Mike, I couldn’t agree more. After a year of Substack articles where I calll out both Trump and the Academic Left, I’m left with the exasperating fact that some percentage of our fellow citizens engage so heavily in motivated reasoning that they don’t see what is obvious to anyone with half a foot in reality: that Trump’s only motivation is quieting the narcissistic chaos in his head that screams at him (in his father’s voice, I’m guessing): “Donald, you worthless piece of shit! Do something to prove how important you are!” Maybe it was growing up with a parent who was a narcissist that gave me a bead on this sad clown when he was still just a laughable game show host who bought his own grift, but we’ve all had enough time to see his pathology that anyone who doesn’t see can safely be accused of bad faith.
However, while you are 100% right about his motivation, I would suggest that the explanation of *why* he does these things is more complicated. I suspect that while he does these things for the supply, he has also learned that they work to get him out of trouble. Because he’s never faced any material consequences for his behavior, he’s learned that he is unlikely to pay a price. When you have 30% or so of the population who will warrant *anything* you do and another 20% who give you unwarranted benefit of the doubt, he’s learned over and over that he’ll never have to hear, “Donald, you pathetic sack of shit—everyone sees through your ‘big strong man’ charade. Your weakness pours out of every word you say and every action you take.” So, while he’s not playing chess of any dimensionality and this isn’t a strategy of any sort, we can blame the lack of critical thinking skills and emotional sophistication of a surprising number of our fellow citizens for letting it get to this point. In a more serious age (the one I thought we were still living in until 2016), Trump’s stupidity and obvious pathology would have stopped him in his first primary. But where we are today is as much (or more) the result of massive, social-media mediated delusion among Americans as it is Trump’s manifold pathologies. And the because of this lack of seriousness, the entire world is at risk of being downstream from a narcissistic collapse. I can tell you from experience, because none of us a real human being to him, Trump is entirely likely to hurt us all in ways that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago. People are going to suffer in material, devastating ways if he is not stopped.
I feel like a lot of people do know this, but we're not the ones with the kind of power or platform like the traditional media. I and many folks I know have said from the beginning that Trump does not have the intellectual capacity for chess and it should not be attributed to him. He is a man-boy looking for attention because that's what narcissists survive on. What people call distraction is him getting bored and acting like a toddler jumping up and down for attention, although the malignant part is what's so effing scary.
Some people take a lifetime to admit the disease they see in their loved ones. We are not geared to recognising it and then not geared to take evasive action - like getting the person the fuck out of our lives. For a long time it just looks like confidence. Fuck, fuck and more fuck.
At last — literate clarity about a psychological universe that is so without the requisite educated basis for most people to, well, 'get their heads around'. Explaining the invisible world of complex psychological mechanisms that drive behavior to a mostly psychologically illiterate society is damn near impossible. Yet, this piece cuts out the "can't you see this?!" frustration to bring clarity in language that informs every level of understanding. Phrased as I've not discovered in any clinical discussion or study I've encountered in my years of clinical and neurological research - and my own understanding is here distilled into greater awareness.
Donald does, and has always only ever done, whatever he thinks is best for him in the moment.
(Also, Prevost isn't really a USAian Pope, not from the perspective of the cardinals who elected him. After he was ordained as a priest, he spent most of his working life either in Peru or Rome, with only a few years in the United States. It's very relevant to understanding his papacy that he hasn't been immersed in US Catholicism and has seen the Church from outside that bubble but is still from the US: see, eg, https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3loqsfhswjk2r
I share your exasperation. The sanewashing is quite dangerous and pervades major media. Major media continues (11 years and counting) to struggle with its own cognitive dissonance, mostly born of convenience and laziness. Trump is transparent. Those who support him rationalize his behavior in order to justify their own beliefs and behavior, despite Trump’s obvious deviancy. So, it is an ecosystem functioning-- increasingly impermeable IMHO with each escalation.
I used to think there were more sane people in the world than deluded. Now, I think there are more deluded people than I ever imagined and a whole heap of folks who are perpetually dazed and confused. I'm worried.
The media and other formal power centers as a whole simply refuse to state what should be undeniable. Doing so calls far too much of their own project into play so it simply CAN NOT be.
They have a vested interest in not seeing. Not seeing protects both their status but perhaps more importantly their core understanding of reality and how that reality justifies them.
I also don't think djt can stand that the Pope is truly who he is. You're spot on with his increasing attacks leveled at Pope Leo. Personally, I couldn't be prouder as an American to claim Pope Leo as our deeper, better 'Statue of Liberty' Leadership.
The mainstream media, DNC are mealy-mouthed. Mary Trump often says It's impossible to negotiate with a malignant narcissist. And, placation is like blood to a vampire. Count Dracula has nothin' on trump.
