Dead-Enders
What’s More Dangerous Than a Cornered Malignant Narcissist? Three of Them.
Three Malignant Narcissists
The world has never been in more danger—not because Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk are succeeding but because they are failing.
Musk is losing his money—and his connection to reality.
Putin is losing to Ukraine—and the loyalty of his people.
Trump is losing to Iran—and at everything else.
Each of these men is very different with radically divergent beliefs but they share a rare trait—a constellation of psychopathologies referred to by many psychologists and psychiatrists as malignant narcissism. This is not a quirk of personality; it defines them. As Erich Fromm, who initially coined the term, described it, malignant narcissism is a combination of narcissism, psychopathy, sadism, and paranoia.
The world has seen these kinds of men before, and the world has paid the price for allowing them to rise to power—and ultimately to fail spectacularly. But the world has not seen three of them with this much power at so much risk of losing it at the same time. Two men who control the vast majority of the world’s nuclear weapons, and the world’s richest man who controls a great deal of global infrastructure and influence, are all in danger of collapsing at once.
The scenario is made even more perilous because these three authoritarians have historically been allies. The increasing divide between them makes them less effective collectively but far more volatile as individuals.
Three Quagmires
Sadism is “the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being… the transformation of impotence into omnipotence.”
—Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973
Iran
Trump’s war on Iran is not just a quagmire; it is metaphysical trap. He cannot win militarily but he also cannot lose psychologically. He is unable to process defeat so, as a sadist, he converts pain into winning.
“They haven't received enough pain yet.”
Donald Trump, Axios, 7/23/26
Trump has no good options remaining. He blundered through every solution except the two worst: 1) accept an even worse humiliation than the first surrender; or 2) commit a potentially existential error by launching a ground invasion of Iran. While Trump can continue to deplete our ammunition with his fruitless bombing campaign for a little longer, so far he has only managed to kill more Americans, punish our own allies, and endanger the global petroleum supply.
Ukraine
Similarly, Vladimir Putin’s “three day war” on Ukraine is now 4 1/2 years old. His own narcissism and totalist belief in Russia’s destiny to be restored as an Eurasian empire has steered him into creating his own existential quagmire.
Putin has essentially the same two choices as Donald Trump: radically escalate with a national conscription or face humiliating surrender.
Zelenskyy has effectively proven to Putin—and crucially to the Russian people—that Ukraine can project military power into any region of Russia it wants. Drone attacks have destroyed half the warehouses of Wildberries, the “Amazon of Russia,” which has been increasingly used as a military supply chain. Nearly every major oil plant in Russia has been hit. The skies of Moscow and St. Petersburg—both cities Kash Patel intends to visit—have been repeatedly darkened.
Like Trump, Putin’s reaction to his losses is to try to reestablish dominance through sadism—by bombing Ukrainian hospitals, apartment buildings, and day care centers.
Elononomics
Elon Musk has a different kind of self-created quagmire. His empire has started to crack, and not in a small way. As predicted, both Tesla and SpaceX are struggling to justify their absurd stock prices. Tesla came in with a terrible quarter, in which they lost money despite growing revenue. And SpaceX, which has never made money without government subsidies, has lost 50% of its value from the peak and continuing to drop.
Musk has also had a string of such extreme racist, bizarre behavior that it has started to get the attention of even mainstream publications. After his months-long effort to discredit Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey for hiring a Black woman to play Helen of Troy, the film is set to be Nolan’s biggest yet. This led Musk to pledge to make a new “historically accurate” (ie. white) version of the story built with Grok.
The Economist, which published parts of an extended interview with Musk on Thursday, also exposed how extreme and unconnected to reality he has become. Musk was agitated, aggressive, and disrespectful. When asked how many people he thought would be killed by his cuts at USAID, Musk threw up a sign used by white supremacists and sneered “Zero” several times—before blaming Bill Gates and “NGOs.”
In the clip below, Musk predicts that within ten years, humans will be “like chimpanzees” compared to “superintelligent AIs” who “will be in charge” of us. He admits that there is a “10-20% chance” that killer robots will wipe out humanity in the interim, but he’s decided—for everyone—to just “roll with it.”
This kind of techno-apocalyptic lunacy can slip by when you’re making people money, but it’s far harder when you’re making people feel like bagholders.
