Three Narcissists: One Ancient, One Colonial, and One Modern
THE FIRST QUESTION A READER MIGHT ASK IS WHY THIS book is entitled American Nero. What does Nero have to do with Donald Trump? There was a Roman emperor famous for building a wall, but it was not Nero. The reason the book is called American Nero is because the emperor, like Donald Trump, was a notorious narcissist who put himself above everyone else, causing chaos and confusion with every irrational decision.
Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (December 15, 37–June 9, 68 AD) was the last Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was a man with low self-esteem who would cheat the system and declare himself a winner whenever he could. He rigged the Olympic Games in 67 AD to win the chariot race, even though he’d been thrown out of the chariot while making a turn. During public performances, he would “wow” his audience with his singing ability, though in fact he had a weak voice. The audience dared not reveal to him the truth about his meager talent lest he feed them to the lions.
Nero was obsessed with popularity and loyalty—the loyalty of others to him, of course. He paid informants to spy on the senators to see who was loyal to him and who wasn’t. He wanted to know who applauded his stage performances, who flattered him and fawned on him. He especially wanted to know who mocked him.
Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus was one senator who didn’t make the cut. He refused to take an oath of loyalty, kept his hands in his lap during Nero’s performances, and stormed out of the senate when Nero defended himself for murdering his own mother. Nero had him tried for treason, found guilty, and forced to commit suicide.
Nero felt his mother, Agrippina, favored her other son, Britannicus. Agrippina had criticized Nero for shacking up with a slave. Nero, like all narcissists, wouldn’t abide criticism, so he banished his mother from the castle. She died mysteriously. Britannicus died suddenly and mysteriously while attending a banquet.
Nero killed his wife, Octavia. Though he had her death ruled a suicide, Nero sent Octavia’s head to his mistress, Poppaea, as a gift.
It didn’t stop at murder. In ten years, Nero stripped the senate of all its power, and in a display of arrogance and poor judgment, he decided he no longer needed to heed the wishes of the senators.
Nero was a nativist. He sought to rid his country of Christians, whom he relentlessly persecuted.
“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the historian Tacitus wrote. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination when daylight had expired.”
Nero was said to have ordered the execution of the Apostle Paul, and in one of the worst fake news events of world history, when Rome burned down, he blamed the Christians for its destruction.
Nero bankrolled a lavish, expensive lifestyle with funds from the Roman government. To build an extravagant villa, an edifice to himself, he raised taxes and stole money from the local temples. In one of his last moves, he reinstated a policy that allowed him to confiscate property from anyone suspected of treason. Of course, he alone decided who was suspected of treason.
In 65 AD, Nero discovered a plot to assassinate him, so he killed many of those involved, including former advisors and close friends.
Now he was universally hated. Nero had no friends left. He had killed them all. When his own army deserted him, he knew it was time to flee.
Nero was assailed by his enemies for being greedy, frivolous, and self-indulgent, and the senate ordered him to be beaten to death. In his own defense, he claimed to be an artist who was misunderstood. As he heard the hoofbeats of the horses bearing the men ordered to carry out his execution, Nero refused to give them the satisfaction and ended his life by suicide.
Nero was the fifth Roman emperor, succeeding Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius in that order. These emperors succeeded a series of authoritarian leaders who had gradually transformed Rome from a republic to a dictatorship. Much of the political foundation for the rise of dictators and emperors including Nero had been laid ninety years earlier during the populist dictatorship of Julius Caesar, who ruled from 49 to 44 bc.
Most dictatorships emerge out of other authoritarian governments, as happened after the French Revolution, which began in 1789, and the Russian Revolution in 1917. Rome was one of two examples in history of a major economic and military power being transformed from a republic into a dictatorship. The second example was the transformation of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany in 1933.
Our objective in writing this book is to help make sure there is not a third.
KING GEORGE III
Great Britain’s King George was not as horrific a leader as Nero, but like Nero he was very much focused on his authority as king, and he reacted to political unrest in petty and destructive ways. George’s reaction to instability in the American colonies in large part precipitated the American Revolution.
George was twelve when his father died and left him heir to the throne. When he became king, he had no previous government experience. Born wealthy, he’d never worked for anyone else. Though he was commander in chief, he had never served in the military.
Though George was frugal, cheap even—he advocated importing cheap labor to drive down wages and increase profits—he spent lavishly on his new royal palace, Buckingham House.
George’s family had immigrated to Great Britain from Hannover, Germany, to become its rulers after the death of Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs. Many British citizens, including nobility, saw the Hanoverian dynasty as foreigners. Indeed both King George I and II spoke imperfect English. George III was obsessed with proving himself to be British, proclaiming, “I glory in the name of Britain” when he ascended to the throne.
Many witnesses described George’s pathological mania.
They spoke of his “incessant loquacity” and his habit of talking until the foam ran from his mouth. Sometimes he suffered from convulsions, and his pages had to sit on him to keep him safe on the floor.
The press accused George of preferring war to peace and of restricting the liberties of English citizens. His advisor was George Grenville, an ultra-conservative Whig politician.
King George saw America as a parent saw a child. If America was disobedient, George felt, it must be punished. During a period of financial difficulty for England, Grenville advised George to make the colonies pay their own administrative costs. The colonists were going to pay for their protection and well-being. First came the Stamp Act in 1765, and then indirect taxes on the colonies from the Townshend Acts. When in 1773 Britain passed the Tea Act (called the Intolerable Acts in America), imposing yet another tax, the colonies united in protest and tossed the tea into the harbor.
