There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.
~William Shakespeare
The only one that matters is me.
I’m the only one that matters.
~President Donald J. Trump
Narcissism, the most commonly used term to describe Donald Trump’s personality, can mean different things to different people. Remarkably, virtually all definitions apply to Donald Trump. To the general public, narcissism is a cluster of behaviors that includes self-centered focus, lack of empathy, indifference to others, difficulty imagining the consequences of one’s actions, and shameless bragging. Narcissists manifest an almost absolute degree of self-love, accompanied by an almost total lack of self-awareness or awareness of their effect on others. Narcissists show no interest in learning about themselves and think whatever they do is the best and most important thing anyone would ever want to do or accomplish.
Examples of Trump’s narcissism are legion and instructive. A widely photographed instance occurred in February 2018, when Trump, boarding Air Force One on a rainy day, held a large umbrella to cover his head in the storm without inviting his wife or young son to join him. While depriving Melania and Barron of cover from the rain, Trump was exhibiting textbook signs of two kinds of narcissism: primary narcissism, associated with survival, which was the impulse behind his disregarding his family’s comfort to ensure his own protection, and secondary narcissism, the impulse we connect to the familiar impulse to give oneself pleasure beyond mere survival—touching oneself, looking in the mirror—which drove his focus on keeping his hair in place in the storm.
A different storm brought out other sides to Trump’s narcissism. Opening an August 2017 press conference in Corpus Christi during his trip to survey Hurricane Harvey’s damage to Texas, Trump first had to comment on the size of the audience—“What a crowd! What a turnout!”—reminding observers that his self-centered impulse to see the world as a measure of his own reflection took priority over empathy and self-awareness. Days earlier, while the raging hurricane wrought havoc in Texas, Trump had announced his decision to pardon Joe Arpaio, the controversial and convicted racist sheriff from Arizona, which he acknowledged he had timed to coincide with “the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, [because] I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they were normally.” By scheduling his announcement during a natural disaster, Trump demonstrated that his indifference to others’ feelings was not subject to weather delays, a perverse twist on the credo of the postal service he oversees.
The many facets of Trump’s narcissism have been widely chronicled, but less attention has been paid to its likely origins. Like so much of his pathology, Trump’s narcissistic tendencies can be traced back to his earliest interactions in childhood. Narcissism stems from the baby’s need for omnipotence, formed as a survival instinct in response to the absence of a fully nurturing and supportive connection to his mother. When feeling vulnerable or not cared for, young children retreat into a secret all-powerful world of grandiosity, where they feel protected from the inevitable hurts and disappointments of childhood. This can be a normal part of development, familiar to those of us who have children of our own. But some children deny even feeling hurt, having retreated already from an indifferent environment into their internally created world of safety. Other children feel enraged and betrayed whether or not the environment lets them down. But whatever the emotional response, narcissism is a defense created to maintain the grandiose self and remains the primary defense against any threats to the child’s sense of omnipotence.
To that extent, narcissism is different from the Greek myth from which it gets its name. In the myth, Narcissus was a handsome youth who fell in love with his refection while looking down in a lake; there’s no mention of distant parents or other factors that would have made him vulnerable to having such a self-centered response to his reflection. Whatever the impetus, Narcissus was so enraptured by the beautiful face returning his gaze that he ceased to think of anything else, including eating. Eventually he weakened, fell into the lake, and drowned. The story is about obsessive self-love that ends in self-destruction, complete with an ironic and tragic ending that has transformed it into a cautionary tale that parents have long used to rein in their children.
There’s a certain irony in the Narcissus myth’s popularity among parents wanting to check their children’s excessive self-regard, since narcissism can often be a reaction to a lack of early parental support, whether real or irrationally wished for. Trump’s narcissism represents a compensatory response to deep injuries from his distant past; what reads as self-love is obscuring a profound need to be loved and admired by others, and a defense against any challenges to a grandiose sense of self that might make him feel vulnerable.
