The world has many conflict hotspots, but a narcissist like Trump would make them about himself, rather than what's good for
America…
Move over American Exceptionalism, and make way, if Trump
attains the White House, for Trump Exceptionalism. Make no mistake,
Trump’s presidential hopes are Trump hopes. Make America Great is
Trump-speak for Make Trump Important. Because as the image says, Trump
likes himself some himself.
In other words, the problem for America is that the Republican front
runner is a textbook narcissist, at least according to psychologists.
This is probably not a surprise even to laymen, but
Vanity Fair asked some professionals to weigh in with their opinion (perhaps because Vanity Fair
believes Trump could really be elected
president) and what we’re hearing in response is “Textbook narcissistic
personality disorder,” and “Remarkably narcissistic,” and “He’s so
classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops
because there’s no better example of his characteristics…he’s like a
dream come true.”
Or a nightmare:
That mental-health professionals are even willing to talk
about Trump in the first place may attest to their deep concern about a
Trump presidency. As Dr. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry and
the director of the master’s of bioethics program at Columbia
University, pointed out, the American Psychiatric Association declares
it unethical for psychiatrists to comment on an individual’s mental
state without examining him personally and having the patient’s consent
to make such comments. This so-called Goldwater rule arose after the
publication of a 1964 Fact magazine article in which psychiatrists were
polled about Senator Barry Goldwater’s fitness to be president. Senator
Goldwater brought a $2 million suit against the magazine and its
publisher; the Supreme Court awarded him $1 in compensatory damages and
$75,000 in punitive damages.
Scary stuff. And think about what it would mean to America to have
the Trump Cult of Personality in the White House. Look at all the
hotspots around the globe.
For Trump, these would not be about American interests, what’s best
for us and for our allies, but about being one of the winners.
There’s Iraq and Syria and Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and
the West Bank, there is Iran and Russia and the Baltic States and Russia
and the Ukraine and Russia in Syria and Russia and Turkey. As the
International Institute for Strategic Studies
tweeted,
Russia has violated every major European security agreement from UN charter to 1990 charter of Paris:
@IlvesToomas
Then there is the South China Sea with China versus just about everybody:
Don’t forget Korea, and Afghanistan, and India and Pakistan, tension
over natural resources in the Arctic, not to mention African hotspots
like Nigeria. The world is a mess. (a complete list of ongoing conflicts
can be found
here – as of November 26, “27 Countries and 191 between militias-guerrillas, separatist groups and anarchic groups involved”).
So yeah. We need a stable president to confront this mess, not a
president who is a man who can’t handle facts at the expense of his own
ego. The world is not black and white, either/or, or good vs. evil.
Reality has nuance that escapes most Republicans, but Trump sees the
world as defined by “winners” and “losers.”
Huffington Post talked to Joseph Burgo, psychologist and author of
The Narcissist You Know, who said,
“Narcissists like Trump… are constantly driven to prove
themselves among the ‘winners’ of the world, often by triumphing over or
denigrating other people as comparative ‘losers.’ If you examine
Trump’s language in his public statements as well as in the debates, you
will hear him proclaim his winner status again and again while sneering
at his detractors as losers.”
Vanity Fair
approached Licensed clinical social worker Wendy Terrie Behary, the author of
Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving with the Self-Absorbed, and she said,
“Narcissists are not necessarily liars, but they are notoriously
uncomfortable with the truth. The truth means the potential to feel
ashamed. If all they have to show the world as a source of feeling
acceptable is their success and performance, be it in business or sports
or celebrity, then the risk of people seeing them fail or squander
their success is so difficult to their self-esteem that they feel
ashamed. We call it the narcissistic injury. They’re uncomfortable with
their own limitations. It’s not that they’re cut out to lie, it’s just
that they can’t handle what’s real.”
So imagine Trump in any of these scenarios mentioned above. He
couldn’t confront a media lightweight like Kelly without losing
it, or even that antithesis of a journalist Todd. But let’s assume
for a moment that he could find his testicles long enough to face down
Putin. It’s a recipe for disaster. We need common sense and a realistic
appraisal of the situation and we’ll have instead two guys comparing the
lengths of their “penii.”
Or look at Trump confronting China over its economic policy, which
he has entirely wrong (perhaps an explanation for his
four corporate bankruptcies)
or over its military reach into the South China Sea against Vietnam,
the Philippines, or even its ongoing taunting of a re-arming Japan. The
United States has interests in this area. Is Trump going to turn this
into another case of Trump has to win because Trump is a winner? Or is
he going to engage in sober diplomacy? You tell me.
If psychologists are worried enough to speak up, we should heed their
fears. We should all be worried. The world is no place for Donald Trump
with a nuclear briefcase. The place for Trump is reality TV
where he can ruin only a few lives at a time, the lives of people who
have agreed to have their lives ruined by this narcissist. The entire
world should not be at his mercy. It’s great the Republican
establishment opposes him, but they created him and they’re opposing him
for all the wrong reasons.
As Vanity Fair’s Henry Alford
put it,
“the need to protect or exalt the self is at odds with the job
requirements of a president.” Obama understand this. Sure, presidents
have a care for their legacy. But Obama understands his duty is to the
nation and to the American people. Trump see’s his only duty as being to
himself. And if he got into the White House, there is nowhere in this
world any of us could hide from his fragile ego.
![Donald Trump appears at a fundraiser held onboard the USS Iowa. [MSNBC]](http://www.rawstory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Trump-092115-410x220.jpg)
