Chapter 6

The Narcissist

It’d be impossible for you to picture the earth by looking at just your backyard. Sure, you could describe what you see, and what you see would certainly be a part of some bigger image. But the planet is so vast, so varied, so colorful that you’d have to pull way, way, way back to take in all of its roundness and its blue and its green. And withdrawing to that point takes time. The same goes for grasping Donald Trump’s total mental unfitness for office—the real and obvious instability in his conduct that Americans witness every day. There is an overwhelming number of examples, only a few of which have been chronicled in this book so far. They can’t be judged as though they’re one-offs, because ultimately, they’re more like individual brushstrokes on some yuge mural. In sum, they add up to an overwhelming and worrying picture no one could possibly appreciate by staring at it up close—by thinking about Trump twenty-four hours in a row.

There’s no way to succinctly describe all the occasions long before he got into politics that Donald Trump called reporters on the phone pretending to be his own spokesman—not as a gag but as a serious disguise—so he could defend his business deals or brag about his romantic life.¹ There’s no way to briefly recall all the instances when he has denied saying or doing things that he said on the record, with evidence to back it, or did in plain sight, with cameras and witnesses around. If I tried to put the full evidence of Trump’s megalomania into words here—I mean, it’d take a thousand pages, and the pages would spontaneously combust. (And people would say they’d never seen anything like it, believe me.)

So instead of doing any of that, I’d like to recognize a couple of people who’ve already tried. George Conway and Peter Wehner are loyal conservatives—loyal to principle, not to some guy who holds some political title—who’ve explained Trump’s behavioral dangers at length and why they’re the reasons, above any others, to oppose him as president. Wehner, who was a speechwriter and policy adviser for President George W. Bush and served in the Bush 41 and Reagan administrations before that, made that point pretty much from day one. Pay attention to the italicized part of the following quote, which comes from an interview he did with C-SPAN in July 2016: “I think [Trump] is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement to be President of the United States isn’t where you check the boxes on policy, though I think policy is very important . . . but it is temperament, it’s disposition, it’s the idea of whether you have wisdom, and judgment, and prudence.” (My emphasis.)²

Peter’s description of the presidency is dead on. The job of president isn’t to own the libs or the conservatives. It isn’t to be a culture warrior, to purge every frustration about politics and society we’ve ever had—and that goes for the Republicans who can’t stand the media and Hollywood the same as it does for the Democrats who condescend to middle America. The job of president is to oversee the world’s most powerful government and to use that power measuredly in most cases, appropriately in the most stressful ones, and intelligently in all of them. Let me tell you: Donald Trump’s extreme narcissism prevents him from doing any of that.

As Conway noted in an essay in The Atlantic, our Founding Fathers made it so that the president would be a “public fiduciary,” whose fundamental responsibility was to do what was best for the country. “To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard. For Trump, Trump always comes first. He places his interests over everyone else’s—including those of the nation whose laws he swore to faithfully execute. That’s not consistent with the duties of the president, whether considered from the standpoint of constitutional law or psychology.”³

The psychology angle on Trump has gotten a lot of airtime and column space the last few years. Conway himself has argued that Trump’s conduct meets the literal book definition of something called “narcissistic personality disorder,” which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)—the authoritative guide for health professionals on such things—says is evidenced by a set of nine criteria, any five of which need to be present for there to be a diagnosis. Whether mental health professionals would diagnose Trump with this condition is a discussion exclusively for them. But that discussion is irrelevant to deciding whether the president’s mentality causes him to fail in his office and fail the nation. Conway and Wehner have made the points respectively that you don’t need to be a doctor to tell that a football player suffered a gruesome leg injury or be a mechanic to tell that your car is leaking oil and puffing smoke from underneath the hood. I think reasonable people should agree that one, mental health is a serious topic, and two, we can treat it with the sensitivity it deserves while observing something pertinent about our country’s chief executive: that he acts like a destructive egomaniac any way you look at it.

I’d like to look at it from the perspective that Trump lacks sound judgment to a large extent exactly because he’s a narcissist. It impairs his ability or his willingness—your guess is as good as mine—to make good choices in his capacity as president, regardless of whether those choices are about policy or simply enforcing laws as he is constitutionally bound to do. The problem is that Trump’s narcissism makes him mistrust any advice that goes against his own instincts and his self-described “great and unmatched wisdom.”⁴ Only somebody omnipotent could get away with dismissing everything but his own mind and experience—every set of data, every expert insight, every alternative—and come to the best conclusion every time. Trump, although he’d never admit it, is not omnipotent. So he needs to rely on outside sources to guide his decision making, even when he has a strong instinct one way or the other.

Of course, that’s not his style. As he told the Washington Post in an interview, “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”⁵

I know, I know—that’s the rebellious, screw-the-Poindexters attitude that many of the people who voted for him liked, especially after eight years of a president who prided himself on being cerebral and cosmopolitan, while leaving half of Americans feeling as though they had been cast off as dumbass bumpkins. But people: Don’t. Buy. The. Sham. Donald Trump is not the commonsense cowboy he thinks he is. Give this paragraph from Conway—which is fully cited—a chance:

In July [2019], [Trump] described himself in a tweet as “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” . . . That “stable genius” self-description is one that Trump has repeated over and over again—even though he has trouble with spelling, doesn’t know the difference between a hyphen and an apostrophe, doesn’t appear to understand fractions, needs basic geography lessons, speaks at the level of a fourth grader, and engages in “serial misuse of public language” and “cannot write sentences,” and even though members of his own administration have variously considered him to be a “moron,” an “idiot,” a “dope,” “dumb as shit,” and a person with the intelligence of a “kindergartener” or a “fifth or sixth grader” or an “11-year-old child.”⁶

