and once the heir apparent to their father\u2019s real estate empire, also serves as an example of the dangers of failing to conform in a family dominated by a driven, perfectionist patriarch and an aggressive younger brother.\u201d Did Donald Trump blame himself for his elder brother\u2019s death? Did he unconsciously have to punish himself for it? And, if Donald\u2019s father was such a perfectionist, did he not demand such high standards from Donald as well, which Donald found impossible to live up to? (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/01\/03\/us\/politics\/for-donald-trump-lessons-from-a-brothers-suffering.html?_r=0<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The driven, perfectionist father, and the aggressive younger brother, however, were not the only cause of Freddy\u2019s self-destructive addition; such addictions begin with early-life experiences of maternal deprivation or rejection, or, more generally, with disturbed mother-child relations. It may not be accidental that it was Mary Anne\u2019s firstborn son, Freddy, who became addicted; nor, for that matter, is it an accident that Trump\u2019s presidential-campaign website makes no mention of his mother, while his books are full of praise for her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Signature<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

On February 1, 2017, twelve days into Donald Trump\u2019s presidency, by which time he had already signed several executive orders and other official documents, a Boston Globe <\/em>journalist interviewed Sheila Lowe, a U.S. graphologist with over forty years of experience in her field, about Trump\u2019s \u201chorrifying\u201d signature. \u201cHis signature is this barbed-wire thing that\u2019s into power and control and rigidity,\u201d said Lowe. \u201cIt\u2019s closed, it\u2019s not open, it\u2019s not soft at all and it looks like Himmler\u2019s.\u201d For those of her readers who had not heard about Himmler, the journalist added, \u201cAs in Heinrich Himmler, head of Adolf Hitler\u2019s SS and the man who established the first official concentration camp at Dachau.\u201d Lowe had first come across Trump\u2019s handwriting and signature in the 1990s and had been keeping a professional eye on it ever since. \u201cHandwriting changes over time in people who grow and change,\u201d the graphologist said, “but Trump\u2019s handwriting has remained largely consistent for the last twenty years. He\u2019s the same person he was all those years ago \u2014 an empty narcissist.\u201d Lowe continued, \u201cThere\u2019s absolutely no softness in his signature, it\u2019s just mean and tough and rigid, and there is no room for anybody else. He\u2019s not interested in anyone else\u2019s opinion. It\u2019s like a big fence.\u201d \u201cA wall?\u201d asked the journalist. \u201cYes,\u201d said Lowe, \u201cand he hides behind it. He\u2019s afraid of being seen.\u201d We shall return to the matter of Trump\u2019s wall below. (see https:\/\/www.bostonglobe.com\/ideas\/2017\/02\/01\/trump-signature-horrifying-but-should-you-care\/5Bbnsu2DoPJkcqmm06LzgM\/story.html<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

On an Israeli radio news program on May 24, 2017, in which I was interviewed about the contents of this study, an Israeli graphologist who followed me said that Trump\u2019s signature reminded her of shark\u2019s teeth, that he was \u201ca snake,\u201d and that he wore a perpetual mask. Whether or not graphology is scientific and accurate, Trump\u2019s signature is but the tip of the iceberg of his psychopathology. Before going down that road, however, we must discuss the ethical issues involved in the public diagnosis of political leaders by mental-health professionals who have never examined them in person\u00a0 and whose professional opinion may affect the leader\u2019s career.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

How Could Such a Guy Become President of the United States?<\/strong>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On November 8, 2016 a lifelong gambler, con man and pathological liar named Donald John Trump won the biggest gamble of his life: an unprecedented race by a political novice for the office of President of the United States of America. From a very young age, Donald Trump had practiced both plain deception and self-deception. Thanks to the inequities and to the inadequacies of the antiquated American electoral system, he won the majority of the Electoral College votes, which made him the President-elect, even though millions more Americans voted for his rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton. (for Trump\u2019s \u201cart of deception\u201d see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2016\/10\/03\/opinions\/art-deception-dantonio\/<\/a> and for his self-deception see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/12\/10\/opinion\/truth-and-lies-in-the-age-of-trump.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Expressing the feelings of countless people around the world, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, <\/em>wrote, \u201cThe election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump\u2019s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President\u2014a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit\u2014and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/news-desk\/an-american-tragedy-donald-trump?intcid=mod-latest<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, on Friday, January 20, 2017, repeating his simplistic and populist campaign slogans of America First<\/em> and Make America Great Again,<\/em> Donald J. Trump was sworn in by U.S. Supreme Court President John Roberts as the 45th president of the United States of America, gravely threatening American democracy, the very essence of America, nay, the very existence of the human species. In an article in The Atlantic <\/em>of January-February 2017 the American writer and journalist James fallows (born 1949) wondered about how this disaster could have happened. Referring to the former FBI Director James Comey, who had helped Trump get elected by revealing his investigation of his rival Hillary Clinton, he wrote: <\/span><\/p>\n

No one can know for sure, and with an event this complex and contingent\u2014why not more visits to Wisconsin? what about Comey? and the Russians?\u2014there will be no single explanation. But I disagree with two elements of instant analysis: that this was a sweeping \u201cchange\u201d election, and that it reflected a pent-up desperation and fury that would have been evident if anyone had bothered to check with Americans \u201cout there,\u201d away from the coasts. In its calamitous effects\u2014for climate change, in what might happen in a nuclear standoff, for race relations\u2014this could indeed be as consequential a \u201cchange\u201d election as the United States has had since 1860. But nothing about the voting patterns suggests that much of the population intended upheaval on this scale. \u201cChange\u201d elections drive waves of incumbents from office. This time only two senators, both Republicans, lost their seats. Of the nearly 400 representatives running for re-election to the House, only eight lost, six of them Republicans and two Democrats. In change elections, the incumbent president and his party are out of favor, even reviled: Hoover after the start of the Great Depression, George W. Bush after the financial crash. Through 2016, Barack Obama\u2019s popularity kept rising, and if he could have run again, he would have been a favorite for re-election. But even the much less popular candidate from his same party comfortably won the popular vote, and the Democrats gained seats in both the Senate and the House. This is not what 1932 looked like, or 1980, or 2008. (see https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2017\/01\/despair-and-hope-in-the-age-of-trump\/508799\/<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

If Fallows is right, then how could a dishonest, arrogant, tyrannical man, a malignant narcissist and hatemonger, a racist, misogynist, high-risk gambler and con man who cannot abide the slightest criticism or resistance to his will, win the presidency of the world\u2019s greatest democracy? How could the members of the Electoral College of the United States entrust a dangerous seventy-year-old egomaniac who must always win over others, who is addicted to humiliating his opponents, no matter what the cost, who can lie unflinchingly and believe in his own lies, who is often out of touch with reality, a man with such a dark and vulnerable mind that he may, in his rage, bomb Syria, Iran, North Korea or some other \u201cterrorist nation\u201d and provoke a Third World War, with the nuclear weapons of the world\u2019s most powerful country and with the future of their country and of humanity itself? <\/span><\/p>\n

Poor Self-Control: The \u201cLoose Cannon\u201d<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

During the election campaign of 2016 Trump\u2019s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and many political pundits called Trump \u201ca loose cannon\u201d because he could not control his rage, his tongue, or his tweets. In May 2017 Trump gave sensitive and highly-classified intelligence on the Islamic State, supplied to the U.S. by Israel, to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister. Israel thereupon decided not to supply such information to the U.S. again. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/16\/world\/middleeast\/israel-trump-classified-intelligence-russia.html<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Leon Panetta, the former CIA Director and Defense Secretary under President Barack Obama, was aghast at Trump\u2019s carelessness, which severely damaged U.S. credibility. Interviewed about this by Chris Cuomo on the CNN television show New Day,<\/em> Panetta said, \u201cI watch the President rationalize these kinds of things, and the problem that really bothers me is it undermines the credibility of the office of the Presidency.\u201d Panetta called Trump a \u201cloose cannon,\u201d and said that the President must come to terms with the idea that his words now have gravity as the leader of the free world. \u201cI just think this president has to understand that he cannot just say whatever the hell he wants and expect that it doesn\u2019t carry consequences,\u201d Panetta said. Ultimately, Panetta hoped, others in the White House could save the President from himself. \u201cThis President needs to have some grown-ups around him that make very clear what the lines are here,\u201d he said. (see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/05\/16\/politics\/leon-panetta-donald-trump-russia-classified-info-cnntv\/index.html<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On Wednesday, June 28, 2017 the U.S. mass-communication media reported that eight years earlier Donald Trump had had a fake TIME magazine cover made for him, in his own image, and that it was hanging on the walls of his four golf clubs, two in the U.S., the others in Scotland and Ireland. TIME magazine promptly asked the Trump Organization to remove the fake cover from all the walls where it was on display. Would Trump comply? (see https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2017\/jun\/28\/time-magazinetrump-fake-covers-golf-clubs<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The next morning,\u00a0Thursday, June 29, 2017, Mika Brzerzinski and Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of the influential MSNBC television show Morning Joe,<\/em> which features in-depth, informed discussions that help shape the day\u2019s current political conversation and interviews prominent politicians and pundits, excoriated Mr. Trump on their show, denouncing his behavior and questioning his mental health. Mika said sarcastically, \u201cNothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself, lying every day and destroying the country.\u201d This comment set off an uncontrollable outburst of narcissistic rage in Donald Trump, which, as often happens, led to a gross tweet on Twitter.\u00a0 (see http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/why-did-trump-attack-mika-brzezinski-2017-6<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Mika and Joe, who are a couple in real life, outside their show, had been friendly to Trump during the early phase of his election campaign and had visited his Mar-a-Lago \u201cWhite House\u201d in Florida. Their relationship had begun to sour in mid-2016, when Scarborough publicly declared that Trump did not have what it took to win the election. Trump had launched a Twitter attack on him, and the mutual verbal blows snowballed into a war of words. Trump experienced Mika and Joe\u2019s attacks on him as a personal betrayal. <\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly after their show had aired, Trump once again showed the world what a \u201cloose cannon\u201d he can be. He fired off a furious and infantile message on Twitter, divided into two tweets, because the total number of characters exceeded the 140 Twitter allows per tweet. Combined, Trump\u2019s tweets read, \u201cI heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe<\/a> speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!\u201d Trump\u2019s outrageous tweets provoked widespread condemnation from Democrats as well as from Republicans. Commentators pointed out that it was infantile and self-destructive. (see http:\/\/www.politico.com\/story\/2017\/06\/29\/trump-targets-morning-joe-hosts-in-tweet-240085<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Under the U.S. constitution, President Donald J. Trump is the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. But, as David Brooks had written in The New York Times <\/em>a few weeks earlier, psychologically Trump is a seven-year-old child. Can an infantile \u201cloose cannon\u201d like Donald Trump be trusted with the nuclear weapons of the world\u2019s mightiest military power? What will he do in Syria, in Iran, or in North Korea if he becomes enraged with their leaders? Can the grown-ups around Trump reign in the narcissistic rage of a child with a terrible temper, or will they keep heaping praise on him and nurture his malignant narcissism? Are we headed for a Third World War that will wipe out our species? (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/15\/opinion\/trump-classified-data.html<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The Narcissistic Need for Admiration
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

