The President Is Psychotic
Donald Trump has irretrievably lost his connection to the objective world.
“Psychosis is a state of absolute narcissism, one in which the person has broken all connection with reality outside.”
— Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man, 1964
Donald Trump is psychotic. This is not an epithet or an insult. I mean that he has literally lost his connection to the objective world. He has collapsed into himself, and he has taken his regime, and his nation, with him.
Trump lives in an alternate reality constructed by his own delusions—and he expects everyone to live in it with him. No amount of evidence or factual information will change his mind.
For example, on Monday, the president was asked about DC Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a long-time Trump zealot, dropping frivolous charges on Olympian David Hearn for alleged vandalism of the Reflecting Pool. What erupted was eight minutes of pure grandiose delusions, a fantasy created by his own psyche. It began this way:
“Jeanine Pirro made a mistake. It was vandalism. I just told you we did, I think, 78. One of the things was the reflecting pool, hasn’t worked since 1922, because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it’s the largest longest pool ever, all that. The concept is beautiful, but it always leaked because of the size, because of maintenance, whatever. But it was built in 1922, and from the day it was built, it like, Biden spent $58 million. Barack Hussein Obama spent much more than that…“
Trump’s world has been sealed to protect his messianic ego which is being attacked on all sides by reality, and by his own cognitive decline. He was unable to conjure up the words “algae” or “video”—he called it “photographs of tapes, like moving cameras.”
His entire monologue was a string of emotional associations that touched on fireworks, bubblers, UFC, the grass (including a plug for Scott’s Miracle Gro), “8647,”Comey, Pirro’s “choking,” and a long section on how the “vandals” created the “slit” with “box cutters.”
“For the narcissistically involved person, there is only one reality, that of his own thought processes, feelings and needs.”
—Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955
At one point, the president veered off to mention his “new horses that just opened by the bridge.“ Trump’s absurd gilding of the Arts of War horses straddling the Arlington Memorial Bridge is perhaps the best visual metaphor for Trump’s psychosis. He has encased himself in gold—as if King Midas touched himself.
“You saw the new horses that just opened by the bridge with the gold. That was the way they were many years ago. Now they looked better than they did many years ago. But these monuments looked better than they did when they were originally built. Not just a little fix up. We made them the way they were plus, and everyone’s so proud.”
“Public figures… prevent the open outbreak of their potential psychosis by gaining the acclaim and consensus of millions of people.”
—Fromm, The Heart of Man
Trump focuses on gilding things, statues, arches, and ballrooms because he cannot cope with his failure—and because he senses he’s losing his hold on his own followers. “The acclaim and consensus of millions of people” is fading.
Over the weekend, to shore up his waning narcissistic supply, Trump proudly proclaimed on Truth Social that he won two golf tournaments at his own Bedminster Golf Club—and shot a 70, an absolutely preposterous score for an 80-year-old.
“Power not only corrupts but also magnifies existing psychopathologies … grandiosity may morph into grotesque delusions of grandeur.”
—Judith Herman and Bandy X. Lee, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
But crucially, Trump’s disorders do not just affect trivial matters like statues and golf. Trump’s delusions have made the United States more vulnerable than any time in many decades. He has depleted “virtually all” of the military’s long-range precision missiles on his fruitless war on Iran which “could limit the U.S. ability to deter adversaries, including Russia and China.”
U.S. has used ‘virtually all’ of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war: Reuters
This is a direct result of the same neuropsychological disorders that caused him to perseverate for eight minutes about the Reflecting Pool. He simply believes that he’s winning the war with Iran, and that if he just keeps doing the same thing over and over, the results will be different—which is the colloquial definition of insanity.
Donald Trump has always created his own reality to some extent. Malignant narcissists can be successful for this very reason.
“Paradoxically, the element of insanity in such leaders makes them also successful. It gives them that certainty and freedom from doubt which is so impressive to the average person.” — Fromm, The Heart of Man
However, this “freedom from doubt” is ultimately judged by objective reality. At some point, the story being told collides with the real world. If the narcissist cannot cope with reality, they will decompensate instead.
I have referred to the process of an entire government becoming welded to the disorders of a failing narcissistic leader as governmental decompensation. This is the current status of the United States. The entire regime has been unstable, incoherent, and dangerous because it is decompensating along with its failing autocrat.
But the leader and the regime have now lost any commitment to even acknowledging reality at all, because for Trump the real world does not exist—except as an external threat.
“By his power Caesar has bent reality to his narcissistic fantasies.”
—Fromm, The Heart of Man.
The hold Trump has on his inner circle and on his shrinking cult of followers has been one of the most extraordinary and important phenomena in modern history because it shows just how far people can be pushed with modern technology into what Freud called the “improbable.”
“A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it.”
—Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921
The president of the United States is clinically psychotic and he has transferred his pathologies to his regime—and to approximately 30% of Americans who have been entrained to mirror his insanity, regardless of the consequences.
“That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
—Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955
Donald Trump and his regime represent a global security emergency. He is out of options and he is out of his mind. He must be removed from office or he will cause a historic tragedy. It is the inevitable mathematics of his condition.
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The self interests of those who could remove him, mitigate against the action. They would rather see the house burn down, than use the fire extinguisher.
Trump is psychotic, but what then of his enablers and financiers .
MAGAts, well they are beyond redemption or reaching. It is a waste of time and money to try and deprogram a cult. Look at the far reaching success of religions.
Jim, reading today’s piece reminds me of that smug Kellyanne Conway touting “alternative facts, alternative reality”.. it seems we have arrived at this new reality…