There are a variety of reasons why Trump would have retreated as a child to a state of omnipotent and destructive narcissism. Children naturally imitate their parents and eventually identify with them. At a deep level, young children think their parents are all-powerful and all-knowing. Trump certainly identified with both his father and mother, whose self-absorption is evident in family histories. The question is what happens when the child is disillusioned—or even worse, when parents disappoint or frighten their children. Donald Trump at some point learned that his mother was emotionally unavailable and that his father was absent and critical; combined with his own limited impulse control at school, which interfered with his traditional learning, these factors would contribute to a sense of despair over not getting enough warmth and meaningful nourishment from his earliest caretakers. This despair, in turn, would lead to narcissism, as a defense against shame and criticism, as well as against the need for any introspection that would cause him to face his selfish or hurtful behavior.
Narcissism begets a mind-set characterized by an aversion to depending on others that runs deep through many aspects of Trump’s thinking. Adopting an attitude of indifference protects the narcissist from facing what psychoanalysts call “object hunger”—the human condition of needing other people—and obscures his facing the truth that even adults have dependency needs. Beneath the indifference and narcissism is a fear of dependency grounded in the notion that not being self-reliant is simply not acceptable to people as insecure as Donald Trump.
Not surprisingly, Trump’s denial of his reliance on others flies in the face of his track record, which is filled with examples of his relying on others to get ahead. First his father’s wealth got him started, of course, and kept him afloat when necessary. He was later bailed out of a potentially crippling lawsuit by Roy Cohn, who became the most influential adviser in Trump’s life; gay and Jewish, Cohn also unconsciously served to embody Trump’s ambivalence about having and needing a father figure, by personifying traits that Fred Sr. found unacceptable. Finally, television producer Mark Burnett lifted him from financial distress by making him a television star on The Apprentice. His bombastic self-made persona, meanwhile, gave no indication of any awareness that he had ever relied on anyone other than himself.
The illusion of independence fostered a sense of entitlement we see in his business life. Where his father built a fortune in part by maximizing his share of government assistance, Donald expertly manipulated zoning laws—another form of government assistance. Trump’s mix of entitlement and grandiosity was so strong that he effectively denied his dependency on the vendors and contractors who worked on his buildings, famously paying a fraction of his contractual obligations—because paying in full would acknowledge that tradespeople could accomplish things that he needed and couldn’t do himself. And the unfortunates to whom Trump owed money for services rendered made things worse for themselves just by demanding payment. Admitting that they needed him to pay his bills invited Trump’s contempt; he recognized in them the unacceptability of his own dependence on others. Being able to project the fury he expresses at his own neediness onto others soothes and relieves him. Withholding money—Trump’s favorite means of keeping score—makes him feel big and powerful in comparison, and expressing rage provides a physical release.
Trump no doubt benefited financially from not recognizing or honoring his debts—just as he benefited (if you can call it that) from evading so many unwanted truths or feelings. He essentially dehumanized himself. In his final years in business before entering politics, Trump externalized that dehumanization into his business sphere, transforming himself into a brand, his name disconnected from the work and risk that went into the construction projects bearing his imprimatur. In this latest business incarnation, Trump was able to avoid the responsibility for loss—receiving, and ultimately coming to expect, as great a reward for failure as for success.
Trump’s resistance to paying bills and honoring contracts is symptomatic of another aspect of the narcissistic personality—a rejection of rules and regulations that apply to other people, and from which the narcissist asserts an immunity. A classic example of this can be found in his refusal to release his tax returns, asserting his exemption from the unofficial regulations by which his fellow candidates have historically abided. As Trump pointed out, he wasn’t legally required by any rules to release his returns, despite years of accepted protocol that motivated other candidates to do so. By evoking the letter of the law to violate the spirit of its regulation, Trump was conveying his contempt for the construct of rules and regulations, and for the notion that he would be subject to their controls. From what little we know of what those tax returns are likely to reveal, they are themselves replete with contempt for regulation, likely expressed through finding loopholes in the tax system for his personal profit.