On Monday morning, June 12, 2017 U.S. President Donald J. Trump held one of the most surrealist cabinet meetings in U.S. history. It was the first meeting of his full cabinet, including the Secretaries of all the Departments of the federal government, Trump\u2019s top advisers, his U.N. ambassador, and the heads of the U.S. intelligence and security services. Each of them spoke for less than a minute, each thanked Trump for the opportunity to serve him and the American nation in his capacity, and several participants heaped personal praise on Trump.The Secretaries and top advisors must have sensed how much Trump needs this kind of adulation, and gave it to him abundantly.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The president himself joined the chorus: \u201dNever has there been a president, with few exceptions \u2026 who has passed more legislation, done more things,\u201c Trump declared, even though the U.S. Congress, which is controlled by his party, had not passed any major piece of legislation. He hailed his plan for the \u201csingle biggest tax cut in American history,\u201d even though he had not proposed any such plan, and the Congress had not acted on one. Trump said that \u201cno one would have believed\u201d his election in November 2016 could have created so many new jobs over seven months (1.1 million), even though 1.3 million jobs had been created in the seven months preceding his election. The next day the American television talk show host David Colbert mocked Trump\u2019s cabinet meeting on his CBS Late Show<\/em> as a \u201cstrokefest for an emotionally frail man.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/stephen-colbert-calls-trumps-cabinet-meeting-strokefest-emotionally-frail-man-624901<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In early February 2017, after Iran tested a long-range missile, Trump\u2019s national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, who is known for his Islamophobia, publicly threatened Iran by saying, \u201cWe are officially putting Iran on notice\u201d without spelling out what he meant. Flynn soon became the subject of FBI and Congressional investigations due to his secret ties with Russia. On February 13 Vice President Mike Pence forced Flynn to resign in disgrace by for having lied to him about his relations and contacts with the Russians. The next day, February 14, Trump held a one-on-one meeting with FBI Director James Comey in the Oval Office in which he tried to pressure him to drop the Flynn investigation. This was a clear breach of the rules of conduct of the U.S. president, if not an illegal obstruction of justice. In early December 2017, after Flynn confessed to Special Counsel Robert Mueller that he had lied to the FBI, Trump tweeted that he had been forced to fire Flynn because he had lied both to the Vice President and<\/em> to the FBI, prompting a host of questions about his collusion with Flynn\u2019s lies and his obstruction of justice.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On February 11, 2017, after North Korea tested yet another long-range missile, Trump stood alongside Japan\u2019s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, at Mar-a-Lago and declared that the U.S. was 100% behind Japan. Trump\u2019s saber-rattling was alarming because it could lead the U.S. to war with with nuclear-armed North Korea whose consequences, not only for these two countries, but also for South Korea, for Japan, and for our whole world might be dire. (see https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2017\/feb\/01\/iran-trump-michael-flynn-on-notice<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of Trump\u2019s appointments have been alarming. His chief political strategist and senior counselor is the far-right American nationalist Steve Bannon; because of his racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim statements, his appointment, shortly after Trump\u2019s election, drew fire from the U.S. Anti-Defamation League, the Council on American\u2013Islamic Relations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, U.S. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and even some Republican politicians. Bannon, whom Trump has put on his National Security Council while removing the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from it, has told the U.S. mass-communication media to \u201ckeep its mouth shut.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Trump appointed Rex Tillerson, the chairman of Exxon Mobile and a former close friend of the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, who has committed war crimes in Ukraine and in Syria, his Secretary of State; his ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, adamantly opposes the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While some Israelis applauded the long-awaited move of the U.S. embassy in our country to our \u201ceternal capital\u201d of Jerusalem, which Trump had no real intention of carrying out, the Arab leaders have declared that this move would make the traditional U.S. role of honest broker between the Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs no longer tenable; and the one-state solution would mean the end of Zionism, if not second-class citizenship for the Arabs. Trump\u2019s designated Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, does not believe in global warming and in climate change, which is like a Secretary of the Treasury not believing in money. (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/12\/16\/world\/middleeast\/david-friedman-us-ambassador-israel.html?_r=0<\/a> on Friedman and https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/26\/business\/media\/stephen-bannon-trump-news-media.html?_r=0 <\/a>on Bannon).<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s appointments and his statements on nuclear weapons endangered the future of our species. On January 26, 2017, reacting to those statements and appointments, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em> moved its Doomsday Clock to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, indicating that nuclear war and the end of our species were more imminent than at any time since 1953, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested their hydrogen bombs. Dr. Rachel Bronson, the executive director of the Bulletin<\/em>, wrote, \u201cwords matter, and President Trump has had plenty to say over the last year. Both his statements and his actions as president-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways. He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security, including the conclusions of intelligence experts. His nominees to head the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency dispute the basics of climate science. In short, even though he has just now taken office, the president\u2019s intemperate statements, lack of openness to expert advice, and questionable cabinet nominations have already made a bad international security situation worse.\u201d Five months later the situation has worsened. Trump has pulled the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris accord on global warming, which over 110 nations had signed. (see http:\/\/thebulletin.org\/sites\/default\/files\/Final%202017%20Clock%20Statement.pdf<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Black-and-White Thinking: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Arabophobia<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In mid-February 2017, when U.S. President Donald Trump asked FBI Director James Comey to \u201clet go\u201d of the investigation of his just-resigned national security adviser General Flynn, he called Flynn \u201ca good guy.\u201d During the 2016 presidential election campaign, when he spoke about the need to build a wall on the border with Mexico, he said \u201cthere are a lot of bad honchos over there.\u201d Trump thinks that people are either good or bad. He is unable to see that every person has both good and bad traits at once. He divides his emotional and interpersonal world into the good us and the bad them. This type of black-and-white thinking and perception is due to unconscious splitting, which we shall discuss below.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On January 28, 2017, without consulting Congressional leaders, President Trump signed an executive order banning refugees, immigrants, and other citizens of seven Muslim Arab countries \u2014 Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran \u2014 from entering the United States, claiming that \u201cRadical Islamic terror\u201d had to be stopped and that the Islamic State (also known as ISIL or ISIS) has to be destroyed.\u00a0 Significantly, Saudi Arabia, the home of the terrorists who had committed the worst attack on U.S. soil on September 11, 2001, killing thousands of Americans, was not included in the ban; nor were Afghanistan and Pakistan, the homes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, whom America defines as some of the world\u2019s most dangerous terrorist organizations. Congressmen and Senators were roiled, legal experts questioned the constitutionality of this executive order, and protest demonstrations against it erupted all over the world, yet Trump felt that he was saving America \u2014 his idealized mother \u2014 from those who would destroy it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump cannot abide criticism: it constitutes an unendurable blow to his self-esteem. His defense is to denigrate, attack, or fire the critic. Trump\u2019 unconscious says, \u201cif I can fire, humiliate, attack and ridicule you, then you can\u2019t fire or humiliate me.\u201d During his election campaign and his first seven months in office he fired some of his most important aides and officials: his election campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and his successor, Paul Manafort; his key campaign adviser, Chris Christie; his national security adviser, General Mike Flynn; his acting attorney general, Sally Yates; his FBI director, James Comey; his communications director, Michael Dubke, and the latter\u2019s successor, Anthony Scaramucci (after just ten days in office); his press secretary, Sean Spicer; his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and the head of the U.S. office of government ethics, Walter Shaub. Trump ordered his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to demand the immediate resignations of all 46 Obama-appointed federal prosecutors; when one of them, Preet Bharara, refused to resign, he was fired. (see http:\/\/www.smh.com.au\/world\/officials-donald-trump-has-fired-20170801-gxngdd.html<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

When Trump\u2019s acting attorney general, Sally Yates, questioned the legality of his executive order banning Muslims from entering the U.S. he promptly fired her; when a courageous federal judge in Seattle, James Robart, temporarily suspended the president\u2019s ban, an enraged Trump tweeted, \u201cThe opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!\u201d He promptly ordered his Justice Department to appeal the ruling to the 9th Circuit federal appeals court in San Francisco. His lawyers argued, incredibly, that the court did not have the authority to review the president\u00b9s executive order. The attorney general of the state of Washington, as well as those of many other states, and some one hundred chief executive officers of top U.S. business corporations filed amicus curiae<\/em> briefs opposing Trump\u2019s ban and arguing that his executive order was eminently reviewable. The federal appeals court accepted their arguments and upheld Judge Robart\u2019s suspension of Trump\u2019s travel ban. \u201cThere is no [legal] precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy,\u201d the court said. (see http:\/\/www.cnbc.com\/2017\/02\/09\/appeals-court-to-issue-decision-on-trump-travel-ban-later-today.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s arrogant response on Twitter was \u201cSee you in court. The security of our nation is at stake!\u201d What was really at stake, however, was Trump\u2019s self-esteem. Trump\u2019s various executive orders banning travel from Muslim countries have repeatedly been voided by federal judges. His attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, who provided Trump with the excuses he needed to fire FBI Director James Comey, and who on June 13, 2017 was grilled by the members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on his communications with Trump, refusing to answer their questions and being accused by the Democrats of obstructing their investigation, may eventually also have the ungrateful and well-nigh impossible task of defending his boss\u2019s illegal or unconstitutional orders in the U.S. Supreme Court. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/04\/us\/politics\/visa-ban-trump-judge-james-robart.html?_r=0<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

