“Mortification is when the narcissist sees himself through other people’s eyes.”
— Sam Vaknin, Narcissistic Mortification
In order to understand what’s happening to the president of the United States, we need to understand a few psychiatric terms related to malignant narcissism:
Narcissistic injury: any information, speech, interaction, or challenge that contradicts the narcissist’s grandiosity and self image. Usually transient.
Narcissistic collapse: the prolonged, increasing failure to extract sufficient narcissistic supply from surroundings to maintain the narcissist’s grandiose alternate reality.
Narcissistic mortification: a sudden public rejection, humiliation, or embarrassment in front of people the narcissist values as a source of narcissistic supply.
Narcissistic mortification is not just an injury to the ego, and it’s not the prolonged collapse we’ve been seeing in Trump since a few months into office. The verb to mortify has the root of “death” because the event is experienced as an existential mortal threat, not just to the ego, but to life itself.
The reason is that mortification forces the narcissist to see his own reflection in the mirror, and it terrifies him.
“The narcissist feels that all his efforts to sell himself, so to speak, all his fake it till you make it attempts, all his facade, the false self. It’s crumbling. It’s not working. There’s a loss of control over both internal objects and external objects or realities.”
—Sam Vaknin
When Donald Trump’s party lost the midterms in historic fashion, it genuinely shocked him because he has set up an insulated echo-chamber which reinforces his own delusions. He lives in a perpetual psychosis, reinforced by his coterie of sycophants—including Natalie Harp and Stephen Miller.
But it was impossible for Trump to escape the reality of this electoral defeat. It represented a full break of his grandiose bubble because he was forced to see himself as a failure. He could not escape that his power was diminished in the eyes of others.
“And so when there’s a mortification, the narcissist is forced to look in the mirror and not to filter what he sees, but to really, really confront the monster in the mirror, the Quasimodo that is staring back at him, the Hunchback, who is no longer in Notre Dame, but right here at home.
So when the narcissist is faced with this hideous, hideous representation, which is him, it produces disorientation.
But even more so, it produces terror.”
—Sam Vaknin
This terror is experienced as a deadly threat. It is the terror of a small child about to be beaten. It is an extinguishing fire.
That’s why Trump decided to have Stephen Miller, the most pathologically racist, combative, and antidemocratic operative in the White House become Chief of Staff—after Susie Wiles resigned. Miller’s entire being is pushing his brand of overt Nazism into the public.
This is how a narcissist reacts to mortification. He doesn’t adjust to new information; he scrambles to protect his reality, and destroy his enemies by any means necessary. He decompensates, often violently.
As further evidence of Trump’s decompensation, these two “Truths” from Donald Trump Saturday are the result of his panic to restore his sense of superiority and dominance in the face of searing shame.
Trump says any attempt by Democrats to investigate or impeach him or his “Donors” is the same as being “EXTORTIONISTS.” Trump says he’s “ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act immediately!” This is naked tinpot fascism, an absolute inversion of American jurisprudence, but it’s the only legal tool he has to left protect himself.
But perhaps the most astonishing announcement Trump has ever made is that he wants billionaire wife-beater and UFC president Dana White—“a violent Fighter and Warrior”—to become Press Secretary. Trump wants actual MMA fighters to come protect him in the White House. Dana White, apparently, has declined.
We are watching the death spiral of the American government, an organization which has totally disintegrated into the vortex of one man’s nihilism. Trump, Miller, and anyone left in the regime will never see an election as a meaningful repudiation, but as disloyalty by unimportant, treasonous losers. The worse the defeat, the greater the need to show dominance.
This terror of being seen as weak is the reason when rumors swirled that Pete Hegseth might be fired, Trump doubled down on him instead. This came after Hegseth posted a profoundly disturbing white nationalist rant daring Democrats to exercise their constitutional duty to oversee the Pentagon.
Miller and Hegseth see themselves as allies in prosecuting a racist holy war on Iran, so Trump’s desire to pull them both closer indicates he intends to escalate, not negotiate an end to hostilities.
The next two months will likely be among the most challenging in the history of the American republic because we are facing an intensifying, self-reinforcing system of violence, failure, and revenge. The more violence the regime wreaks, and the more rejection they get from the rest of us, the more it will double down. It is a mirror of a decompensating, mortified man.
"If you want to stimulate violence, the single most effective way to do it is to shame somebody." —Professor James Gilligan
Please join me and our amazing community at Noon PT / 3PM ET on Sunday for a Zoom to discuss the current precarious state of the state, narcissistic mortification, or anything else on your mind. It‘s always wide open for questions and comments.
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