The narcissist’s investment in his delusions of omnipotence is so pervasive and profound that he can psychologically ill afford to conceive of himself as governed by the rules and regulations that apply to lesser, less powerful people. Trump offered a glimpse of this mind-set when he claimed during a presidential debate that not paying taxes made him smart. The clear implication was that he was smarter than people who do pay taxes, superior to those who are burdened by any sense of responsibility for abiding by the rules and regulations that govern the less cunning. To a narcissist there is no concept of paying one’s fair share to support government functions. The pitfalls of empowering an individual who thinks this way to run the government are self-evident.
We see a similar dynamic in Trump’s success in turning bankruptcy laws into a way to manipulate the systems of legal and financial regulations for his personal profit. After his manic acquisition and spending spree in the late 1980s led to a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s, Trump famously maintained a lavish lifestyle while his creditors ended up paying the price, having to accept a fraction of their due on his debts. His debt was so vast and far-reaching that banks couldn’t afford to hold him accountable; in a foreshadowing of the hold he would later claim on the Republican Party, Trump had made himself too big to fail. The question, now that Trump’s tax reform dramatically increased America’s national debt, is whether he has also made the United States itself too big to fail.
In his gaming of the bankruptcy system, Trump exhibited several previously discussed elements of his particular strain of narcissism. There’s contempt for the notion that rules and regulations would apply to him. There’s the assumption that he is entitled to more than his fair share when in fact he can’t pay his debts. Spending his way into such a deep hole, he was likely in thrall to his delusions of omnipotence—which just as likely felt even less delusional when he emerged from the proceedings unscathed. The absence of any personal damage as a result of his corporate bankruptcies no doubt confirmed his narcissistic anti-dependency impulses as well.
Trump has been rebelling against rules and regulations since childhood, both in flagrant defiance of authority—the secret knife-buying trips to Manhattan that landed him in military school—and in subtler ways of maneuvering regulations to serve his agenda, such as when he “figured out all the angles” at summer camp. Unconsciously, sons experience having to follow rules as being castrated by the father: their fear of being castrated results from projecting onto their father their own wish to castrate him. Now, as president, he is arguably the world’s most visible father figure, both responsible for and beholden to its most powerful rule-making and rule-enforcing apparatus. He is more pronouncedly in a position to castrate or be castrated—so far, only figuratively.
As his refusal to divest his business interests makes clear, Trump is still rebelling against rules and regulations, and using the system against itself—reminding observers that the absence of a provision against presidential conflicts of interest immunizes him by rendering such conflicts nonexistent by definition. Meanwhile, his law-and-order platform—enforced without mercy on immigrant families, for example—demonstrates his willingness to deploy the system against others. Of course, the laws of the United States—specifically, its election laws and Electoral College—are the source of his power today, even if he may have illegally influenced them. The narcissistic impulse to identify as self-created—to deny any other influence or input in the narcissist’s progression toward omnipotence—adds another unconscious impetus to Trump’s need to justify his disregard for the law, or at least its application to him. Not only are his delusions of omnipotence unlikely to be abandoned, but he is now frighteningly well positioned and psychically motivated to defend and even realize them.
When contemplating the potentially devastating costs of unchecked narcissism, particularly in an individual with as much access to damage-wielding power as Donald Trump, it can be tempting to forget that the narcissistic impulse has its origins in a defensive, compensatory response. Infant observation researchers have traced the formation of the omnipotent conception of the self to the young baby’s struggle to survive when not in his mother’s care. The infant experiences the unintegrated parts of his personality as lacking a “binding force between themselves,” writes psychoanalytic theorist Joan Symington; these disparate personality aspects, she continues, are experienced as being “held together passively in a very precarious way by a psychic skin, equated with the physical skin.” In the baby’s primitive understanding, this imagined skin becomes the only protection from a “constant danger of suddenly spilling out in a state of unintegration, should this fragile psychic skin be breached or lost.” This “desperate survival measure,” which is echoed in adulthood by the “same sorts of survival mechanisms, over and over again at times of crisis,” can set the individual on a psychic course that leads from infantile fears of chaos through primitive and defensive delusions of omnipotence to full-blown narcissism.