On February 8, 2017, in a conversation with U.S. senators, Trump\u2019s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Neil Gorsuch, had reportedly criticized Trump\u2019s attacks on the U.S. judicial system as \u201cdisheartening\u201d and \u201cdemoralizing.\u201d One of his interlocutors, the Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, publicized Gorsuch\u2019s comments and urged him to go public with them; Trump then falsely stated that Blumenthal had \u201cmisrepresented\u201d Gorsuch\u2019s comments, adding that the senator had also \u201cmisrepresented\u201d his Vietnam record. (for Yates\u2019s firing see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/01\/30\/politics\/donald-trump-immigration-order-department-of-justice\/<\/a> and for his attack on Senator Blumenthal see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/02\/09\/politics\/donald-trump-neil-gorsuch-democrats\/index.html<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The abused child becomes an abusive parent. One reason Trump constantly shames and humiliates others may be that he has been traumatically shamed and humiliated himself: it is as if his unconscious was constantly telling him, \u201cDo unto others as they did unto you!\u201d Trump has also hurt and humiliated his wives. In one of his rare moments of self-awareness, he told his biographer that being married to him was very tough. (see http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/10\/26\/us\/politics\/donald-trump-interviews.html?emc=edit_ta_20161025&nlid=68054513&ref=cta&mtrref=undefined&_r=0<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Charisma and <\/strong>Narcissism
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Charismatic leaders, whether highly constructive, like Mustafa Kemal Atatr\u00fcrk or Barack Obama, or frighteningly destructive, like Adolf Hitler or Donald Trump, are extremely narcissistic people. Some psychological professionals have called Trump a \u201csociopath.\u201d Writing in The Atlantic<\/em>, one journalist discussed Trump\u2019s \u201csociopathy\u201d and narcissism: <\/span><\/p>\n

Psychiatrists often bestow labels knowing less about the facts of people\u2019s lives and actions than we collectively know today about Donald Trump\u2019s. We\u2019re also legitimized in this endeavor by the fact that sociopathy and psychopathy\u2014which are similar, and sometimes used interchangeably\u2014are not formal psychiatric diagnoses. The terms \u201csociopath\u201d and \u201cpsychopath\u201d do tend to be thrown around casually by people in need of an insult that carries an air of empiricism […] The closest thing to psychopathy or sociopathy in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual<\/em> [of the American Psychiatric Association] \u2014 the book that defines every mental illness and outlines how mental-health professionals should make the diagnosis \u2014 is either Narcissistic Personality Disorder or Antisocial Personality Disorder. <\/span><\/p>\n

Other analysts have focused on the applicability [to Trump] of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines by \u201can inflated sense of [one\u2019s] own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that\u2019s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.\u201d One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump \u201ctextbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder.\u201d Psychologist George Simon called Trump \u201cso classic that I\u2019m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there\u2019s no better example of his [narcissistic] characteristics.\u201d (see https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2016\/07\/trump-and-sociopathy\/491966\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1973 the Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Irvine Schiffer published a slender tome entitled Charisma: A Psychoanalytic Look at Mass Society.<\/em> Schiffer thought that charisma was in the eye of the beholder: it is not a quality inherent in the charismatic leader but rather a quality with which he is endowed by his followers. Among the psychological \u201cingredients\u201d that make immature followers attribute charisma to their \u201cgreat\u201d leader, Schiffer found, were his foreignness<\/em>, his imperfection<\/em>, his feeling of calling<\/em>, his fighting stance<\/em>, his social station<\/em>, his sexual mystique<\/em>, his perpetrating a hoax<\/em>, and his innovative lifestyles<\/em>. These traits revive in his immature followers powerful emotions of longing, fear, and idealization, dating back to their infancy and childhood, which they have not outgrown, and which Schiffer explained in detail; and most of these \u201cingredients\u201d characterize Donald Trump. His foreign wife is only one of them. (see\u00a0https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Charisma-Psychoanalytic-Look-Mass-Society\/dp\/0802019587<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

The American historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of Italian history at New York University and an expert on the Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), found many similarities between him and Donald Trump. She wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

Italians learned in the 1920s what Americans are learning in 2016: Charismatic authoritarians seeking political office cannot be understood through the framework of traditional politics. They lack interest in, and patience for, established protocols. They often trust few outside of their own families, or those they already control, making collaboration and relationship building difficult. They work from a different playbook, and so must those who intend to confront them. The authoritarian playbook is defined by the particular relationship such individuals have with their followers. It\u2019s an attachment based on submission to the authority of one individual who stands above the party, even in a regime. Mussolini, a journalist by training, used the media brilliantly to cultivate a direct bond with Italians that confounded political parties and other authority structures and lasted for 18 years. For over a year now, Trump has been subjecting Americans and American democracy to analogous tests. Actions many see as irrational make chilling sense when considered under this framework: the many racist tweets or retweets, which his campaign then declares a mistake. His early declaration that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose any supporters. His extended humiliation of powerful politicians such as Paul Ryan and John McCain. His attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the American electoral process. His intimation that \u201cthe Second-Amendment people\u201d might be able to solve the potential problem of Hillary Clinton appointing judges, presumably by shooting her. This last remark is a sign that Trump feels emboldened in his quest to see how much Americans and the GOP will let him get away with \u2014 and when, if ever, they will say \u201cenough.\u201d (see https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2016\/08\/american-authoritarianism-under-donald-trump\/495263\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

The Cypriot-Turkish-born American psychoanalyst Vam\u0131k Djemal Volkan (born 1932) explained the unconscious dynamics of this special bond between charismatic leaders and their followers. He wrote: <\/span><\/p>\n

It is generally when an ethnic, national, religious or ideological large group is regressed, that the \u201cfit\u201d between a large group and a political leader with exaggerated self-love (narcissism) is likely to be strongest: the narcissistic leader\u2019s belief in his or her own superior power, intelligence and omnipotence creates comfort for the regressed large group and an illusion of safety. Thus, the followers use the narcissistic leader\u2019s personality as an \u201cantidote\u201d for shared anxiety. In turn, narcissistic leaders utilize the dependency and adoration of their regressed followers as one way to protect and maintain their grandiosity and hide their own dependency needs. Leaders are then inclined to manipulate, in an exaggerated manner, the societal and political signs of large-group regression, consciously, but more importantly, unconsciously. The shared psychological processes of members of a large group dovetail with the internal psychological processes of narcissistic leaders. They, in turn, tame or inflame large-group regression along with its signs or symptoms. (see http:\/\/www.vamikvolkan.com\/Some-Psychoanalytic-Views-On-Narcissistic-Leaders-and-Their-Roles-in-Large-group-Processes.php<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Let us examine an example of Trump\u2019s narcissistic relationship with his followers to see how he manipulates them and why they idealize him and endow him with such charisma.<\/span><\/p>\n

The President and the War Widow<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

On Tuesday night, February 28, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump delivered an address to a joint session of the two houses of the U.S. Congress. Many Democratic Congresswomen wore white, reminding the world of the women’s suffragette movement a century earlier and of Trump’s misogyny. The high point of the evening came when Trump mentioned the presence in the hall of Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens, who had been killed a month earlier in a bungled raid on Al Qaeda in Yemen ordered by none other than Trump himself. The black-clad Ms. Owens sat next to the president\u2019s daughter, Ivanka, in the First Lady’s box high above the hall. In the midst of pressing his case for many more billions of dollars for the U.S. Military, Trump said, looking up at Ms. Owens: <\/span><\/p>\n

We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens, the widow of a U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William “Ryan” Owens.\u00a0 Ryan died as he lived:\u00a0 a warrior, and a hero — battling against terrorism and securing our Nation. I just spoke to General Mattis, who reconfirmed that, and I quote, \u201cRyan was a part of a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.\u201d\u00a0 Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity.\u00a0 For as the Bible teaches us, there is no greater act of love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.\u00a0 Ryan laid down his life for his friends, for his country, and for our freedom — we will never forget him.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The president then addressed the widow directly: \u201cAnd Ryan is looking down right now. You know that,\u201d he told her. In what seemed to be a reference to the length of the standing ovation that followed his words about her husband, the president said: \u201cAnd he\u2019s very happy, because I think he just broke a record.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In fact, the raid in Yemen had been a failure due to incompetence. The death of Ryan Owens on Jan. 29 resulted from a series of errors and misjudgments that produced a fifty-minute firefight with Al Qaeda fanatics. Three other Americans were wounded, as well as several Yemeni civilians. A $75 million aircraft was deliberately destroyed.<\/span><\/p>\n

The grieving widow, who probably did not know all this, looked upward toward Heaven, where the jubilant president had just told her her husband was, and repeatedly murmured \u201cI love you.\u201d The widow tried to hold back her sobs, but the television cameras focused on her contorted face and tearful eyes. In a rare show of bipartisan unity, Republicans and Democrats rose up and applauded for several minutes in a standing ovation; it was not clear whether they were applauding the president, the dead soldier, or the widow.\u00a0The president broke from his prepared remarks, saying that Ryan Owens must be looking proudly down from heaven at the \u201crecord\u201d likely set, an apparent reference to the long ovation. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/03\/01\/us\/politics\/william-ryan-carryn-owens-navy-seal-yemen.html<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

At least one other American war widow, Kaili Joy Gray, saw through Trump\u2019s blatant exploitation of Ms. Owens for his own purposes. She pointed out Trump\u2019s total lack of empathy for the widow\u2019s feelings: <\/span><\/p>\n

At the very least, I would have hoped my president would be capable of humility, of kindness, and of a recognition that my loss is not about his glory or his blamelessness, but about the tragedy that forever changed my life. It\u2019s hard to imagine, though, that Trump\u2019s words were intended to comfort, and not instead to establish his innocence in this tragedy, to prove that he is a victim of the generals’ insistence upon this mission and of the previous administration’s plans, as he also claimed earlier in the day, and that certainly he bears no responsibility for Carryn Owens\u2019s grief.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

