A while ago I posted the transcript of a video by Lucas Bean about how Donald Trump became the monster that he is. This video dives deeper into the man’s personality traits, and goes a long way to explaining why he acts the way he does. The transcription is mine, there may be errors but if they exist, they are minor. For a clear picture of what Trump is and how he got that way, it would be instructive to watch both of these videos together, or read both posts.

You can watch the original video here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/2456629481475440

Transcript:

I’ve been wondering for years why the Trump cult attracts the cruelest people in the country, so I decided to do some research on dark personality psychology to understand what’s actually going on here.

He mocked a disabled reporter on live tv and the cult loved it. He called for violence at his rallies and his followers cheered for it. Federal agents attacked non-violent people in the streets and his base defended it, and said they should have just complied.

This isn’t a political movement; this is a cult enjoying the suffering.

In 2013, researchers at the University of British Columbia, identified a specific cluster of dark personality traits that explain who gets drawn to hateful movements like this. They called it “the dark tetrad,” four dark personality profiles that love to watch people suffer. And when you map these four traits onto the Trump cult, everything that looked insane starts to make sense.

Trump didn’t accidentally attract these people, he built something specifically designed for these people.

Here are the four dark psychological traits that make up the Trump cult:

1: Narcissism

Trump supporters see themselves in Trump. He says what they think, he hates who they hate, he fights the people they’ve always wanted to see humiliated. So when you tell his followers that he’s a liar, they don’t hear facts, they hear an attack on themselves.

Psychologist Otto Kernberg at Cornell University spent decades studying why certain people can never admit they are wrong. He called it narcissism. Narcissism is the belief that you’re better than everyone else built on a lifetime of feeling insecure. The majority of narcissists were created by authoritarian parenting and abusive households, a home where being wrong was punished, where showing weakness was dangerous, where the only safe move was to comply, perform, and never question the person in charge.

That defense mechanism doesn’t turn off when they grow up, it just finds a new authority figure to organize itself under. The narcissistic brain doesn’t process criticism the way a normal brain does. Criticism isn’t information, it’s an attack on their entire identity. The brain registers criticism the same way it registers physical danger. Narcissists do no self-reflect, they retaliate and the longer they stay in the cult, the more they have to lose. Admitting Trump is a fraud means admitting they destroyed relationships and wasted years for nothing. The brain will do anything to avoid that pain. They destroy every relationship in their life defending a man who doesn’t even know their name and never will.

Trump knows exactly who these people are. He just put up a 22-foot gold statue of himself at a Miami golf club, he’s putting his face on the US passport, he’s building a 250-foot gold arch in Washington, D.C. He’s not governing the country, he’s performing for the people who need someone to worship. He didn’t create their narcissism, he just knew exactly how to feed it. And once a narcissist decides you are the enemy they will burn everything down before they admit that they were wrong.

2: Machiavellianism

Trump lies consistently and openly. His supporters know this and they love him more for it, because for them lying isn’t a character flaw, it’s proof that he’s smarter than everyone else who’s trying to stop him.

In 1970, psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Guise at Columbia University identified a personality type built entirely around manipulation and power and they called it Machiavellianism, the belief that the world is a game of power and the only real morality is winning that great game at all costs. Machiavellian fathers create Machiavellian children, homes filled with harsh punishment, emotionally cold parenting, and early exposure to manipulation. When a child grows up where trust is weakness and power is the only currency that matters, the brain adapts. It learns that the world is a game and the only way to survive is to play it better than everyone else, no matter whom it hurts.

People wired this way don’t see manipulation as wrong, they see it as intelligence. They see honesty as weakness. Facts don’t fit the game they are playing, power does… and in the game the only move that matters is loyalty to whomever is winning, so they don’t question him and Trump makes them feel like loyalty is power. He calls them patriots. He said they figured out what everyone else is too weak to admit. That feeling of being on the inside is exactly how the manipulation works. You can’t see the con when  you think you’re in on the con.

When you believe that everyone is playing an angle, you can never trust anyone – not your friends, not your family, not even the man you gave your vote to. These people will spend their entire lives being manipulated by the one person they thought they finally understood. He took their money through fake foundations and worthless degrees. He called them “the forgotten Americans” and then forgot about them. The second the rally was over, they gave him their vote; he gave their tax cuts to billionaires, their healthcare to lobbyists, and their jobs to the same system he promised to destroy.