The notion of the psychic skin provides a helpful construct for organizing and understanding a variety of the now-familiar defenses in Trump’s pathology. While common to all of us, moments of early childhood desperation are more of a factor when the mother is absent or disengaged, so young Donald likely had ample need and opportunity to develop the defenses that Symington describes. The child in a family where parental holding and understanding are in short supply will discover new mechanisms for holding himself together. Often, the infant searching for a protective, containing source of comfort “may engage in constant bodily movement which then feels like a continuous holding skin,” Symington writes. Young Donny’s incessant muscular activity—which came to include neighborhood behavior that today reads as childhood aggression—accrues something approaching poignancy when viewed as a desperate attempt to soothe himself.
In adulthood, Trump has developed a variety of less poignant pursuits that have served the function of containing and comforting psychic skin. Power, money, sexual conquests, publicity, and the proliferation of self-named towers and products around the world have all at various times helped him organize his inner space to defend against chaos. Perhaps none of these was as effective as starring as a reality television version of himself in The Apprentice. Watching the Donald Trump of The Apprentice gave Trump the chance to see himself on the screen as a fully integrated, authoritative, effective individual—who, in this version, wasn’t struggling to recover from a series of near-disaster corporate bankruptcies. The show’s ratings success was a bonus, as was the unique opportunity to behold his psychic skin made visible for the world to see. But as with so many matters involving Trump, the most important viewer metric was an audience of one, Trump himself. Seeing a Donald Trump who could disregard his financial troubles, operate in a fake and idealized version of his world, and earn deference and adoration by exhibiting unchallenged agency and the ability to fire people at will worked as a restorative and empowering therapy unmatched by all of Trump’s previous attempts to integrate and contain himself. One wonders if Trump would have had the mental strength to imagine himself as President Trump if he hadn’t first been Apprentice star Trump. It would have been just what the doctor ordered—had there been a doctor, and if a doctor could have imagined such a thing.
Unfortunately, like so many narcissism-based defenses, the relief offered by the digital psychic skin of The Apprentice was only temporary. Recalling Jacques Lacan’s theories of the mirror stage, we’re reminded that the infant who gazes upon the reflection of his fully integrated self is presented with both a vision of the level of integration to which he aspires and a reminder that internally he feels that he perpetually falls short of the integration he sees in the mirror. Donald Trump knows he is no “Donald Trump,” and that the TV version of himself—who turned “You’re fired!” into a catchphrase for viewers who fantasized about having so much agency in their own lives—would never be so cowardly as to resort to firing his cabinet secretaries by tweet. That’s why I was scarcely surprised when an acquaintance shared with me the previously unreported discovery she made while on a private White House tour that Barron Trump offered a classmate and her family. In a room off the Oval Office, which had been outfitted with several large-screen TVs, the group discovered none other than the president, watching reruns of himself on The Apprentice. Trump still needs the comfort of seeing himself made whole by a televised second skin, even if it reminds him that he still doesn’t feel that wholeness inside.
Now he derives the comfort of a psychic skin from his rallies, where the adoration of the crowd chanting his name confirms the better image of himself that he doesn’t in fact feel, and the public cabinet meetings and signing ceremonies, where again he is buoyed by affirming adoration, if on a smaller scale. Although, like so many idiosyncrasies of the Trump presidency, they have been normalized by observers, neither first-year campaign rallies nor fawning cabinet meetings staged as performance art have precedent in previous administrations; observers perhaps understand they are performing some necessary function for the president, without knowing precisely what that is. His “executive time”—reportedly spent tweeting while binge-watching Fox News and eating fast food—and his endless rounds of golf also offer adult iterations of the repetitive continuous movements that are observed in infants seeking the containing function.
His narcissistic needs require so much continuous support that he also seeks it in private, out of the public eye. He is on the phone every evening talking with numerous business associates and acquaintances. He holds small private dinners at the White House, attended by a variety of loyalists ranging from Oracle exec Safra Catz and venture capitalist Peter Thiel to staffers Corey Lewandowski and Kellyanne Conway. He hosts Sarah Palin, Kid Rock, and Sean Hannity. They praise him, listen to him, and agree about his greatness, providing external reinforcement to the ever-endangered integrity of that psychic skin.
