Tag Archives: Narcissism

Donald Trump’s Dark Tetrad

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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.

How Donald Trump became the monster that he is.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A TikTok video by contributor “dh479.710” (later identified as Lucas Bean) explains in excruciating detail how Donald Trump became the cruel, chaotic person that has caused so much destruction to our government and our nation. I’m not sure who this individual is, but from where I sit he absolutely nails it, and so I felt it worthwhile to transcribe his video and present it here for your consideration. You can watch the full video at TikTok.

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Transcript:

I’ve been wondering for years how Donald Trump became so cruel, and so sadistic. So I decided to do some research on child trauma and dark psychology to understand what’s actually going on here.

He mocked a disabled reporter on national television and laughed. He called for violence at his campaign rallies time and time again and reveled in it. (See “Personal Observations” below)

He stood in front of crowds and fantasized about jailing his political enemies while the crowd cheered.

In 2020, Donald Trump’s own niece, a clinical psychologist named Mary Trump, published a book¹ explaining exactly how her uncle became this cruel.

Trump sued her for $100 million to stop the book from being published; she published it anyway.

Here are the five childhood events that turned Donald Trump into who he is today.

1: The Mother who disappeared

Donald Trump was two years old when his mother was hospitalized for six months following a series of emergency operations. She nearly died, and when she came back she was never really quite the same.

Psychologist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London identified what happens to a child when the primary caregiver disappears during the first two years of life. He called it “maternal deprivation” – the complete failure of the attachment bond at the exact moment when the brain is learning whether other people can be trusted and whether other people’s pain matters.

Bowlby found that children who lose their primary caregiver before age 2 develop what he called “affectionless psychopathy,” the permanent ability to feel remorse; the permanent inability to feel empathy; the permanent inability to form genuine emotional bonds with other human beings.

Donald Trump was 2 years old. His brain was forming its first understanding of what other people are. And the person who was supposed to show him that other people matter simply was not there.

Mary Trump described her grandmother as “ghostly absent” for most of Donald’s childhood. A woman who attended to her children when it was convenient for her, not when they actually needed her. Mary Trump argues that her uncle has never watched another human being suffer and felt anything. Not the disabled reporter, not the separated families at the border, not the people dying without healthcare. The person who was supposed to teach her that other people matter was not there and nobody else ever filled that gap.

2) The Brother his father destroyed

Donald Trump’s father had two sons. Donald’s older brother Freddy was the firstborn. Freddy was kind, Freddy was sensitive, and Freddy loved people. Freddy Trump wanted to be a pilot more than anything in the world. His father called Freddy weak every single day. He mocked him at the dinner table in front of the whole family constantly. When Freddy apologized, his father mocked the apology too. He would repeat it back in a sneering way. His father wanted a killer. Freddy was a human being and his father destroyed him for it. Mary Trump, Freddy’s own daughter, documented what happened to her father. She wrote that Donald Trump’s father dismantled Freddy by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality until all that was left was a man who hated himself and spent every day trying to earn the approval of a father who would never give it.

Freddy became an alcoholic; he lost his pilot’s license; he ended up doing maintenance work for the family business. He died at 42, broken, invisible, and alone.

Trump’s father did not just destroy Freddy; he used Freddy as a live lesson to Donald. “This is what happens to weak people in my household. This is what being sensitive gets you. This is what happens when you feel things.” Freddy was not weak. Freddy was the only one in that family who made his daughter Mary feel loved.

Trump’s father destroyed the kindest person in the family and made Donald watch every single day. Donald never forgot the lesson as he watched his brother get destroyed daily and never spoke to defend him.

3) The moment Donald chose to become his father

Watching was not enough for Trump’s father. Donald did not just observe what happened to his older brother Freddy – he participated. Mary Trump documented that Donald began mocking Freddy alongside his father. He learned to sneer at his brother’s sensitivity the same way his father did. He learned to call Freddy weak. He learned to degrade him in front of other people. He chose his father’s side completely and permanently.

Anna Freud, one of the most important psychologists of the 20th Century, identified the mechanism that produces this exact behavior in 1936. She called it “identification with the aggressor.” When a child cannot escape an abuser, it cannot defeat them, the brain chooses a third option: become the abuser. Adopt their cruelty. Perform the humiliation on the target. Make yourself indistinguishable from the thing that terrifies you so you don’t become the target. Anna Freud found that this is not a completely conscious choice. If you become the aggressor, no one can use the aggressors tactics against you. But a child pays a price for that safety. Mary Trump describes what it cost Donald in clinical terms.