3: Psychopathy

His supporters see the same news everyone else sees; they hear the same stories, they watch the same footage, and they don’t care. They feel nothing. Psychologist Robert Hare at the University of British Columbia spent decades studying people who felt nothing for other people; he called it psychopathy, the complete absence of empathy for anyone outside their group. Children who experience severe neglect, abuse, or chaos early in life show the same neurological abnormalities as an adult diagnosed with psychopathy. Their empathy doesn’t disappear, it gets deactivated as a survival mechanism.

In a normal brain, when you see someone suffering a signal fires. It’s automatic and it’s involuntary. That signal is what makes cruelty feel wrong. In a psychopath brain, the signal is absent. Other people’s pain produces no internal response, so there’s nothing to overcome, nothing to rationalize. The suffering of strangers is simply neutral information to them. What fills the void in these people is dominance. The psychopathic brain does not ask who is right, it asks who is winning, and whoever is winning gets their total loyalty, no questions, and no guilt. That’s why a psychopath can watch a child get taken from its mother at the border and call it a deterrent.

Trump tries to act like the most powerful person in the room every single day, and to a psychopath that’s all they need to see to follow him forever, or until his perceived power wears off. When you can’t feel other’s pain, you also can’t feel your own pain. These people aren’t just indifferent to the suffering they cause, they’re cut off from the full experience of being human, and Trump knows exactly how to aim that emptiness at everyone he needs them to hate. They’re not making a mistake about him, they know exactly who he is: he’s the most powerful person in the room and he hates the same people they hate. That’s not a political opinion, that’s a personality built for cruelty, and Trump built his entire cult just for them.

4: Everyday sadism

Trump supporters don’t cheer for policy, they cheer when other people feel pain. They cheered when Trump mocked a disabled reporter, they cheered when families were separated at the border, they cheered when Trump talked about roughing up protesters, they cheered when Trump talked about putting his enemies in prison. The crowd isn’t cheering despite the cruelty, they’re cheering because of the cruelty.

In 2013, psychologists Aaron Buckles and Delroy Police identified a fourth dark trait which expanded which expanded the Dark Triad into the Dark Tetrad. They called it “everyday sadism.” Everyday sadism is the enjoyment of causing pain or humiliation to others. Sound familiar? The research on its origin is thinner than the other three traits; what we know is that it shares genetic roots with psychopathy and shows up early in childhood.

Whether they were born with the cruelty or the cruelty was modeled by their parents, the results are the same. They have a brain that finds pleasure in what other people find horrific, and when the cruelty escalates, they don’t look away – they cheer louder for it. Buckles and Pollis also found that everyday sadism is the single strongest predictor of internet trolling. These aren’t people who enjoy arguing online; they actively hunt for victims and enjoy every second of it.

Now, look at what a Trump rally actually is. It’s not a policy event, it’s two hours of watching people get mocked, threatened, and humiliated while a crowd cheers. That’s the product. That’s what they paid to see. Everyday sadism is the one trait that predicts willingness to work for the opportunity to hurt someone – not just when it’s easy, to put in actual effort for the chance to hurt someone. When cruelty is the only thing that makes you feel powerful, you need more of it to feel the same effect every time. The targets have to get more vulnerable. The humiliation has to get more public. The suffering has to escalate, and it always does. That’s not a political movement, that’s an addiction, and Trump knows exactly what they came for.

This is what the Dark Tetrad looks like when it finds a political home. Four personality traits built by abuse, drawn to cruelty, and organized around a man who delivers it on demand. They are a fringe minority of broken and damaged people, and the only reason they feel powerful is because they found a man willing to weaponize their cruelty. They think they have permission to be cruel, to be hateful, and they think that they’re going to get away with it. They are wrong.

Trump didn’t build a political movement, he built an angry rage-filled mob of cruel people, and he has been feeding that mob every single day since.

Many people display one or more of these traits, but watching Donald Trump as president and considering his past actions as a real-estate developer and otherwise failed businessman, it’s easy to see how he admirably displays a toxic combination of all four characteristics of the Dark Tetrad.

I have known cruel people in my life, both in school and at work, and they are most unpleasant to be around. There is no reasoning with them. If you show any weakness at all, you’re just opening yourself up for even greater abuse because they see you as an easy target and they will zoom in for the kill. The only way to stop a bully is to make sure that the price they pay for their depredations is higher than the satisfaction they get from tormenting you. Turning the other cheek does nothing, Informing authorities does nothing. A hard sock in the nose or a solid kick in the hoodie-doodies is usually enough to make them back off and find easier targets for their cruelty.

Sadly for America, Trump has never experienced personal consequences for his cruelty, surrounding himself as he does with a cadre of purchased attorneys willing to make sure that he always avoids significant blowback.

The Old Wolf has spoken.