This perceptive war widow put her finger on one of Trump\u2019s most prominent character traits, his narcissistic lack of empathy for other people\u2019s feelings and his using them for his own needs:
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, Trump’s astonishing lack of empathy has been well-documented \u2014 from his repeated attacks during the 2016 election on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the [bereaved] Gold Star parents of United States Army Captain Humayun Khan, to the horrifying story of Trump cutting off health benefits for his own nephew just to spite his family. After the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub last year, Trump praised himself on Twitter for \u201cbeing right on radical Islamic terrorism.\u201d Asked recently about the dozens of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools, Trump found no sympathy for those victims of terror, but only for himself, the victim of a reporter\u2019s question he did not care to answer. Trump\u2019s sympathy for victims and their families is arbitrary at best and seemingly never without a crass, cynical agenda \u2014 to justify his policies, to attack others, or to lavish congratulations upon himself. <\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s exploitation of her fellow war widow made Kaili Gray quite upset. She pointed out how the president manipulates the American public by pretending to care for them when he only cares for himself:
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

To demonstrate his supposed empathy for victims of violent crimes, Trump announced in his speech the creation of a new office, Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE), devoted to crimes committed exclusively by immigrants \u2014 one of his favorite subjects, which he invokes regularly to justify his anti-immigration policies. This, as his administration reportedly intends to shift the focus of an existing counter-terrorism program away from white supremacist and right-wing extremism to Islamic extremism only. Trump is unconcerned with the violence committed by white, homegrown criminals. A knife attack in Paris, in which there were no fatalities and one minor injury, was tweet-worthy for Trump to justify his Muslim ban; the deadly shooting at a mosque in Quebec City, allegedly by a far-right extremist and Trump supporter, was greeted with deafening presidential silence. <\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Gray has no faith in President Trump. She does not believe anything he says. She perceives him as a malignant narcissist who tries to manipulate and exploit everybody and anybody he ever encounters:<\/span><\/p>\n

So it is hard to give Trump any benefit of the doubt or credit when it comes to his words about Navy SEAL Owens during his Tuesday night address, even as a flood of post-speech punditry declared this moment marked the long-awaited pivot (at last!), when Trump finally learned to put his pettiness, cruelty, and braggadocio aside and to take seriously the enormous responsibility of the office he holds. Trump is, the day after his speech, still Trump: a man who has compared his \u201csacrifices\u201d \u2014 of creating jobs, building \u201cgreat structures,\u201d and having \u201ctremendous success\u201d \u2014 to those of our fallen military and their families. He is, first and foremost, yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the hero or victim of every story he tells, in which the pain of others is merely a background for his preferred self-serving narrative. And there is nothing presidential about that. (see\u00a0http:\/\/www.cosmopolitan.com\/politics\/a9078877\/carryn-owens-donald-trump-speech-navy-seal-widow\/<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

So much for the president and the war widow. But, as we shall see, this incident has much more ominous implications for the personality of the president of the United States and for the fate of our species.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Troubled Mind of Donald Trump
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1916 Sigmund Freud published a pioneering psychoanalytic study of political leaders entitled Those Wrecked by Success<\/em> in which he speculated on the unconscious guilt feelings and inner conflicts that cause some successful people to unwittingly destroy themselves. In 1930 the American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell, who was keenly interested in psychoanalysis, published an equally groundbreaking study entitled Psychopathology and Politics <\/em>about the emotional illnesses of political leaders. Since then there has been a growing body of scholarly research into this fascinating subject, much of it by members of the International Society of Political Psychology, who come from political science, psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, political sociology and other disciplines. <\/span><\/p>\n

One of the key questions in such studies is whether people with prior psychopathology are drawn to politics and, if so, what it is about politics that draws such people to it. Does the power that comes with political office provide an unconscious antidote to unbearable feelings of powerlessness that such people carry with them since their childhood?
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The current president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump is a case in point. On May 4, 2017, after repealing \u201cObamacare,\u201dwhich had given health coverage to tens of millions of previously-uninsured Americans, and without waiting for the required approval of the U.S. Senate, the Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives came to the White House to celebrate the \u201cpassage\u201d of their new American Health Care Act with President Trump. The president praised the Republican politicians and then said, \u201cComing from a different world and only being a politician for a short period of time \u2014 How am I doing? Am I doing okay? I\u2019m president! Hey! I\u2019m president! Can you believe it, right?\u201d Television viewers rubbed their eyes and convinced themselves that this was the President of the United States speaking, not an anxious little boy asking his demanding parents to reassure him about his achievements. (see http:\/\/www.mediaite.com\/uncategorized\/im-president-can-you-believe-it-trump-stops-ahca-speech-to-remind-us-hes-potus\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

On May 9, 2017, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who had helped him defeat his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election by publicizing the FBI\u2019s investigation of the latter\u2019s e-mails as President Obama\u2019s Secretary of State at a critical time in the election. On May 17 the Democratic U.S. Congressman Al Green of Texas called for Trump\u2019s impeachment on the Floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. In his written testimony to the U.S. Senate that was made public the following month, Comey claimed that Trump had fired him because (a) he had refused to give him a personal pledge of loyalty, the kind that Adolf Hitler had required of all German officials (b) he had testified to the U.S. Congress that the Obama Administration had never wiretapped Trump, contrary to the latter\u2019s assertions, and (c) because he had turned down Trump\u2019s request to \u201clet go\u201d the FBI investigation of the Russian connections of Trump\u2019s former national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, and of the Russian tampering with the U.S. election that made Trump president.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Fearful of being publicly accused by Comey of collusion with Russia, in his letter of dismissal Trump formally thanked Comey for having told him three times that he was not personally under FBI investigation. Comey later claimed he had never told Trump any such thing. On May 10 The New York Times <\/em>published a front-page story revealing that two months earlier Comey had told some of his associates that Trump was \u201coutside the realm of normal, maybe even crazy.\u201d Trump had threatened the Times <\/em>several times with libel suits, but the newspaper\u2019s owners had stood their ground and refused to be intimidated. By making Comey into his sworn enemy, Trump had brought his personal and political disaster upon himself. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/10\/us\/politics\/how-trump-decided-to-fire-james-comey.html?_r=1<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

His Own Worst Enemy<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump has been self-destructive throughout his life. As a teenager he got himself kicked out of school for insulting his music teacher. Throughout his career he has lied and cheated his way into success, making enemies of his victims along the way. In real life as well as on his television shows he has fired numerous people from their jobs, earning many more enemies. During his business career his companies went bankrupt no less than six times. He embarrassed himself publicly by not paying any federal taxes for decades, by body-slamming his rival Vince McMahon at the 2007 WrestleMania, and by boasting to a friend about freely groping beautiful women by their pussies. In early July 2017 Trump edited the body-slamming video by replacing McMahon\u2019s head with the CNN logo, producing a movie of the President of the United States body-slamming and wrestling down the news organization. (see\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=TuesauNtqTU<\/a> and https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UKX51slEcO<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s firing of FBI Director James Comey and his attempt to attribute the responsibility for this firing to his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, led the latter to appoint Comey\u2019s predecessor, Robert Mueller, as Special Counsel to the U.S. Justice Department with the authority and responsibility \u201cto investigate any links and\/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.\u201d In mid-June 2017 The Washington Post<\/em> reported that Mueller was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of Justice; Trump was said to be considering firing Mueller, which would almost certainly lead to Congressional impeachment proceedings against Trump, just as Nixon’s firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox did for Nixon in 1973. Trump tweeted that this was a witch hunt. (see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/national-security\/special-counsel-is-investigating-trump-for-possible-obstruction-of-justice\/2017\/06\/14\/9ce02506-5131-11e7-b064-828ba60fbb98_story.html?utm_term=.2af6b66a835b<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

