Tell us something new! This has been pretty obvious (even to a layman) since day one of his term. The man is just not fit for the office of president, full stop!
As someone that has had to work closely for several years with a person that has NPD, these bullet points are easier said than done. Basically, the only way to deal with their ego is to fully submit to them. Give up your own sense of self, put your principles aside, and become their narcissistic supply. And as soon as you slip up, you will find yourself the target of their narcissistic rage. Over time they will work to erode your self-esteem and sense of self-worth.
I can not stress how insidiously manipulative people with NPD are, and how much they screw with the psyche of those around them. Projection, gas-lighting, deflection, and other anti-social behaviors are their normal. They don’t play by conventional social rules, and regularly use people up and then discard them when they are no longer deemed useful. While this may sound like hyperbole, I assure you that it is not as I have seen and experienced this first hand. And what you see Trump doing reflects this same behavior. I have no doubt he has NPD as well.
People with NPD almost never get professional help. They are rarely ever convinced that there is anything wrong with them, and they will always feel and portray that they themselves are the victim in any situation. This is part of what allows them to get away with whatever atrocities they commit. However it is the victims of narcissistic abuse that are the ones that end up needing and receiving professional mental health treatment.
After my experience with this person, I truly hope I never have to deal with anyone like that again for the rest of my life.
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The US has bred selfish “I want it all and deserve it” types since we first had an entire continent to remorselessly annex. He is the cream of that crop. No fiber; all cream.
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Presidents wield power differently. Some seek consensus or unity, while others will use every tool available to them to pursue their agenda. There are a whole slough of conventions and norms that the POTUS has traditionally respected, but Trump is now flaunting those conventions.
I don’t know anyone who is under the illusion that America would suddenly move toward democratic socialism if Sanders or Warren were elected. But if you had to pick one elected politician to start that movement, surely it would be the President?
Any bureaucracy has a lot of internal inertia, though I’d also say that even if it has been self-operating, the American state has changed in very tangible ways under Trump.
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Oh, I’ve been there myself. My stepmother was like that, and I’m not the only one who thought she had undiagnosed NPD. Everything you say is true, and it was even worse for my sister. These people are absolute horrors.
I finally made the break with her a few months before my dad died, due to a crisis situation where she was endangering him. I hadn’t seen those bullet points, just read a few articles on NPD that should have been illustrated with her photo. I let her know exactly how I felt, how disgusted I was by her treatment of my father, and that I was done with her. This was after years of her rotten behaviour, and it’s been a complete relief not having to deal with her directly in the years since.
I can’t recommend following those steps enough if you can, but if the person is a family member like my stepmother or a manager at work it can be very difficult.
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That ignores a lot of the very real, very serious, very long-lasting harm that Trump is causing. Diplomatic and economic relationships that may take decades to rebuild. Countless families torn apart, countless childhoods lost forever. Supreme Court appointments that will impact human rights for generations. People getting fucking murdered in the streets as a direct result of the Presidents’ words and actions. The list goes on and on.
And that’s supposing things don’t get worse. In the current sociopolitical environment a full-on civil war is less far-fetched than we like to suppose.
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He has done much to destroy the already much eroded American “brand.” Other authoritarian leaders can point to him and say “And how is that DEMOCRACY working for you NOW?”
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And it’s usually based on some sort of contextual criteria, too, what is being a proper human and what isn’t. But really, humanity is whatever it is that humans do, good and bad.
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It is true that neither I nor anyone I know personally has had their life dramatically changed by Trump’s bureaucratic activities. And I know a lot of people who are marginalized in all sorts of ways, because of gender, class, immigration status, etc, and we talk a lot about politics, so I expect I would notice. But maybe I am just oblivious or don’t know the right people. Has your life been dramatically changed by Trump’s bureaucratic activities? I would like to know (in earnest) how.
I should stress that I’m not talking about his symbolic activities, because that has definitely significantly changed my life and the lives of people I know. I know of people who have lost their jobs, been attacked in the street, and charged with felonies as a pretty direct result of his mainstreaming of far-right and racist ideology. I know people who’ve been affected by local officials who have taken terribly oppressive action because of inspiration by Trump, rather than federal directive.
I should also stress that I don’t overlook things like ICE, and that while I know people who are terrified of ICE, they were in pretty much the same situation before Trump took office. In fact, many people I know were either deported or forced to “self-deport” well before the presidential election. The symbolism of Trump’s open xenophobia is overwhelming and horrible, but his rate of deportations of real people are actually lower than Obama’s. Obviously this doesn’t mean that Trump is more humane than Obama, it probably means that the machinery of ICE is primarily influenced by forces other than the president. I care a lot about stopping deportation, which is why I want us to try to recognize the forces which are actually driving it.