💯 Bandy X. Lee et al. sounded the alarm years ago about Trump’s dangerousness. What is a related fact is that many of his sychophants are dangerous - not as dangerous for obvious reasons, but dangerous nonetheless.
I would posit that Stephen Miller is more dangerous than Trump. As Trump's lieutenant, he has all the power Trump has to make his will happen, is crueler and smarter than Trump, yet can hide behind Trump in a way that it looks as if Trump is making these things happen.
He is part of the antichrist regime and I am sure has the AC’s ear and pushes him toward much of this. They all feed the same way. Trump does…. Off sociopathy, chaos suffering, and bloodshed of others. Their souls have turned dark. There is no light in them.
We need to take a good, hard look at the cultural deficit we hold as a people to elect such a person. Twice. Almost 3 times! Until we elevate character strengths and prioritize education, we are at risk of continually rewarding reality TV politics and shunning true governance. We must get to the root of our problems as a people and work towards cultural maturation.
It’ll be vastly important to elevate public school education. Local elections matter the most. We must attack the issues from the grassroots level. In everyday conversations we will need to adhere to ethical norms and redirect speech and action that discounts basic decency. Silence is complicity.
A lot of people want to believe this is all "madman strategy", "3D chess" or whatever but then you see interviews with a lot of the people who've worked with rump, or work with him now and actually admire him, and even they will tell you: No, this is him, he's really an idiot.
And the "sanewashing" is not so much their attempt to say he is normal but their attempt to say it is normal for THEM to accept this.
I would say calling him merely an idiot is a form of sanewashing. You can be an idiot and be sane. It honestly doesn't take much intellect to be a good person in the world. Most of the basic moral lessons in life are things a 5-year-old can grasp. So idiot is simply the wrong category to place him in.
He is a malignant narcissist with ADHD, with no executive functioning (otherwise mentally healthy idiots still have executive functioning) who has nuclear launch authority.
The fact that he has been enabled to become POTUS, despite decades of evidence of his personal mental and emotional illness and consequent vicious criminal actions, should really be enough for even the most politically detached to clearly see the moral collapse within the heart of our present financial and societal infrastructures.
You are absolutely right. Until you properly know someone with a type B personality disorder you can’t understand that the only thing that matters to them is their emotional need in a specific moment and for that need to be met and satisfied immediately, no matter what. Nothing else exists. It is truly baffling and scary in equal measures.
Both things can be true at the same time, and [hear me out] I suggest they both are; It’s all part of the same broken neural pathways you correctly identify, and the high itself is a means of distraction — as is the distraction a means of the high — in multiple senses of the words.
In the reptilian midbrain of someone with an untreatable Cluster B personality disorder (e.g. malignant NPD or severe BPD with sadistic tendencies) the reaction to being cornered in the collapse of their sense-of-self is exactly as you described above—exactly as drug addicts react when the euphoria collapses and they’re cornered into the state of withdrawal—exposed for the self-destructive, meaningless, hollowed-out mess that they are.
They *instinctively* distract —both themselves and others around them— from their own worst addict behaviors & vulnerabilities. They deflect and shift blame. Their maladaptive behavioral excuse-making, insane rationalizing, and impulsive destructiveness directly corresponds: “splitting” and “idealization/devaluation” between best friends [enablers/suppliers/codependents] —vs— arch-enemies: [anyone who would stand in the way of that on-top-of-the-world high they get by numbing their internal pain again.]
It’s an instinctual distraction from having attention shown on their ugliness— by projecting their own ugliness outward, blaming every problem caused by their addiction on anyone / anything other than themselves and the addiction they are, deep down, singularly defined by.
That is indeed “distraction.” Not a thought-out, carefully calculated one, and certainly never a personally-beneficial one in any sense of long-term strategic advantage. It’s an animalistic, zero-cerebral-cortex-involved type of distraction…in the same way the euphoria of the next hit is distraction. It’s all reflexive reaction governed by the amygdala when the primitive brain shuts thinking off, switching into fight + flight … into lash-out/externalize + deflect/escape … into mug/steal/violently abuse + get that next fix…
The “distraction” is —in every sense— the same escapism-seeking cyclical impulse back to the bigger hit, the higher high.
More succinctly I always found the distraction to be an artifact of his core needs. Not intentional per se but functionally not that different. That people who should know better need it to be part of a deeper rationale strategy is much more about them than him.
One consistent, informed expert source we shouldn't neglect to mention is Mary Trump.
Your words validate that I am not insane, that what I see as true is reality, that my heartache is real.
No heartache here ... only seething anger and disgust.