On May 23, 2017, the former CIA director, John Brennan, testified to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that Russia had indeed brazenly tried to interfere with the U.S. election that made Trump president. (see http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/newshour\/rundown\/watch-live-former-cia-director-john-brennan-testifies-house-committee\/<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump certainly has paranoid features in his personality. Paranoid people, however, also have real enemies, and Trump\u2019s are legion. The Special Counsel has wide-ranging powers. Nixon-like, Trump has attacked his appointment, which he justly fears may end his career, calling it a \u201cwitch hunt\u201d and \u201can attack on America itself.\u201d Trump believes that he is being personally persecuted, which, as the American journalist Eugene Robinson has pointed out, is \u201ca frightfully dangerous mind-set for a man with such vast power.\u201d If it came to his impeachment, would Trump, who cannot stand to be humiliated, launch a military attack on Syria, Iran, or North Korea, provoke Russia and China, and start a Third World War that would end our species? (see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/trump-thinks-hes-under-attack-thats-very-dangerous\/2017\/05\/18\/e7af59e6-3bf9-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html?utm_term=.1f19902d4209<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Writing in the New York Daily News<\/em> on May 11, 2017, the American journalist Shaun King had this to say of his president: \u201cDonald Trump is crazy. I\u2019ve believed that for some time now. His dishonesty is so severe, among the worst measured by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact<\/em>, that it alone suggests a deep level of mental instability, but that\u2019s not his only problem. The man was recorded openly bragging about grabbing women [by the pussy]. He repeatedly suggested he\u2019d like to date his daughter. His first wife said in a court deposition that he assaulted her, though she later backtracked from that claim.\u201d One might add to this Trump\u2019s paranoid assertions that he had been wiretapped by the Obama Administration, which Comey had publicly asserted was pure fantasy, and the repeated public calls by mental health professionals to have Trump removed from office on grounds of his mental incapacity to execute the functions of his office. (see http:\/\/www.nydailynews.com\/news\/politics\/king-comey-calling-trump-crazy-shows-crossed-line-article-1.3156924<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump tweets on Twitter every day, and his tweets come back to haunt him. On Friday morning, May 12, 2017, fearful that a vengeful James Comey would leak what he knew about him to the press, Trump threatened the just-dismissed FBI Director in an early-morning tweet; apparently he had slept poorly and had woken up anxious. \u201cJames Comey better hope that there are no \u2018tapes\u2019 of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!\u201d Trump tweeted. The very mention of the tapes was an unconsciously self-destructive invitation to a future Special Counsel to subpoena his tape recordings, just as Archibald Cox had done with Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair forty-four years earlier. The New York Times <\/em>wrote that day, \u201dMr. Trump appeared agitated over news reports on Friday that focused on contradictory accounts of his decision to fire Mr. Comey at the same time the FBI is investigating ties between Mr. Trump\u2019s associates and Russia.\u201d(see https:\/\/mobile.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/12\/us\/politics\/trump-threatens-retaliation-against-comey-warns-he-may-cancel-press-briefings.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, after each of his three meetings and six phone calls with Trump, each and every one of them initiated by the president, Comey had made minutely-detailed memos of their content, fearing that Trump would later lie about them. On Monday night, May 15, still agitated by his dismissal by Trump, he shared the content of his memo about Trump\u2019s request the previous February to drop the Flynn investigation with his friend Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia University Law School. Richman in turn leaked the memo to The New York Times,<\/em> which wrote on May 16, \u201cPresident Trump asked the FBI director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump\u2019s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting. \u2019I hope you can let this go,\u2019 the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.\u201d This disclosure led to the appointment of Comey\u2019s predecessor, Robert Muller, as Special Counsel to the U.S. Department of Justice on the Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election of 2016, which could lead to Trump\u2019s impeachment by the U.S. Congress. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/16\/us\/politics\/james-comey-trump-flynn-russia-investigation.html<\/a>).
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On June 7, 2017, the day before James Comey\u2019s testimony before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on the FBI\u2019s Trump-Russia investigation, in a speech to the National Press Club of Australia, the former U.S. Director of National Intelligence under President Barack Obama, James Robert Clapper (born 1941), said that \u201cWatergate pales, in my view, compared to what we are confronting now.\u201d Two Democratic U.S. Congressmen, Al Green of Texas and Brad Sherman of California, began drawing up formal articles of impeachment against Trump. (see\u00a0 and http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/av\/world-us-canada-40187457\/watergate-pales-beside-trump-russia-allegations-james-clapper<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The stage was set for a damning public testimony on Thursday, June 8, 2017 by Former FBI Director James Comey before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that could destroy Trump\u2019s career. In an open session of the Committee, Comey testified about his meetings and phone calls with Trump, all of which had been initiated by the latter, and about the various FBI investigations of Russia, General Flynn and the 2016 Trump election campaign, whose details he could only reveal in a closed, classified session. Comey, who has great integrity, bent over backwards to be fair to Trump and not to accuse him of anything he did not have solid proof for, yet Trump came off in his testimony as a habitual liar. Comey was especially blunt about Trump\u2019s defamation of the FBI at the time of his firing, calling it \u201ca blatant lie.\u201d When repeatedly asked by the senators to explain Trump\u2019s behavior, however, Comey was at a loss to do so; he tends to attribute rationality to people\u2019s actions, whereas Trump\u2019s actions are often irrational. There was little doubt that the firing of Comey had not only not helped Trump in any way, and that it had, in fact, done him enormous damage, even with own party\u2019s members in the U.S. Senate. And this was only a beginning, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller was conducting his own investigation of Trump. (see http:\/\/abcnews.go.com\/Politics\/james-comey-testifies-trump-administration-lied-defamed-fbi\/story?id=47901315<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Why has Trump done all this damage to himself? This study sets out to examine the roots of Trump\u2019s self-destructiveness, to see whether he is \u201ccrazy,\u201d whether he is \u201cemotionally ill\u201d or suffers from a \u201cmalignant narcissistic personality disorder,\u201d to trace the origins of his psychopathology, and to assess the danger he poses to the survival of our species.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Apocalypse Now and the Mother of all Bombs<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

In 1899 the Polish-born English novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) published Heart of Darkness,<\/em> a novel about a white ivory trader named Kurtz who takes over an African tribe and makes it into his private army. The tribesmen worship Kurtz as a god. He uses his power wantonly, raiding the surrounding territory in search of more ivory and killing black people indiscriminately. The fence posts around his station are adorned with the severed heads of the natives he has killed. The narrator of the story, a sailor named Marlow, is fascinated by the stories he has heard of Kurtz and sails up the river to meet him. Kurtz orders his tribesmen to attack Marlow\u2019s steamer with bows and arrows. Its African helmsman is killed, and Marlow frightens the attackers away. When he finally meets Kurtz, he discovers a madman obsessed with exterminating the Africans, whom he calls \u201cthe brutes.\u201d When Kurtz dies, his last words are \u201cThe horror! The horror!\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Eighty years later the American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939) adapted Conrad\u2019s novel into a film entitled Apocalypse Now, <\/em>set in Indochina during the horrific Vietnam war in the late 1960s, in which many hundreds of thousands had lost their lives. Coppola kept the name of Conrad\u2019s protagonist, Kurtz, as that of the mad American colonel in his film.\u00a0 By that time the world had also suffered the horrors of two world wars, in which tens of millions of soldiers and civilians had been killed. At the end of the Second World War, in August 1945, on the orders of U.S. President Harry Truman (1884-1972), a U.S. Air Force pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets (1915-2007), dropped an atom bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima from a bomber named Enola Gay<\/em>, burning to death hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. The pilot\u2019s mother\u2019s name was Enola Gay Tibbets. <\/span><\/p>\n

Why did the pilot name his bomber after his mother? What do mothers have to do with terrible wars and with mass killings? Joseph Conrad lost his mother when he was seven years old. His loss of her had a lifelong effect on him. He also lost his father four years later. Before becoming a writer he had been a sailor. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Cervantes\u2019s novel, or Don Giovanni and Leporello in Mozart\u2019s opera, Marlow and Kurtz were two different aspects of Conrad himself. What effect did Conrad\u2019s mother in real life, or Kurtz\u2019s mother in Heart of Darkness,<\/em> have on their sons?
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From 1964 to 1970, at the height of the \u201cCold War,\u201d the Italian psychoanalyst Franco Fornari (1921-1985) wrote four books about the unconscious motives of war-making and the nuclear threat to humankind. The English edition of Fornari\u2019s most important book, The Psychoanalysis of War<\/em>, was published in 1974. Fornari believed that war-making betrayed the inability to mourn one\u2019s losses; he called it \u201cthe paranoid elaboration of mourning.\u201d The classic example is the reaction of a preliterate tribe to the death of one of its members. Feeling guilty about it, and unable to mourn their loss, the survivors unconsciously project their guilt feelings on the neighboring tribe, believe that it has killed their fellow tribesman by witchcraft, and make war on it. The earliest loss in a person\u2019s life is that of the blissful infantile fusion with the mother, symbolized by the Biblical myth of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. <\/span><\/p>\n

Among other things, this study sets out to uncover the hidden connections between Trump\u2019s tormented childhood relationship with his mother and his extremely dangerous military conduct in Afghanistan, Syria, and, as we may well expect, Iran and North Korea in the near future. It also aims to explore Trump\u2019s unhealthy relationship with his father and its effect on his relationship with other world leaders, such as Vladimir Putin.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The danger is very real. On his very first day in office President Trump had made the retired Marine general James \u201cMad Dog\u201d Mattis his Secretary of Defense, calling him \u201cvery dignified and impressive.\u201d Given Trump\u2019s unconscious identification of America the Great with himself, will he perceive Iran and North Korea\u2019s verbal attacks on America and their threats against \u201cher\u201d as a personal affront? Will he feel shamed and humiliated? Will it provoke his narcissistic rage? Will he see any way of preventing Iran and North Korea from developing their nuclear-weapons programs other than \u201cpre-emptive\u201d attacks on their nuclear installations and on their missile bases? Will Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump order the kind of \u201cshock and awe\u201d attack on Iran or North Korea that his predecessor George W. Bush ordered on Iraq? Will the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un launch his nuclear-warhead-tipped missiles on Japan, South Korea or the United States in desperate retaliation? Will nuclear-armed China intervene? Will that bring about \u201cthe mother of all wars\u201d and the end of our species? (see http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2016\/11\/28\/mad-dog-on-the-loose-the-blood-soaked-career-of-general-james-mattis\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

America as the Idealized Mother<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Louis XIV, the seventeenth-century \u201csun king\u201d of France, purportedly said, \u201cI am the State.\u201d While he may not actually have said this, from most accounts this king seems to have been grandiose and narcissistic. Most psychological professionals have similarly diagnosed Donald Trump as suffering from a malignant narcissistic personality disorder. This has become so commonplace that \u201cDonald Trump is a narcissist\u201d is by now a journalistic truism. In Donald Trump\u2019s unconscious mind, he and America are one. In late November 2016, when students burned the American flag at the obscure Hampshire College in Massachusetts, Trump reacted as if they had burned him in person. He became enraged and proposed on Twitter that flag burners should be jailed or lose their American citizenship; both proposals were in fact illegal. (see http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/politics-news\/donald-trump-proposes-two-illegal-responses-flag-burning-n689726<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"crippled-america-book-cover\"<\/a> \"great-again-book-cover\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