Maybe we’re just thinking about this differently, but to me that seems entirely symbolic.
This also doesn’t change life for us in an immediate way, but I can see the argument that the Supreme Court has real long-term power. I’m inclined to agree there.
That’s what I’m getting at: Presidents don’t start movements, they reflect them. The fact that a deranged slavery-apologist Mad King of a president can’t return us all to slavery is a Good Thing, but it also means that we the people are stuck with all the responsibility for how things are actually going. If we want socialism, we need to start a movement that can make whoever is president fall in line.
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Indeed.
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This doesn’t surprise me. It’s that they want their order to reign and not the order which is coming about as demographics shift. If you look at age of Trump voters they skew toward the Baby Boomers more so than they do any other demographic aside from no college education. They’re scared of folks like me who are heading to my forties and not straight and not cis and not an evangelical and don’t like the same things they do (Harley bikes, Charlie Brown, etc). They’re mad too cause the world ain’t gonna look like theirs did when they’re gone or nearly gone. They demand stasis on top of order.
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Trump is “not well”? You mean mentally? Well, that’s not news. I was hoping you were going to disclose some physical illness, perhaps connected to his morbid obesity, ideally something that would be physically incapacitating enough to remove him from office in the very near future.
Sadly, Trump proves that no Republican President can be mentally ill enough for his own party to admit that he’s unfit for office. Please don’t say Pence would be just as bad; he wouldn’t be, because he has no ideas of his own, and as a charisma-free zone he is unelectable, so he wouldn’t be around for long.
Here’s hoping for a debilitating stroke, a fat-clogged coronary artery requiring immediate surgery and lengthy recuperation, or an acceleration in the pace of the man’s already all-too obvious progressive dementia.
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I think the word you are looking for is reactionary. In the summer of 2016 I took a road trip to the Yukon and Alaska. Like most people at the time I thought the chances of a Trump presidency were slim to none. On the road from Whitehorse to Haines I picked up a couple of hitchhikers on their way to a wedding. They invited me to crash the party, with the blessing of the bride and groom, who I met when I dropped them off. The wedding was a marvellous storybook affair, held on an outdoor movie set, with live bluegrass, craft beer on tap, lovely welcoming folks, the whole hipster shebang. At some point, for some reason, probably because I was alone and a little older than most guests, a visiting relative from Ohio (?) singled me out for political interrogation. “What do you think of Trump?” he asked, apropos of nothing. “I think he’s unfit for the job on every level”, was my reply, to which his eyes flashed and his lip curled in barely-concealed anger…“We had to listen to a black man for eight years, now it’ll be a woman…next thing you know it’ll be the gays! Over my dead body!”…Talk about a buzzkill. I walked away and never quite regained my stride that night. Even then it felt like a bad omen but I’m sensitive like that. Back home, when the election results came in that November I thought immediately of that racist uncle, and was struck, and continue to be struck, by the sheer injustice of the fact that he and people like him now run the country, and not the tolerant, peaceful, happy folks that were by far the majority at that wedding that had so graciously welcomed a stranger.
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I’d go a step further and ask (again), why did anyone think this person was so worthy of attention in the first place? (I’d have heard of him around the same age and time that you mentioned.)
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The cream rises to the top.
So does the scum.
– Wellington’s Law of Command
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Right, and those bullet points are only for people that don’t have the option to distance themselves from the individual because it is a work or family situation. The actual first line of defense is to not just walk away from them, but to run. The problem is that they are frequently very charismatic and it sometimes takes a while to figure out what they are. And by then you might be already be roped into a bad situation.
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I don’t know if we can assume Trump is mentally unwell. Is he licking doorbells for hours? Even that is not really an indicator of someone’s mental state. Assuming even the slightest mental aberration is a good way to get your comment deleted.
I agree, but I also seem to recall that pet experts suggest putting the dog’s nose in the shit is ineffective. I figure some dogs would like it, and others might not but would still have no idea why it was being done. I figure that Trump supporters subjected to an analogous process would react in much the same ways.
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Which raises another interesting philosophical question: are dogs more, or less self-aware than Trump supporters?
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Good question. I dunno. I do know that they all listen to the same whistles and react in the same mindless (Pavlovian?) way.
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