There are limits to how effective the psychic skin approach to self-treatment can be. Former economic adviser Gary Cohn, in an email quoted in Fire and Fury, offered an assessment of President Trump that evokes Symington’s description of the unstructured, uncontained infant: “Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits.” That collection of impulses and resentments requires an impenetrably thick skin to contain it. It’s no coincidence that Trump wants to build a wall—he has created an internal psychological wall that will repel and protect him from emotional connection with the outside world. When he promises to “drain the swamp,” he is revealing an unconscious fantasy of his mental insides, and the emotional glue that holds him together.
Beyond the limitations of its efficacy, the psychic-skin defense places constraints on the individual’s internal mental space in which to think. As that space becomes organized into good and bad experiences, it remains two-dimensional; the thought process doesn’t evolve to three-dimensional levels of complexity, and the fear of opening an insides-draining gap prevents new ideas from finding an entry point. We see how difficult it is for Trump to listen—even when I hear you is written on his instruction card—and he either blocks out or mimics what others say (or what is written on his card to reiterate). When he speaks he repeats himself, latching on to set phrases like “no collusion,” “fake news,” and “believe me.” His speech betrays evidence of limited capacity, including perseveration, such as when he repeats favored topics, like rigged elections or the death of DACA, and echolalia, as when he repeats phrases he hears on Fox News, a two-dimensional medium with which he has a powerful but primitive relationship, without any apparent knowledge of what these phrases mean.
Understandably, these limitations help explain why the psychic-skin defense and “other omnipotent defense mechanisms,” as Symington notes, will “further block emotional development.” As a result, Trump is maintaining an omnipotent position that may keep “echoes of the very early unheld precariousness” at bay, which “in turn motivates the patient to hold himself together.” But he never grows or transforms into something new, creative, or different. His refusal to face reality’s limitations contributes to his static personality, which he admits is virtually unchanged since childhood. Trump is all about holding, like having a plaster cast that holds parts of his mind together—or at least keeps them ready for tweeting, golf, television, or signing executive orders.
This kind of arrested development brings us back to the myth from which Trump’s narcissism got its name: the myth of Narcissus ends with his death, because he was focused so exclusively on his reflection that he forgot to eat. The message was clear: unchecked self-love becomes self-destruction, regardless of whether it is intentional. Trump’s psychic starvation parallels Narcissus’s physical starvation; so in love was he that seeing his name on tall buildings replaced curiosity about his inner world. He has lost an ability to think, to listen, or to make sense of his environment in terms that are anything other than fundamentally narcissistic—that is, what can the environment do for him?
That focus is also closely aligned with greed, narcissism’s handmaiden. Greed is stimulated by excessive envy, driven by a desire to have and consume everything, especially things that might arouse spiteful envy in others. Trump famously claimed in The Art of the Deal that his deal-making drive was not motivated by greed, but events have clearly proven otherwise. Although he would no doubt deny it, Trump’s powerful greed also extends beyond material possessions to qualities he envies in others. Unconsciously, greed can be traced back to the infant’s ambivalence toward the bountiful breast—simultaneously relying on its providing nurture and sustenance while resenting its seemingly inexhaustible goodness. Now in his capacity as the head of government (functionally, the keeper of the national breast), Trump wants unconsciously to deplete its resources, suck it dry and keep the goodness for himself and his cronies. In this respect—depleting and destroying the government that empowers him—greed can serve as an unintentional weapon for Trump’s narcissistic self-destruction. But the rest of us become collateral damage.
Another path to self-destruction awaits the narcissist who falls under delusions of grandiosity. Long before he floated the ideas of military parades or a presidency for life, Trump behaved as president less like a servant of the state than like the embodiment of the state. Apparently surprised that he can’t execute his office with the absolute authority of a Mafia boss, Trump seems dissatisfied with being the most powerful man on earth. Aspiring to a greater power, he brings to mind the unconscious grandiosity reminiscent of what psychoanalyst Ernest Jones described over a century ago in “The God Complex.”