In 2015 Donald Trump published a book entitled Crippled America,<\/em> which has now been recycled as Great Again. <\/em>When Donald Trump that he will make America great again, he unconsciously means, \u201cI shall make myself great again!\u201d or \u201cI shall make America as great as I am!\u201d Trump feels that he is not as great as he should have been, that he needs to become great again. As we shall see below, in his unconscious mind America is his mother; he unconsciously repeats with her his early relationship with his mother, in which, on the one hand, he idealized her, and, on the other, he wanted to destroy her.
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Narcissism, however, has a broad spectrum, and it is important to be more precise about Trump\u2019s narcissism. Some types of narcissism may be benign. Barack Obama\u2019s narcissism, for example, is of the high-level, constructive type. He gets his narcissistic satisfaction from lifting other people to his own level, which is very high. Obama also tried to bring people together and to reconcile their differences. Trump\u2019s narcissism, on the other hand, is low-level, malignant and destructive. He gets his narcissistic satisfaction from shaming and humiliating other people, which makes him feel big and powerful next to them. We can see this in the U.S. \u201creality television\u201d series The Apprentice, a copycat version of a British television series of the same title, which starred Trump, on NBC TV. Each time Trump said \u201cYou\u2019re fired!\u201d to one of his \u201capprentices\u201d he beamed with self-satisfaction, as if he were saying, \u201cSee how great I am! I can walk all over you!\u201d Sadomasochism is an integral part of Trump\u2019s narcissism.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2007 NBC followed up The Apprentice<\/em> with The Celebrity Apprentice<\/em>, on which Trump joyfully humiliated well-known people. Donald Trump received a sort of comeuppance for his sadism in 2015 when NBC fired him from The Celebrity Apprentice<\/em> after he had publicly attacked Mexican Americans. Typically, however, Trump announced that he had not been fired but that he had rather quit the show to run for President of the United States. This is Trump\u2019s way of preserving his unconsciously shaky self-esteem: he imagines that nobody ever defeats, shames or humiliates him; it is he who always defeats, shames and humiliates others. (see http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/donald-trump-i-wasnt-fired-by-nbc-2015-8<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Citizen Kane<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

In 1941 the American actor and filmmaker Orson Welles released his famous film Citizen Kane,<\/em> in which an enormously wealthy but deeply unhappy newspaper tycoon named Charles Foster Kane, modeled after William Randolph Hearst, runs for political office. As a child, Charlie Kane had a sled named Rosebud<\/em>, with which he was playing on the day his mother, Mary Kane, suddenly sent him away from home \u201cto be properly educated.\u201d Her real reason for abandoning him was her greed. Mary ran a boarding house in rural Colorado. In lieu of a payment, one of her tenants gave her some stock in what she thought was a worthless mine; it turned out to give her ownership of the Colorado Lode, a working gold mine. Finding herself suddenly wealthy, she decided to send away her son, Charles, to be raised by her banker, Thatcher. Charles was understandably upset and whacked Thatcher with the sled he had been happily riding when Thatcher showed up to escort him away. Kane\u2019s relationship with Thatcher never improved. Vignettes from their years together show Kane engaging in questionable journalism, wasting money, and constantly enraging Thatcher.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s personal happiness seems to depend on the woman he is with. In 2002 the fifty-four-year-old American documentary filmmaker Errol Morris interviewed the fifty-six-year-old real-estate tycoon Donald Trump about Citizen Kane. <\/em>Trump, too, had a mother named Mary; she, too, had sent him away from home when he was a boy, after he had insulted his music teacher. The filmmaker\u2019s first question to Trump was, \u201cDo you have any advice for Charles Foster Kane, sir?\u201d The twice-divorced Trump replied, \u201cMy advice to Charles Foster Kane is find another woman!\u201d (see https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=a63ymFn6nS0<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

At the peak of the 2016 presidential election campaign the American journalist Anthony Audi, who considered Charles Foster Kane a \u201ccinematic monster,\u201d talked to Errol Morris about his interview with Trump, and the following conversation ensued: <\/span><\/p>\n

Anthony Audi<\/strong>: It\u2019s an incredible line. And it makes you wonder what goes through Trump\u2019s mind as he watches the movie. I still can\u2019t wrap my head around if he just chooses to ignore its obvious moral undertone, or if he genuinely doesn\u2019t see it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Errol Morris<\/strong>: Well, that\u2019s one of the great mysteries of self-deception. When Donald Rumsfeld says to me, \u201cThere you were in the Oval Office of the White House. There\u2019s Gerald Ford, there\u2019s you, there\u2019s Henry Kissinger, et cetera, and we are pulling out of Vietnam. People are climbing onto helicopters.\u201d And I ask: Do you feel we learned anything from the experience of Vietnam? And Donald\u2014I guess the other Donald, Donald Rumsfeld\u2014says to me, \u201cWell, we learned that some things work out and some things don\u2019t. And that didn\u2019t.\u201d And the question that comes to my mind, actually at the time, and then certainly subsequently, is what is he saying to me? Is he just simply saying fuck you and I don\u2019t really care to reflect on this or to answer the question? Or is he revealing the fact that there\u2019s nothing there? Like the Wizard of Oz, you open the curtain and there\u2019s just simply a little man, an imposter, standing there. (see http:\/\/lithub.com\/erroll-morris-on-the-time-he-filmed-donald-trump-missing-the-point\/#<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

In his interview with Errol, Morris Trump also said, \u201cThe word Rosebud<\/em>, for whatever reason, has captivated moviegoers and movie watchers for so many years. And, to this day, is perhaps the single word. And perhaps if they came up with another word that meant the same thing, it wouldn\u2019t have worked. But Rosebud<\/em> works.\u201d Trump said that Rosebud<\/em> signified \u201cbringing a sad, lonely figure back into his childhood.\u201d Anthony Audi tried to show that Donald Trump had modeled his entire life on the \u201ccinematic loser\u201d Charles Foster Kane. (see\u00a0http:\/\/lithub.com\/donald-trump-modeled-his-life-on-cinematic-loser-charles-foster-kane\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Rosebud<\/em><\/strong>
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American journalists who have studied his childhood described the boy \u201cDonny\u201d as a \u201cconfident, incorrigible bully.\u201d In his autobiographical book The Art of the Deal<\/em> Trump recalled that in second grade he had punched his music teacher at the Kew-Forest School in Queens, Charles Walker, so hard that he had given him a black eye, because \u201cI didn\u2019t think he knew anything about music,\u201d adding \u201cI almost got expelled.\u201d This was pure fantasy. None of Donald\u2019s classmates, nor Mr. Walker himself, ever recalled such an incident; Mr. Walker\u2019s son, however, remembered the ten-year-old Donny as \u201ca piece of shit.\u201d What did this fantasy mean, then? Did the \u201cignorant\u201d music teacher represent Donny\u2019s \u201cunmusical\u201d father in his unconscious mind? (see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/style\/young-donald-trump-military-school\/2016\/06\/22\/f0b3b164-317c-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

When Donny was in seventh grade he was in fact expelled from his school, where his father was on the school board, after insulting \u2014 but not punching \u2014 his music teacher; he was sent away from home to a boarding school at the New York Military Academy in upstate New York. His father did not lift a finger to protect him; in fact, he approved his expulsion. His expulsion from school was Trump\u2019s Rosebud<\/em>: it was the first serious failure in his life, and it left him with very painful feelings of rejection, shame, humiliation and narcissistic rage. (see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/lifestyle\/style\/young-donald-trump-military-school\/2016\/06\/22\/f0b3b164-317c-11e6-8758-d58e76e11b12_story.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump, Vince McMahon, and Vladimir Putin<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s narcissistic rage can be overwhelming and lead to physical violence. It is only matched by his need to feel stronger than and superior to everybody else. In 2007 he body-slammed his fellow tycoon Vincent McMahon and humiliated him publicly by shaving his entire head and spraying shaving cream on it at WrestleMania, an annual professional-wrestling event. (see https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=MMKFIHRpe7I<\/a>). While American professional wrestling is a big show, Trump is a showman, and his body-slamming of McMahon may have been part of this show, such a \u201cjoke\u201d has an unconscious kernel of truth in it, and Trump seems to have a history of violent physical assaults. (see http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/features\/the-violence-of-donald-trump-w444012<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

On February 6, 2017 the sixty-seven-year-old American television host Bill O\u2019Reilly, who two months later was fired from his Fox News job for sexual harassment and other ethical violations, interviewed President Donald Trump about the sixty-four-year-old autocratic Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump told O\u2019Reilly that he respected his Russian counterpart. \u201cBut he\u2019s a killer!\u201d O\u2019Reilly protested. \u201cThere are a lot of killers. You think our country\u2019s so innocent?\u201d Trump replied. (see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/02\/04\/politics\/donald-trump-vladimir-putin\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Why did Trump defend Putin? Had he received help from Putin during the U.S. presidential election? Was he biding his time until he could launch an attack on Putin and show him who was more powerful? And why did his warm relationship with Putin deteriorate so much during the next two months that U.S.-Russian relations have reached, by Trump\u2019s own statement, an all-time low, that some Russian politicians have compared the present U.S.-Russian relations with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em> says we are closer to a nuclear Holocaust than ever before? (see http:\/\/thebulletin.org\/timeline<\/a>).
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The American Jewish sociologist Gordon Fellman (born 1934) believes that Donald Trump waged a life-and-death Oedipal battle with his strict, authoritarian and \u201ccastrating\u201d father, against whom he rebelled even as his father built up his business career. Is Putin an unconscious father figure to Trump? The fact that Putin is a few years younger makes no psychological difference. Putin is a very powerful man, if not the second most powerful person in the world; Trump\u2019s father was the most powerful man in his life when he was a child. Trump may be unconsciously saying to Putin, \u201cYou are not my father, and you will no longer tell me what to do! You may have helped me become President of the United States, but I will now show you which of us is more powerful!\u201d (see Prof. Fellman\u2019s comment at the end of this article).
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The entire population of our planet fears a nuclear war that would end our species. These fears were confirmed during Trump\u2019s bizarre news conference on February 16, 2017, when, in response to a reporter\u2019s question about a Russian missile firing thirty miles off the coast of Connecticut the day before, he speculated on a \u201cnuclear holocaust.\u201d\u00a0 Here is the text of that interchange: <\/span><\/p>\n