Faced with such disobedience, George declared, “The colonies must either submit or triumph. We must not retreat.”
Two years later, the Continental Congress declared independence. George was the main character in the 1991 play by Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III. Because of porphyria, a rare metabolic disorder, George suffered from severe insomnia. He would stay up all night ranting, writing letters to cabinet members, generals, and even to citizens airing his complaints. Nothing was too petty for him to complain about, from the stipends of parish clergy to the pension of the royal laundress. One can only imagine what King George III would have been like on Twitter.
Though he sought to emphasize his loyalty to Britain, George is remembered as the monarch whose refusal to compromise cost Britain one of its most valuable possessions.
DONALD J. TRUMP
So, why does this book about the forty-fifth president of the United States discuss King George III, and why is it named after a narcissistic emperor of ancient Rome?
Many psychologists and psychiatrists are convinced that we are faced with an extreme narcissist whose psychological disorders are a threat to our national well-being and our government. In an age of nuclear weapons, which neither Nero nor King George III had at their disposal, our president’s psychological disposition could threaten the survival of the human race.
At best, Trump is a real threat to our democracy and the rule of law.
An article written by one of this book’s authors, Richard Painter, and clinical psychologist Dr. Leanne Watt, observed:
Anti-social symptoms include a disregard for the rights of others, a tendency to break the law, lack of remorse, frequent lying, failure to honor financial obligations, interpersonal exploitation, risk-taking and revenge-seeking in response to perceived slights.
Hallmark narcissistic symptoms include an exaggerated self-importance, sensitivity to criticism, lack of empathy, a need for admiration and attention, entitlement and exploitation with a need for personal gain.
Together, these symptoms could severely undermine a president’s ability to lead.
At the time, almost eight hundred mental health professionals had come forward to warn the public about Trump’s alarming behavior.
“Though remote,” concluded the article, “we cannot rule out the possibility that a president in a downward mental health spiral could destroy important global partnerships, alter century-old alliances, and leave the United States vulnerable to terror attacks or war.”
From his speeches, negotiations with Congress, and tweets, we can see clearly that we have a raging narcissist in the White House.
It is also clear that his narcissism has already had a severe impact on our government. For a narcissist, laws are meant for other people. Laws that do not reinforce their own sense of superiority are to be ignored.
Examples from Trump’s tenure so far are many, including:
• Taking foreign government payments in violation of the Constitution
• Refusing to disclose where his business empire gets its money even though there is good reason to believe that he is financially and politically dependent upon foreigners, including perhaps the Russians
• Repeatedly attempting to obstruct the FBI investigation and special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference
• Attacking the special counsel, Robert Mueller
• Threatening to put Hillary Clinton in jail
• Threatening the free press, a direct challenge to the liberties afforded under the First Amendment
• Attacking Muslims because of their religion, a direct challenge to freedom of religion
And the list goes on and on.
Historians and the general public often wonder whether we have ever had a president display such extreme narcissism and refusal to abide by the rules that apply to everyone else. Has any president so blatantly and consistently violated the Constitution and the rule of law?
As we explain in this book, the answer is clearly “NO.” We have had presidents—and other government officials—who at times have violated laws set forth in our Constitution, statutory laws, and laws based on principles of common human decency. Our history is a very imperfect one, and we recount several of those imperfections in the first part of this book.
We demonstrate, however, that Donald Trump’s narcissism has put him in the unique position of exploiting the historical imperfections of the United States to elevate himself by rubbing salt in the wounds of his fellow Americans.
He thus raises himself up while putting the rest of us down.
First, some generalizations about pre-Trump history, which is the subject of the first part of this book. There has never before been a combination of representative democracy and a society as large and diverse as ours in the United States. Unlike many countries that are far more ethnically homogenous, we are a nation in which people of many different races, ethnicities, and religions must work together to build and defend a representative democracy.
The United States is a great experiment of whether a very diverse mixture of people can live together in a democracy. We believe the answer is yes, but that remains to be seen.
We started off with a substantial portion of our population, African Americans, enslaved. Women could not vote. Native Americans were either exterminated or forced to live in poverty on reservations. Immigrants were sometimes allowed to come to the United States and sometimes not, but they often faced discrimination from those who were already here. Sometimes there were laws in place to protect citizens’ rights, sometimes not. Sometimes, perhaps often, our laws were ignored.
That being said, the trajectory of the United States until 2016 was generally headed in a positive direction. The rule of law—set forth in our Constitution—has helped bring us together to form a union approaching if not achieving perfection.
Then came the election of Donald Trump. In the second half of this book, we explain why his presidency has been the greatest challenge to the rule of law that this country has faced since the Civil War.
This book is about the rule of law: the internal and external threats to the rule of law, the role that narcissism and other psychological disorders can play in undermining the rule of law, and the ways in which ordinary citizens who care about their country can respond. Since the founding of this country, violations of the rule of law have made for some colorful yet troubling moments.
We will begin this story with the Salem witch trials, and we’ll end the book with the Mueller investigation, which President Trump snidely calls “the worst witch hunt in our history.” We will also briefly relate how Trump, after declaring himself “exonerated” of involvement in Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, immediately turned to pressuring another former Soviet Republic, Ukraine, to dig up dirt on former vice president Joe Biden, a likely opponent of Trump in the 2020 election.
Our goal is that, by the time you are finished reading, you’ll have the perspective to determine just how great a threat our forty-fifth president is to our nation.
The makers of fake news in 1690 who brought the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, for a brief moment unleashed real monsters onto our land.
This president has done the same.