To read Jones today is to confront the question of how he could have envisioned Trump’s Twitter feed in 1913. To the individual who has been afflicted with the God complex, Jones writes, “even the most trivial pieces of information about himself, those which an ordinary man sees no object in keeping to himself, are invested with a sense of high importance, and are parted with only under some pressure.” Also applicable to Trump, he writes that communication “is often not written at all, but instead is constantly hinted at with repeated promises that it will be disclosed on a further occasion.” Trump has become known for his grandiose promises, as well as for his vague “we’ll see” comments when he can’t answer a question.
But the opposite of “we’ll see” is when Trump jumps to conclusions from a shred of information, such as when he treated as absolute fact one Fox News statement that Obama tapped telephones at Trump Tower. Trump’s unconscious fantasy of omniscience feeds his resistance to accepting new knowledge unless it fits his presuppositions. Grandiose people never apologize or express remorse for something they did. Nor do they admit fallibility in their words or memory; Trump—of the “very good brain” and “one of the great memories of all time”—will defend his memory as perfect even in light of contradictory statements a day prior or hence. To Trump, anything is true the moment he says it, simply because he says it.
Trump’s infallibility applies to the future as well; predictions are important to individuals with the God complex. They will keep predicting something positive, like Trump’s saying that he will “make America great again.” This reveals a psychotic fantasy of having an unconscious sense of power over future time. They promise something great, but they also predict something disastrous if they are not listened to or if their ideas are not followed.
Trump famously appropriated Reagan’s campaign slogan—“Let’s make America great again”—when it was time to come up with his own. The one-word difference between the two slogans is telling. Eliminating the word let’s, while coupling it with the sentiment behind his infamous declaration “I alone can fix it,” makes it clear who is doing the making when it comes to greatness. This is especially evident when the slogan is paired with his name, as in so many campaign materials that effectively read “Trump Make America Great Again.” Trump appears to be making a conscious effort to position himself as a savior; on some level, of course, he knows that saviors’ stories rarely end well, and unconsciously the role he is creating for himself is that of martyr—which is exactly the role he would have assumed had he lost the election as reportedly intended. Having won the election, however, any intimated aspirations to the role of the martyred savior inevitably will lead him—and us—on a path toward a more profound and damaging self-destruction.
To avoid the self-destruction that is the endpoint of narcissism, President Trump needs to externalize what would otherwise be an internally vital threat to his survival—the investigation into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russian interference into the election. What began as a probe into the possibility that Trump had committed his arguably biggest act of narcissistic omnipotence yet—assuming he could get away with treason—has expanded into a broader investigation of seemingly unrelated legal and financial issues that would have compromised him and his family with the Russians. As his second year in office found him squarely in the target and narrowing focus of the Mueller investigative team, Trump’s survival increasingly hinged on keeping his latest threatening father figure at bay, hiding his delinquent financial dealings, and protecting his fragile self. One way for him to externalize self-destruction is to encourage outside groups to attack each other—or at least to stay out of the way when attacks flare up between Democrats and Republicans, immigrants and nativists, whites and blacks. Considered from this angle, the divisiveness Trump has fomented in our culture can be seen as his defense against the narcissist’s fate. A similar dynamic plays out as Trump pushes his self-destructive impulses into government itself, getting the judiciary to destroy government institutions and cabinet members to destroy the very agencies they are supposed to direct.
We see just how dangerous President Trump is when he projects his self-destructive impulses into the government, because on a profound psychic level, he believes he is the government. Destroying the government and the nation thus becomes both the defense and the thing defended against—both protection and destruction. Students of history may see echoes of the Vietnam-era policy of destroying the village to save the village, a reminder of the enormous damage that can be inflicted by misguided leadership. It’s tempting to comfort oneself with the notion that checks and balances will prevent Donald Trump from inflicting too much damage to the nation in his perhaps inevitable narcissistic reckoning. No such comfort can be taken without first giving serious consideration to this simple question: Which prospect is likely more frightening to Donald Trump, revealing his tax returns or starting a nuclear war?