QUESTION: Is Putin testing you, do you believe, sir? TRUMP: No, I don\u2019t think so. I think Putin probably assumes that he can\u2019t make a deal with me anymore because politically it would be unpopular for a politician to make a deal. I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m saying I\u2019m a politician, but I guess that\u2019s what I am now. Because, look, it would be much easier for me to be tough on Russia, but then we\u2019re not going to make a deal. Now, I don\u2019t know that we\u2019re going to make a deal. I don\u2019t know. We might. We might not. But it would be much easier for me to be so tough \u2014 the tougher I am on Russia, the better. But you know what? I want to do the right thing for the American people. And to be honest, secondarily, I want to do the right thing for the world. If Russia and the United States actually got together and got along \u2014 and don\u2019t forget, we\u2019re a very powerful nuclear country and so are they<\/em>. There\u2019s no upside. We\u2019re a very powerful nuclear country and so are they<\/em>. I have been briefed. And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we\u2019re allowed to say because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, nuclear holocaust would be like no other<\/em>. They\u2019re a very powerful nuclear country and so are we<\/em>. If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that\u2019s a good thing, not a bad thing. (see https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/02\/16\/us\/politics\/donald-trump-press-conference-transcript.html<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Why did Trump need to repeat three times<\/em> that America was a very powerful nuclear country and so was Russia? In his unconscious mind, he is America and Putin is Russia. Is he always comparing himself with Putin or with others to make sure he is more powerful? Is that why he body-slammed and humiliated Vince McMahon at the 2007 WrestleMania? Is this going to cause him to strike Iran or North Korea, to show himself that he is more powerful that they are?
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On Thursday night, April 6, 2017, the world saw Trump\u2019s first dangerous and frightening military intervention in another country. Rather than strike North Korea or Iran, which, as he saw it, posed an imminent threat to the United States, Trump had struck Syria, in which Putin\u2019s Russia was heavily invested and had a vital interest. Trump had a good pretext. The murderous Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad had just committed an unspeakable atrocity, killing dozens of his own people with chemical weapons and injuring hundreds of others; Putin had backed Assad, blaming Syria\u2019s \u201cterrorist rebels.\u201d At Trump\u2019s command, the U.S. military had launched 59 Tomahawk missiles against the obscure Syrian airfield from which the chemical weapons had been launched. Russia issued an ominous warning to the United States. Trump himself, who is given to black-and-white thinking, declared U.S.-Russian relations at an all-time low.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Was Trump out to prove, as he had done with McMahon, that he was the boss and that no one would humiliate him? What would happen if his next strike in Syria hit a Russian plane? Would he follow this up with military strikes in Iran or in North Korea?
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

When Trump announced the strike, his words were full of righteous rage; his voice and his body language, however, betrayed no such feelings. The president read monotonously, slowly and deliberately from his teleprompter:
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

My fellow Americans, on Tuesday [April 4] Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians. Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror. Tonight I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons<\/em>. There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons, violated its obligations under the chemical weapons convention, and ignored the urging of the UN Security Council. Years of previous attempts at changing Assad\u2019s behavior have all failed and failed very dramatically. As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies. Tonight I call on all civilized nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria, and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types. We ask for God\u2019s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world. We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed, and we hope that as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will in the end prevail. Good night and God bless America and the entire world. Thank you. (see https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=yGYZHtfJEYg<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

This gap between the spoken word and its accompanying feeling is called \u201cunconscious splitting\u201d or \u201cdissociation\u201d in psychoanalysis. We shall discuss Trump\u2019s personality from a psychoanalytic viewpoint.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAlternative Facts\u201d and \u201cFake News\u201d
\n<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

After Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration, the American mass-communication media found that much fewer people had attended it than those who attended that of Barack Obama. Trump, for whom lying is second nature, angrily accused the media of faking the news and declared that reporters were the most dishonest people on the face of the earth. His press secretary, Sean Spicer, who later publicly claimed that Adolf Hitler had never used any chemical weapons, publicly claimed that Trump\u2019s inauguration audience was the largest that had ever<\/em> attended any U.S. presidential inauguration; Trump\u2019s senior advisor, Kellyanne Conway, told a CNN television interviewer that there were \u201calternative facts\u201d that proved her boss right; and, as the American journalist Samantha Schmidt has put it, in early February 2017 Ms. Conway \u201ctook those \u2019alternative facts\u2019 to a new level\u201d when she defended Trump\u2019s travel ban on the citizens of seven Muslim countries by citing a \u201cBowling Green massacre\u201d that never happened. The language of the Trump administration was beginning to sound like Newspeak in George Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em> or, if you like, like Victor Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii<\/em> (Language of the Third Reich). One could clearly see here the operation of unconscious denial and projection on a large scale. (for Conway\u2019s \u201calternative facts\u201d see http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2017\/01\/22\/politics\/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts\/<\/a> and for her \u201cBowling Green massacre\u201d see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/news\/morning-mix\/wp\/2017\/02\/03\/kellyanne-conway-cites-bowling-green-massacre-that-never-happened-to-defend-travel-ban\/?utm_term=.454ec0503795<\/a>).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Self-Awareness?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump had told Errol Morris in their taped interview that he could understand why the table between Charles Foster Kane and his wife in Citizen Kane<\/em> grew larger and larger as the two grew farther and farther apart. The American writer and journalist James Fallows found Trump\u2019s statements about Citizen Kane<\/em> \u201cutterly absorbing. For any rich person to say these things about the movie, and its theme of the isolation of wealth, would be something. But from the Trump we now (think we) know, the clip is more like astonishing. The man we see here seems \u2026 introspective. Self-aware.\u201d (see http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/notes\/2016\/10\/trump-time-capsule-148-rosebud-and-hillary\/505391\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Is Donald Trump really self-aware? In his bizarre press conference of February 16, 2017, less than a month into his presidency, President Trump bitterly complained about the \u201ctone of hatred, such hatred\u201d that pervades his coverage by the American mass-communications media. He said that he was really not a bad person, that he was, in fact, a very nice person, and that he could not understand why the media hated him so much. To me, this indicates a total lack of self-awareness. People hate Trump because he is selfish and cold, because he constantly lies, because he does not really care about anyone but himself, because he is abusive, abrasive, and downright unpleasant. Trump himself, however, does not think so at all. He thinks he is very nice. He has no idea why others hate him. Donald Trump lives in a psychological world of his own, in which he is the greatest, strongest and smartest person on the face of the earth. His reality-testing is shaky; denial<\/strong> seems to be one of his key unconscious defenses. He constantly makes statements with no basis in fact. Is Trump consciously and deliberately lying? Is he even aware that he is lying? Does he believe his own lies? Is he able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy? (see https:\/\/www.ctvnews.ca\/world\/trump-presser-15-of-the-most-bizarre-moments-1.3288901<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Xanadu and Mar-a-Lago<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

Xanadu is the name of the \u201cstately pleasure-dome\u201d of the Mongol emperor in the poem Kubla Khan<\/em> by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Orson Welles liked this poem; in Citizen Kane<\/em>, the newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane owns a vast Florida estate named Xanadu. Like him, Donald John Trump owns Mar-a-Lago, a landmark estate near Palm Beach, Florida, built in the 1920s as a retreat for U.S. presidents. Trump bought it in 1985; he spends almost every weekend in his \u201cWinter White House.\u201d Unlike the reclusive Kane, however, the greedy and gregarious Trump turned Mar-a-Lago into a private commercial club for millionaires, with membership fees of up to $200,000 per year. Just before Election Day 2016, a perceptive Cornell University senior had this assessment of Donald Trump\u2019s view of Citizen Kane<\/em>: <\/span><\/p>\n

Following Welles\u2019 lead, most viewers have interpreted the images of Charles Kane alone in his extravagant estate as critical of material pursuits, and also reminiscent of William Hearst\u2019s own retreat behind castle walls. Trump, meanwhile, sees the grandeur of Greek tragedy in the film but plays down the significance of the fall. \u201cThere is a great rise in Citizen Kane, and there was a modest fall,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fall wasn\u2019t a financial fall, it was a personal fall. But it was a fall, nevertheless.\u201d This coping mechanism may prove itself useful come Tuesday. In the end, Hearst and Kane\u2019s political careers failed spectacularly, imploding in scandal and landslide defeats. To his credit, Trump\u2019s toxic vacuum of narcissism has carried him farther than either of those men went, and he currently sits within reach of the country\u2019s highest office. If and when he loses, the real estate mogul seems likely to retain the limelight rather than retreat behind the walls of Mar-a-Lago. The \u201cfall,\u201d after all, is only a matter of perspective. (see http:\/\/cornellsun.com\/2016\/11\/08\/stanton-trumps-rosebud\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Fire is always present in Trump\u2019s life, whether materially or emotionally. In early 2018 three people were seriously burned in a fire that broke out on the roof of Trump Tower in Manhattan. The Trump Organization called the fire \u201croutine.\u201d Donald Trump has been unfaithful to all his wives. Even Melania may ultimately leave him. Is Trump anything like the fictional Charles Foster Kane? Will he end up in Mar-a-Lago or in Trump Tower, as Kane does at Xanadu, abandoned by his wife, alone, dying with his prize possession, Rosebud<\/em>, cast into the flames of his fireside? Will those flames not only consume Trump himself but all of New York, America, and the entire world? If so, what was his<\/em> Rosebud? Studying Trump\u2019s relationship to his mother may yield the answer to these questions, as well as the key to everything we have discussed heretofore.
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Trump won the Electoral College vote, but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. Her advisers called for a recount in some states in which the vote was close. Trump tweeted that he had also won the popular vote \u201cif you discount the millions of illegal votes.\u201d After the CIA announced that it had evidence of Russia having tried to sway the U.S. election, U.S. Senators called for an investigation for Russia\u2019s role in hacking Trump\u2019s election. Trump reacted by attacking the CIA and telling an interviewer that he did not need its daily briefing. The Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>was clearly worried. (see https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/trump-cia-on-collision-course-over-russias-role-in-us-election\/2016\/12\/10\/ad01556c-bf01-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s other unconscious psychic defense is massive projection<\/strong>. On January 11, 2017, nine days before his inauguration, in his first press conference in months, he publicly clashed with CNN\u2019s senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, whom he put down and humiliated. Trump, who acts more like Adolf Hitler than any other American political leader in living memory, had tweeted \u201cAre we living in Nazi Germany?\u201d Shortly after being sworn in, he demanded of FBI Director James Comey a pledge of personal loyalty like that demanded in the 1930s by the F\u00fchrer<\/em> of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. Trump denounced CNN\u2019s reports on his ties with Russia and on the Russians\u2019 file on him as \u201cfake news.\u201d Acting like a true tyrant, when Mr. Acosta tried to ask him a question, Trump would not let him speak. The reporter loudly and repeatedly insisted that he deserved to be given the chance to ask Trump a question after Trump had libeled his network, but Trump repeatedly told him to sit down and be quiet, and Trump\u2019s incoming press secretary, Sean Spicer, threatened to throw Acosta out of the room. The Americans would soon find out that Trump\u2019s vision of America resembled Hitler\u2019s vision of Germany. Donald Trump cannot tolerate public shame and humiliation. The incident with Acosta seems to forebode a serious curtailing of the freedom of the press which the Americans had always taken for granted. (see\u00a0https:\/\/mediamatters.org\/video\/2017\/01\/11\/cnns-jim-acosta-reports-incoming-press-secretary-spicer-threatened-throw-him-out-trump-press\/214977<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s Wall<\/strong> <\/span><\/p>\n