Mike, I couldn’t agree more. After a year of Substack articles where I calll out both Trump and the Academic Left, I’m left with the exasperating fact that some percentage of our fellow citizens engage so heavily in motivated reasoning that they don’t see what is obvious to anyone with half a foot in reality: that Trump’s only motivation is quieting the narcissistic chaos in his head that screams at him (in his father’s voice, I’m guessing): “Donald, you worthless piece of shit! Do something to prove how important you are!” Maybe it was growing up with a parent who was a narcissist that gave me a bead on this sad clown when he was still just a laughable game show host who bought his own grift, but we’ve all had enough time to see his pathology that anyone who doesn’t see can safely be accused of bad faith.
However, while you are 100% right about his motivation, I would suggest that the explanation of *why* he does these things is more complicated. I suspect that while he does these things for the supply, he has also learned that they work to get him out of trouble. Because he’s never faced any material consequences for his behavior, he’s learned that he is unlikely to pay a price. When you have 30% or so of the population who will warrant *anything* you do and another 20% who give you unwarranted benefit of the doubt, he’s learned over and over that he’ll never have to hear, “Donald, you pathetic sack of shit—everyone sees through your ‘big strong man’ charade. Your weakness pours out of every word you say and every action you take.” So, while he’s not playing chess of any dimensionality and this isn’t a strategy of any sort, we can blame the lack of critical thinking skills and emotional sophistication of a surprising number of our fellow citizens for letting it get to this point. In a more serious age (the one I thought we were still living in until 2016), Trump’s stupidity and obvious pathology would have stopped him in his first primary. But where we are today is as much (or more) the result of massive, social-media mediated delusion among Americans as it is Trump’s manifold pathologies. And the because of this lack of seriousness, the entire world is at risk of being downstream from a narcissistic collapse. I can tell you from experience, because none of us a real human being to him, Trump is entirely likely to hurt us all in ways that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago. People are going to suffer in material, devastating ways if he is not stopped.
I feel like a lot of people do know this, but we're not the ones with the kind of power or platform like the traditional media. I and many folks I know have said from the beginning that Trump does not have the intellectual capacity for chess and it should not be attributed to him. He is a man-boy looking for attention because that's what narcissists survive on. What people call distraction is him getting bored and acting like a toddler jumping up and down for attention, although the malignant part is what's so effing scary.
Some people take a lifetime to admit the disease they see in their loved ones. We are not geared to recognising it and then not geared to take evasive action - like getting the person the fuck out of our lives. For a long time it just looks like confidence. Fuck, fuck and more fuck.
At last — literate clarity about a psychological universe that is so without the requisite educated basis for most people to, well, 'get their heads around'. Explaining the invisible world of complex psychological mechanisms that drive behavior to a mostly psychologically illiterate society is damn near impossible. Yet, this piece cuts out the "can't you see this?!" frustration to bring clarity in language that informs every level of understanding. Phrased as I've not discovered in any clinical discussion or study I've encountered in my years of clinical and neurological research - and my own understanding is here distilled into greater awareness.
Thank you
Well done.
Donald does, and has always only ever done, whatever he thinks is best for him in the moment.
(Also, Prevost isn't really a USAian Pope, not from the perspective of the cardinals who elected him. After he was ordained as a priest, he spent most of his working life either in Peru or Rome, with only a few years in the United States. It's very relevant to understanding his papacy that he hasn't been immersed in US Catholicism and has seen the Church from outside that bubble but is still from the US: see, eg, https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3loqsfhswjk2r
https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3m3eovdxmwk2z )
I share your exasperation. The sanewashing is quite dangerous and pervades major media. Major media continues (11 years and counting) to struggle with its own cognitive dissonance, mostly born of convenience and laziness. Trump is transparent. Those who support him rationalize his behavior in order to justify their own beliefs and behavior, despite Trump’s obvious deviancy. So, it is an ecosystem functioning-- increasingly impermeable IMHO with each escalation.
I used to think there were more sane people in the world than deluded. Now, I think there are more deluded people than I ever imagined and a whole heap of folks who are perpetually dazed and confused. I'm worried.
The media and other formal power centers as a whole simply refuse to state what should be undeniable. Doing so calls far too much of their own project into play so it simply CAN NOT be.
They have a vested interest in not seeing. Not seeing protects both their status but perhaps more importantly their core understanding of reality and how that reality justifies them.
Yep. Mike, my observations, too...
I also don't think djt can stand that the Pope is truly who he is. You're spot on with his increasing attacks leveled at Pope Leo. Personally, I couldn't be prouder as an American to claim Pope Leo as our deeper, better 'Statue of Liberty' Leadership.
The mainstream media, DNC are mealy-mouthed. Mary Trump often says It's impossible to negotiate with a malignant narcissist. And, placation is like blood to a vampire. Count Dracula has nothin' on trump.
Thanks for your writing, Mike!