She wrote that Trump’s father short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings, his father perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. Trump’s father did not just destroy Freddy; he used Freddy’s destruction to cut Donald off from his own humanity. He made Donald the monster he was. Mary Trump argues her uncle Donald has not felt genuine empathy for another human being since he was a small child sitting at the dinner table, learning to laugh while his brother was destroyed in front of him.

Donald didn’t lose his humanity, his father³ Fred took it from him.

4) Malignant narcissism

In 1964, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm identified the most severe personality pathology in clinical history. He called it malignant narcissism. The combination of four traits that together produce what Fromm called the purest form of evil a human being can become: 1) narcissism 2) paranoia 3) antisocial personality and 4) sadism. Fromm said malignant narcissism represents the most vicious destructiveness and lack of humanity that psychology has ever documented. This is not ordinary cruelty, it’s cruelty that feeds on itself, cruelty that needs to escalate, cruelty that is never satisfied.

Trump has mocked a gold star family³ on national television. He has suggested that a female journalist was bleeding from a facelift. He called a gold star widow who had just buried her husband, and fumbled her husband’s name, and told her that he knew what he had signed up for. She said it made her cry even worse. In my opinion, those are not political acts, those are the acts of someone who experiences other peoples’ pain as entertainment.

John Gardner, a psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins medical school for 28 years, applied Fromm’s concept of malignant narcissism to Trump specifically. He called it the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible in a leader.

In 2017, 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book called 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝐶𝑎𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐷𝑜𝑛𝑎𝑙𝑑 𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝. They said their duty to warn the public superseded professional neutrality; they put it on record. Mary Trump, who sat across the dinner table from Donald for decades and holds a PhD in clinical psychology said he meets all nine DSM² criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. She said he will never change. She said the damage was done too early and too completely. She wrote that Donald continues to exist as he was at 3 years old: incapable of growing, incapable of learning, unable to regulate his emotions or take in new information. And the country gave this three-year-old the most powerful office in the world.

5) Why he needs the chaos.

Trump’s presidency has been defined by one thing above everything else: chaos. Daily explosions, constant firings, threats in every direction. Reversals that make no sense. A government that bounces from crisis to crisis without ever stopping. Mary Trump argues this is not incompetence – he does it because it feels familiar to him.  Chaos is the only environment her uncle has ever felt safe in.

Sigmund Freud identified this pattern over a century ago. He called it “repetition compulsion,” the unconscious drive to re-create the conditions of your original trauma in childhood – not because you want to suffer, but because familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar calm.

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades studying how childhood trauma rewires the brain. He found that people who grow up in chaotic households don’t just tolerate chaos as adults – the recreate it, because calm feels like the moment before something bad happens. Chaos feels like home. Donald Trump grew up in a house where his father destroyed people at the dinner table every night for fun. Where nothing was safe. Where love was withheld and cruelty was the only currency that mattered. That was his normal from the day he was born, so when he got power he recreated the chaos. The daily explosions, the firings, the threats, the reversals, the cruelty aimed at every direction at once.

Van der Kolk’s research suggests this is not incompetence – Trump recreates chaos because chaos is the only thing that has ever felt like home, and now the entire country lives inside chaos. This is what happens when you emotionally destroy someone at a young age. A mother who vanishes at the exact moment the brain learns how to treat other people; a father who tortured his oldest son in front of his younger son every single day; a younger son who watched that torture and chose to become the torturer and the abuser rather than defend the older brother; a clinical diagnosis that 27 psychologists put on the record; a man so traumatized by his own childhood that he needs the entire country to live inside chaos with him.

Mary Trump documented all of it. She watched it happen from the inside. Donald Trump’s older brother Freddy paid for it with his life. Donald paid for it with his humanity. And the rest of us are paying for this damaged person’s reality right now.

End of Transcript

Personal observations:

For those who doubt Trump has mocked a disabled reporter:

This event in 2015 alone should have been the absolute end of his candidacy in 2015, but the nation’s hateful contingent was already fully in favor of Trump’s cruelty.

You don’t think Trump has ever advocated violence? We won’t even talk about January 6th, 2021.