Musk’s only real options are to get a bailout from Donald Trump or to merge Tesla into SpaceX which would make him the unaccountable sovereign of a multi-trillion dollar company—that still loses money. It would just concentrate his losses into a single target. There would be nowhere left to run.
In summary:
Putin can’t win.
Trump can’t win.
Elon’s money is a mirage.
But malignant narcissism is a bottomless pit. These men have no morals, no empathy, and no humanity. No transgression of laws or norms will stop them from trying to keep their status. And no amount of bloodshed will appeal to their “better angels”—because they have none.
Cascade
It is unique in modern history to have a world so thoroughly dominated by malignant narcissists. While we’ve had plenty of prominent ones across the ages, we seem to have reached a kind of peak narcissism which the world must confront. Otherwise, we will fall into a kind of global neo-feudalist techno-fascism that extracts more and more from the population—while the elites get more and more untouchable.
However, the three quagmires bedeviling Trump, Musk, and Putin are threatening to create a more fundamental problem for them. A very good case is being made against the core ideology of all three men—dominance as the only true path to power. Elon’s case for financial and racial dominance, Trump’s case for his own personal dominance, and Putin’s case for imperialist dominance, are all being shown to be fraudulent.
This threat to their collective sovereignty is compounded by the significant overlap in America between people who have believed all three of their core ideas. MAGA and Musk’s cult have been led to believe Putin is a great leader. MAGA was led to believe crypto and Musk meant infinite wealth. The technology gurus were led to believe Trump was good for them and their industry. And so on.
But as the realization hits that any one of these men are a failure, questions may naturally arise about the others:
If Russia is such a failure in Ukraine, why have Trump and Musk been so admiring of Putin?
If Musk is losing me money, why did Donald Trump give him so much power?
If Trump can’t win a war against Iran that he said he already won, why should we trust him about anything else?
This may create a cascade of realizations, or at a minimum raise more doubts about all three men at once. This is how the fall of personality cults often work: one insight that breaks through may lead to many others. Once it starts, it may be impossible to stop.
Desperate men mean desperate times. Malignant narcissists will consume anything and anyone to stay in power—including their own people, or each other.
Putin extracts military power from the bodies of his own people
Trump extracts personal aggrandizement from America’s resources
Musk extracts radicalization, influence, and money from his 240M followers
Of course, all of this consumption of people and resources is a dead end. But these are the ultimate dead-enders—messianic demagogues with nothing inside and everything to lose.
Malignant narcissists don’t believe anyone else deserves to enjoy life, or even to exist without them—so they always try to take the world with them when the end comes.
As I was finishing this article Friday night, at the second attempt at the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner, Trump said this as if to demonstrate:
But you people have no idea how lucky you are when I’m gone. You’re all going to be broke. Your business model is going to be finished. No, it’s true. When I’m not around, you’re going to be broke. There’s not going to be anybody to report on. Nobody gives a damn about anybody else.
He means it. Trump would prefer that when he goes, everyone is miserable—or dead.
The greatest challenge to the survival of the human race is preventing the rise of the most dangerous psychopathologies to the most powerful positions in the world. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before a malignant narcissist succeeds in making themselves the last one—by taking us all with them.
“Power without love is reckless and abusive.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.
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What I've thought about a lot in recent years is just how vulnerable, codependent, and ill prepared a majority of humanity proves to be with regard to these narcissists. Despite plenty of examples throughout modern history, as a species we seem hell-bent on falling prey to these pathetic worms again and again.
Honestly, I believe we should be introducing all of our children to psychology and teaching them about these dangerous personality disorders in grade school. Prepare them to recognize the signs, understand the danger, and possess the skills to manipulate and overpower them.
What's really telling is that the narcissists in states like mine here in Florida apparently recognize the threat posed to them by an educated populace, specifically one which recognizes them for who and what they really are. That's why the state has been eliminating psych and philosophy courses in classrooms and colleges throughout Florida. After all, we can't very well fight back against an enemy when we fail to even recognize that they are an enemy...
It feels like someone simultaneously opened all the zoo cages housing malignant narcissists, including Netanyahu and Thiel, and set them free upon the world, to inflict maximum destruction on civilization.
If we are not prepared to collectively and decisively rebel, our only hollow comfort in surrender will be the knowledge that they will eventually turn against each other.