💯 Bandy X. Lee et al. sounded the alarm years ago about Trump’s dangerousness. What is a related fact is that many of his sychophants are dangerous - not as dangerous for obvious reasons, but dangerous nonetheless.
I would posit that Stephen Miller is more dangerous than Trump. As Trump's lieutenant, he has all the power Trump has to make his will happen, is crueler and smarter than Trump, yet can hide behind Trump in a way that it looks as if Trump is making these things happen.
He is part of the antichrist regime and I am sure has the AC’s ear and pushes him toward much of this. They all feed the same way. Trump does…. Off sociopathy, chaos suffering, and bloodshed of others. Their souls have turned dark. There is no light in them.
We need to take a good, hard look at the cultural deficit we hold as a people to elect such a person. Twice. Almost 3 times! Until we elevate character strengths and prioritize education, we are at risk of continually rewarding reality TV politics and shunning true governance. We must get to the root of our problems as a people and work towards cultural maturation.
100% agreed. But how? I see no light at the end of the dark tunnel.
It’ll be vastly important to elevate public school education. Local elections matter the most. We must attack the issues from the grassroots level. In everyday conversations we will need to adhere to ethical norms and redirect speech and action that discounts basic decency. Silence is complicity.
A lot of people want to believe this is all "madman strategy", "3D chess" or whatever but then you see interviews with a lot of the people who've worked with rump, or work with him now and actually admire him, and even they will tell you: No, this is him, he's really an idiot.
And the "sanewashing" is not so much their attempt to say he is normal but their attempt to say it is normal for THEM to accept this.
I would say calling him merely an idiot is a form of sanewashing. You can be an idiot and be sane. It honestly doesn't take much intellect to be a good person in the world. Most of the basic moral lessons in life are things a 5-year-old can grasp. So idiot is simply the wrong category to place him in.
He is a malignant narcissist with ADHD, with no executive functioning (otherwise mentally healthy idiots still have executive functioning) who has nuclear launch authority.
The fact that he has been enabled to become POTUS, despite decades of evidence of his personal mental and emotional illness and consequent vicious criminal actions, should really be enough for even the most politically detached to clearly see the moral collapse within the heart of our present financial and societal infrastructures.
Yes a decent but rather dim person would be far preferable in the role he is in.
As you say, he's not exactly Forrest Gump.
Agreed. But extreme understatement. Forrest Gump is no genius but in no way could ever be compared to the orange menace.
The infinite escalation treadmill continues. Can’t wait to get off.
You are absolutely right. Until you properly know someone with a type B personality disorder you can’t understand that the only thing that matters to them is their emotional need in a specific moment and for that need to be met and satisfied immediately, no matter what. Nothing else exists. It is truly baffling and scary in equal measures.
Both things can be true at the same time, and [hear me out] I suggest they both are; It’s all part of the same broken neural pathways you correctly identify, and the high itself is a means of distraction — as is the distraction a means of the high — in multiple senses of the words.
In the reptilian midbrain of someone with an untreatable Cluster B personality disorder (e.g. malignant NPD or severe BPD with sadistic tendencies) the reaction to being cornered in the collapse of their sense-of-self is exactly as you described above—exactly as drug addicts react when the euphoria collapses and they’re cornered into the state of withdrawal—exposed for the self-destructive, meaningless, hollowed-out mess that they are.
They *instinctively* distract —both themselves and others around them— from their own worst addict behaviors & vulnerabilities. They deflect and shift blame. Their maladaptive behavioral excuse-making, insane rationalizing, and impulsive destructiveness directly corresponds: “splitting” and “idealization/devaluation” between best friends [enablers/suppliers/codependents] —vs— arch-enemies: [anyone who would stand in the way of that on-top-of-the-world high they get by numbing their internal pain again.]
It’s an instinctual distraction from having attention shown on their ugliness— by projecting their own ugliness outward, blaming every problem caused by their addiction on anyone / anything other than themselves and the addiction they are, deep down, singularly defined by.
That is indeed “distraction.” Not a thought-out, carefully calculated one, and certainly never a personally-beneficial one in any sense of long-term strategic advantage. It’s an animalistic, zero-cerebral-cortex-involved type of distraction…in the same way the euphoria of the next hit is distraction. It’s all reflexive reaction governed by the amygdala when the primitive brain shuts thinking off, switching into fight + flight … into lash-out/externalize + deflect/escape … into mug/steal/violently abuse + get that next fix…
The “distraction” is —in every sense— the same escapism-seeking cyclical impulse back to the bigger hit, the higher high.
More succinctly I always found the distraction to be an artifact of his core needs. Not intentional per se but functionally not that different. That people who should know better need it to be part of a deeper rationale strategy is much more about them than him.
The man who holds all the cards... in chess game.