As I read of Fred Trump’s destruction of his son Freddy, including mocking his apologies, was immediately put in mind of the depiction of Denethor son of Ecthelion in the Lord of the Rings movies. This is exactly how he was depicted in his treatment of the favored son Boromir and the rejected son Faramir, and it was painful to watch. This devastating exchange happens in “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” Before Faramir rides out to retake Osgiliath, Denethor tells him he wishes Faramir had died instead of Boromir. Faramir turns back and asks, “If I should return, think better of me, father,” to which Denethor chillingly replies, “That will depend on the manner of your return”. Excruciating cruelty, portrayed with horrid accuracy by John Noble.

The description of Fred Trump’s hatred of weakness is echoed in detail in a mini-essay by xenophonsXiphos; I have bowdlerized it slightly for a family-friendly blog.

I have experienced this kind of sadistic, passionate hatred for perceived weakness in my own life, as early as 1963. Bullies abound in the world, and they cannot be appeased. The only courses of action is to become like them (witness LeFou and Gaston in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,”) or to hit back at them so hard that they find an easier target with fewer consequences. They can not, sadly, be taught the error of their ways. What is certain is that in the American school system, while administrators crow loudly about their “zero tolerance policies,” these are nothing more than lip service to a problem they do not care to deal with and end up punishing victims often more than perpetrators. Not hard to understand why things like Columbine happen.

Footnotes

¹ Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man

² Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

³ A “gold star family” is a family who has lost at least one member to military conflict. During World War II, it was common for people to hang service flags in their window to indicate how many family members were actively serving n the military, blue for living and gold for deceased. In August 2024 the Red Star Service Banner was created by the Red Star Foundation. Creating a symbol of hope and recognition for the families who have lost a service member or veteran to suicide. On January 28, 2025, Rep. Jack Bergman (MI) read the Red Star Service Banner into the Congressional Record. You can still see these flags in many windows today.

Three-star service flag, indicating three family members in the service with one casualty of war.

The Hubris of Donald Trump

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This collection of statements, lovingly documented, was put together by redditor u/iamlarrypotter. I share it here for the benefit of those who do not particpate over at reddit.

If you want a classic, textbook example of narcissistic personality disorder, look no farther than 45. And then remember that this man has access to our nuclear launch codes. Our nation has never been in a more precarious state of affairs, and the damage this uneducated buffoon has done both domestically and internationally will take generations to repair.

“I’m much more humble than you would understand.”

“I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever.”

“I’m the most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far. Nobody’s ever been more successful than me.”

“I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed”

“I’m the least racist person you’ll find anywhere in the world.”

“Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life. Number two, racism. The least racist person”

“I’m the best thing that’s ever happened to the Secret Service.”

“I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country.”

“No one has done more for people with disabilities than me.”

“Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump.”

“There’s nobody who understands the horror of nuclear more than me.”

“There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am.”

“There’s nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,”

“There’s nobody that’s done so much for equality as I have”

“There’s nobody that has more respect for women than I do,”

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me”

“I am going to save Social Security without any cuts. I know where to get the money from. Nobody else does .”

“Nobody respects women more than I do”

“And I was so furious at that story, because there’s nobody that respects women more than I do,”

“Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump”

“She can’t talk about me because nobody respects women more than Donald Trump,”

“Nobody has more respect for women than Donald Trump!”

“Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”

“Nobody has more respect for women than I do. Nobody.”

“Nobody reads the Bible more than me.”

“Nobody loves the Bible more than I do”

“Nobody does self-deprecating humor better than I do. It’s not even close”

“Nobody knows more about taxes than I do, maybe in the history of the world.”

“Nobody knows more about trade than me”

“Nobody knows the (visa) system better than me. I know the H1B. I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me.”

“Nobody knows debt better than me.”

“I think nobody knows the system better than I do”

“I hope all workers demand that their @Teamsters reps endorse Donald J. Trump. Nobody knows jobs like I do! Don’t let them sell you out!”

“I know more about renewables than any human being on earth.”

“I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”

“I know more about contributions than anybody”

“I know more about offense and defense than they will ever understand, believe me. Believe me. Than they will ever understand. Than they will ever understand.”

“I know more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived”

“I know more about drones than anybody,”

“I know more about Cory than he knows about himself.”

“I know our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president”

“I know tech better than anyone“

“I’m very highly educated. I know words; I have the best words.”