As we have seen at the beginning of this study, an experienced American graphologist who had analyzed Donald Trump\u2019s signature told a Boston Globe<\/em> journalist that there was absolutely no softness in it, that it was mean, tough and rigid, and that there was no room in it for anybody else. \u201cHe\u2019s not interested in anyone else\u2019s opinion. It\u2019s like a big fence,\u201d said the graphologist. \u201cA wall?\u201d asked the journalist. \u201cYes,\u201d said Lowe, \u201cand he hides behind it. He\u2019s afraid of being seen.\u201d (see https:\/\/www.bostonglobe.com\/ideas\/2017\/02\/01\/trump-signature-horrifying-but-should-you-care\/5Bbnsu2DoPJkcqmm06LzgM\/story.html<\/a>).
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The matter of the wall that Trump wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico is psychologically fascinating. In a series of psychoanalytic studies on the symbolism of international borders in the 1970s and 1980s I have shown that in our unconscious mind external boundaries symbolize internal ones. The external borders are visible: fences, walls, barriers, demarcation lines, checkpoints, border controls and border guards; there are also external laws, rules and prohibitions that tells us what is allowed and what is not.\u00a0 The internal boundaries are invisible, yet no less real: they are the boundaries of the self, namely, sense of where you end and where others begin; internal prohibitions, such as the incest taboo; and the superego, or conscience, that tells one what to do and what not to do and makes on feel guilty, embarrassed or tormented when one has transgressed its statutes. (see http:\/\/www.avner-falk.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Border-Symbolism-1989.pdf<\/a>).
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People who do not have clear and firm internal boundaries badly need external ones. Borders, walls and fences defend the self against the unbearable anxiety aroused by the wish for fusion with the other and the fear of loss of self and loss of being through that fusion at the same time. Donald Trump\u2019s internal boundaries are fluid. He does not have a clear sense of self, his self identity is diffuse, he has different selves at different times, and he needs external walls to defend himself against anxiety. Hence Trump Tower, a well-guarded fortress that separates and shields him from the external world. Trump\u2019s powerful desire to build a wall separating the U.S. from Mexico comes from the same wellspring: in his unconscious mind, America is himself, and Mexico is his other, perhaps his engulfing mother, who threatens to engulf him by sending in \u201cbad hombres.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Gambling as the Quest for Mother\u2019s Love<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump is a compulsive high-risk gambler. He made most of his enormous fortune by gambling on high-risk business ventures. Gamblers, however, are self-destructive. The gambler wants to force Fate, who is an obvious mother figure (the Romans called her Fortuna<\/em>), to love him: he says to her, \u201cIf you love me, let me win!\u201d We shall see below what this has to with Donald\u2019s relationship to his mother. Most gamblers ultimately lose and destroy themselves. In late1989 or early 1990 Trump made a high-risk business deal with another compulsive gambler, the Japanese billionaire Akio Kashiwagi (1938-1992), who later sued Trump for reneging on his obligations under their deal. Two years later Kashiwagi was murdered by the Yakuza in Tokyo. To this day, twenty-four years later, the Japanese authorities do not know who ordered this assassination. (see http:\/\/www.politico.com\/magazine\/story\/2016\/02\/japanese-gambler-donald-trump-213635<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Donald Trump clearly has fantasies of omnipotence. During the third presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton described the sort of Supreme Court judges she would nominate, Trump said he would appoint pro-life judges. The U.S. political and judicial system, however, only gives the president the power to nominate judges and submit their nominations to Congress, who votes on their nomination; it does not give the President the power to appoint those justices. (see http:\/\/www.lifenews.com\/2016\/10\/19\/donald-trump-i-am-pro-life-and-i-will-be-appointing-pro-life-judges-to-the-supreme-court\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

One of Trump\u2019s younger friends at NBC was Billy Bush, who produced the weekday television entertainment news program Access Hollywood and later hosted the Today show. In 2005 Trump and Bush worked together on an Access Hollywood episode that indirectly promoted Trump\u2019s show The Apprentice by including his cameo appearance on an episode of an NBC soap opera, Days of Our Lives. As the two men rode a bus with the show\u2019s name written across its side to the set of Days of Our Lives to videotape Trump\u2019s cameo appearance, Bush secretly recorded Trump bragging to him about his sexual exploits with women, including grabbing their genitals: \u201cThey\u2019ll let you do anything if you\u2019re a star!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2016, just before Donald Trump\u2019s second televised debate with Hillary Clinton, Billy Bush destroyed Trump\u2019s political career by releasing the tape of their \u201clewd\u201d conversation on that bus, which Donald Trump belittled during that debate as \u201clocker room talk.\u201d He lied to the moderator, Anderson Cooper, who had asked him whether he had done the things he had bragged about to Bush, by quickly saying \u201cNo, I have not\u201d while speaking of his \u201cgreat respect for women.\u201d Lying seems to come naturally to Trump; he seems to believe that he is entitled to do anything and everything he pleases, including lying in public. (see http:\/\/time.com\/4529433\/inside-donald-trump-total-meltdown\/<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

This could not have been accidental. Trump, who had humiliated countless other people, must have offended Bush as well. The release of the tape was a suicide-bomber act, however: Bush himself was suspended by NBC for it two days later. (see https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Billy_Bush#Suspension_for_lewd_Trump_conversation<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

President Donald J. Trump<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Let me recap my thesis about the development Trump\u2019s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. The child Donny had a \u201csmart,\u201d cold, manipulative, narcissistic mother, herself deprived of maternal love, who could not give him what the British psychoanalyst Donald Woods Winnicott called \u201cgood enough\u201d mothering. Mary saw herself in her \u201csmart\u201d little Donny as in a mirror and could not let him separate and individuate from her, grow, and be himself; to her he was part of herself, and she could not bear to lose him. This \u201csymbiotic\u201d or fusional relationship caused him unbearable feelings of non-being; his unconscious defense against them was to split his inner image of his mother into two, the all-good mother who nursed him and took care of him and the all-bad one for whom he did not exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

The False Self<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Many Trump watchers have observed that Trump wears a perceptual psychological mask that conceals his true thoughts and feelings from others. In his \u201cTrump Time Capsule\u201d series in The Atlantic, <\/em>James Fallows distinguished between the \u201cgenuine\u201d Donald Trump and the \u201cfake\u201d one. He wrote, \u201cTrump the movie critic, the wheeler-dealer, as well as the X-rated media guru, is the genuine<\/em> article, while Trump the religious, pro-life, GOP conservative, redneck, Tea Partier … is fake<\/em>. An act. A stunt. A last gasp for something big before its too late […] He is a lifelong New Yorker, city slicker, playboy, Democrat … now playing a character from rural Mississippi(?) … or West Virginia. Other days he\u2019s Archie Bunker, in a one-man play, on stage. The crowd loves him!\u201d In fact, as have seen, Donald Trump can be Dr. Donald today and Mr. Trump tomorrow; at the same time, Donald Trump often assumes a self that is not his true one; Donald Winnicott has called it \u201cthe false self.\u201d (see\u00a0http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/notes\/2016\/10\/trumps-rosebud-what-happened\/505418\/<\/a>). <\/span><\/p>\n

The boy Donny Trump developed his \u201cfalse self\u201d in order to win the maternal love that he could not have but could not live without. Donny\u2019s perfectionist, demanding father exacerbated this situation. Donny outwardly complied with his parents\u2019 expectations of him, while inwardly filled with narcissistic rage at both of them. The inner conflict exploded when he attacked his music teacher as a teenager; perhaps his parents\u2019 harsh voices and fights had not been music to his ears.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Donny grew up and became Donald J. Trump, other women unconsciously took the place of his mother in his unconscious mind. He repeatedly fell in love with a cold, beautiful woman whom he idealized, but later became deeply disillusioned with her, hated her, and left her. Needless to say, the narcissistic Donald is no less cold than his mother was; and even though he called his current wife, Melania, \u201cvery warm\u201d in their joint 60 Minutes<\/em> interview, Melania seems cold and distant in her public appearances. Donald calls himself \u201csmart, tough, strong and confident,\u201d while Melania called him \u201cstrong, tough, and confident\u201d \u2014 the very terms she used about herself; they seem to have a fusional relationship, just like Donny\u2019s early relationship with his mother. Yet under the surface of harmony lie rage, unhappiness and suffering. (see http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/60-minutes-donald-trump-family-melania-ivanka-lesley-stahl\/<\/a>).
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The most alarming thing about President Donald Trump, however, is not his narcissism, his sadism, or his misogyny. It is his high-risk gambling, his need to defeat his opponents and to win no matter what, his need to defeat, shame and humiliate others at all cost, his splitting of his world into the all-good \u201cus\u201d and the all-bad \u201cthem,\u201d his lack of empathy, his inability to treat other people as individuals in their own right rather than as objects to be exploited, his lack of inner boundaries and controls. All of these could bring the United States into armed conflict not only with Iran but also with nuclear powers like North Korea, China, even Russia, and the dire consequences for our entire species are not hard to see.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Extracted from a full-length psychobiography in progress]   Donald Trump is Mentally Disturbed but also Emotionally Resilient On April 6, 1990, Paula Zahn of CBS television interviewed Donald Trump on the occasion of the opening of his new casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Taj Mahal, which Trump called \u201cthe largest casino in the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1031","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.AVNERFALK.NET\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}