“I know some of you may think l’m tough and harsh but actually I’m a very compassionate person (with a very high IQ) with strong common sense”

“I watch these pundits on television and, you know, they call them intellectuals. They’re not intellectuals,” Trump told thousands of supporters in the swing state. “I’m much smarter than them. I think I have a much higher IQ. I think I went to a better college — better everything,”

“@ajodom60: @FoxNews and as far as that low-info voter base goes, I have an IQ of 132. So much for that theory. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain”

Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure,it’s not your fault

“He’s been quite critical of you as you know. He’s attacked you for being ignorant,” Piers Morgan said to Trump. “Let’s do an IQ test,” Trump interrupted

“We can’t let these people, these so called egg-heads–and by the way, I guarantee you my IQ is much higher than theirs, alright. Somebody said the other day, ‘Yes, well the intellectuals–‘ I said, ‘What intellectuals? I’m smarter than they are, many of people in this audience are smarter than they are.”

“You know, I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years,” Trump told Fox News last December.

Trump says he has “one of the great memories of all time“

Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” who he talks with consistently about foreign policy, Trump responded, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”

” … I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”

In this Salon article, Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee states that “Trump’s mental health is now a “national and global emergency.” My personal opinion is that The Thermonuclear Bowel Evacuation Currently Disgracing the Oval Office has brought us closer to global destruction than any other administration, Bush/Cheney included.

Trump’s narcissistic language

Posted on by The Old Wolf

This is a comment made at reddit by /u/C250586. In it, (s)he explains how Trump’s use of language exhibits the traits of a sociopathic narcissist, and how his words have no objective meaning, but only subjectively mean what Trump decides they mean.

I wish everyone could read this. Sadly, the ones who really need to will not, and those who do will most likely dismiss it as “fake news” or the ravings of a “libtard.”

This is posted by permission, with only one small Bowdlerization.

Why do people get so hung up on what Trump says? The words he uses? Why do people constantly try to frame his pure subjectivity in an objective way? He views the world as an extension of himself… so every word he says needs to be in that context. I’m not sure people recognize how profound this revelation actually is…

When Trump is talking about anything (for example, “The Swamp”), he is not speaking about things in the same objective way that (most) of the rest of the world would – he views things from an entirely non-objective frame of reference so every sentence out of his mouth is a subjective label that is a reflection of this personal closed off frame of reference he lives in. Using the above example, he uses the term “The Swamp” to describe a non-specific group of people/entities that have blocked him from getting what he wants throughout his life (aka, FBI, DOJ, EPA).

He would never talk about a tree as a thing – an objective entity – it would be a “really great tree that he likes” or a “terrible tree”. Does “Crooked Hillary” ring any bells? Have you ever heard Trump speak about Hillary in a way that doesn’t involve him projecting his own frame of reference, his own view of her onto her? He isn’t capable of it because his brain is flat out not wired to do so. Nothing exists outside of his frame of reference where he is the center of his own personal universe.

Think about it. Listen to the man talk. EVERY SINGLE WORD out of his mouth is a label… an adjective… he only speaks in pure subjective rhetoric and hyperbole. Every word is an extension of his one dimensional perspective – intended to label everyone and everything in line with his own personal world view. Everything is an extension of himself, and how he views the world. Textbook narcissism at its absolute worst and most infuriating.

If that’s the DOJ, FBI, or any Mueller, he/they are going to label them all as “spies”, “swamp”, whatever it takes to turn public opinion against these entities. Just like he calls investigations “witch hunts”, and The Washington Post “Fake news”… it’s just an endless sociopathic stream of manipulation, on a massive and very public scale.

Of course Trump hates the DOJ, FBI, and EPA – these entities have all been trying to shut him down and stop him from getting what he wants for his entire life. It’s pretty clear he figured he would become president and finally get rid of them. All his supporters are the same kinds of people who would see the EPA/FBI/DOJ as just red tape that is stopping them from getting rich. These people (and Trump specifically) cannot view these agencies in an objective light. Aka… Yes it costs money to NOT dump your uranium waste in the river, but it also prevents the people downstream from dying of radiation poisoning.

It’s pretty well understood in psychological circles that Trump is textbook sociopathic narcissist. Kinda like a corporation with no soul in human form, who somehow convinced a bunch of people to elect him. Trump is “capitalism”, for lack of a better term, at its absolute pinnacle…. get rich by whatever means necessary, no matter who or what he has to destroy in the process. Zero empathy.

Trump’s mouth is a 24/7 gish gallop of falsehoods, slander and libel, leaving an absolute [imbroglio] of rational people scrambling to attempt to counter him in his wake.

Here’s hoping that the US has a strong enough backbone to prove that indeed no one is above the law, and there are enough checks and balances in place that corruption can’t exist at this level.