I should pause here to say that just because Trump has demonstrated these characteristics and his subordinates have described him this harshly doesn’t mean I view his supporters the same way. Because I absolutely do not. I made that point in the opening chapter, but it bears repeating here: Trump has conned people into believing he’s a big deal by talking a big game—truly bigger than anyone in US politics has ever talked it. If you were a voter fed up in 2016 with the political status quo—a Bush here, a Clinton there, Romney, Obama, not one of them, in your opinion, stopping the country from going in a direction you didn’t like—you might have asked yourself, why not believe Trump’s bluster? After all, his name is on everything, it seems. He’s been one of America’s most famous celebrities since the 1990s. He had that TV show with a catchphrase everyone used all joshing-like for years. “Trump” seems like a successful brand and a successful man. If he says he wants to do the same for the country and do it by speaking the language of the average Joe for once—instead of talking about how some trade deal would be awesome for our “GDP” and our “economic growth,” talk about what it may do to my community and me—why in the hell wouldn’t I give him the chance?

That’s why it’s so important to acknowledge that two things can be true: one, Trump is right that politicians have lost touch with common Americans, and two, he is the wrong man to look out for them. Because when the going gets tough, he will look out only for himself. He cares about the concerns of flyover country only as long as seeming to care gives him power. If he truly cared—if he were an actual problem solver—then wouldn’t he use every tool at his disposal to make the United States’ problems go away? Yes, he would. But he doesn’t. Here’s what he does, instead, to quote Conway once more:

Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians. (My emphasis.)⁷

This is a new level of megalomania. He’s completely dismissed the possibility that anyone knows more than he does about this stuff. And I honestly think that if you listen to the guy talk for a few minutes without thinking about what political party he belongs to—yours or someone else’s—you’d have a difficult time concluding that he wasn’t epically narcissistic about his brilliance and capacities. Good leaders understand that they’re not the smartest person in the room sometimes, even a lot of the time. Donald Trump implies that he has intelligence on the scale of a fucking god. It is ludicrous. And we have to take him at his word that he really believes it. If Trump were just joking, he wouldn’t back up his supposed supergenius by acting as though he were a supergenius—as though he knew better than the weathermen, because Dorian was truly threatening Alabama, and so he had the hurricane map drawn on to prove it. (Here again, you can see how several chapters in this book can apply to single episodes of his behavior.)

Let me pose the same question here that I did about Trump and his cult: Okay, so why does it matter? I’ll acknowledge that talking about all of his awful traits isn’t revealing any startling new insight into the president’s nonexistent character. Everybody, even most of his fans, knows what sort of person he is. Trump’s personal favorability is in the tank; tons of his voters, in surveys and in conversations, don’t defend his personality; only the most burn-it-down of his backers actually like the fact that Trump talks to dictators as though they met on a dating app and has zero self-control on Twitter. The problem is, many of his fans think it doesn’t matter. Here are two reasons why it does.

One: all these categories of kinglike or authoritarian actions eventually cause a society to collapse if you let them go on long enough, and two: a clear-as-day character defect such as narcissism prevents Trump from delivering on many of the promises he makes.

Trump’s narcissism influences or even controls his decision making and then produces conclusions and follow-through that are bad for the United States. Because we don’t have all day, I’ll take just a few examples to show you what I mean.

One, which applies more to the dystopian societal collapse business, has to do with how Trump mistakes himself, as president, for “the state.” What do I mean? Let’s take the instance of Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, exaggerating a transcript of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Zelensky, in September 2019. During a committee hearing, Schiff mischaracterized Trump’s side of the exchange like this: “It reads like a classic organized crime shakedown. Shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words, this is the essence of what the president communicates: We’ve been very good to your country, very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what? I don’t see much reciprocity here. I hear what you want. I have a favor I want from you though. And I’m going to say this only seven times so you better listen good.” (My emphasis.)⁸

He went on like that for a minute before bookending his “this is the essence” caveat with “This is in sum and character what the president was trying to communicate with the president of Ukraine.” Whether it actually was what he was trying to communicate hadn’t been formally investigated at the time—but from Trump’s perspective, it wasn’t.

Now, if you’re a hard-core Trump supporter, you probably absolutely loathe Schiff—and even if you’re a garden-variety Republican, an independent, or (believe it or not) a journalist, you’re likely to be skeptical of his conduct in some way. George Stephanopoulos, the former Bill Clinton aide turned ABC News host, asked Schiff during his weekly Sunday program why he would “make up dialog for dramatic effect, even if it’s a parody, as you say?”⁹ I mention that to make clear that I’m not about to defend Schiff. Rather, I want to show how Trump’s reaction to Schiff demonstrates his delusions of grandeur. First, there was this tweet:

Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?¹⁰

There you have it: the president of the United States just casually wondering if federal law enforcement should arrest the House Intelligence Committee chair and charge him with a crime punishable by death. “Well, maybe he was just joking,” one might say. Well, here Trump is later that week speaking to press in the Oval Office:

The whistleblower started this whole thing by writing a report on the conversation I had with the president of Ukraine. The conversation was perfect, it couldn’t have been nicer. I saw [Senator] Rick Scott, I saw many of the senators talking about it, many of the congressmen talking about it—not a thing wrong. Unless you heard the Adam Schiff version, where he made up my conversation. He actually made it up. It should be criminal, it should be treasonous. He made it up, every word of it, made up, and read it to Congress as though I said it. And I’ll tell you what, he should be forced to resign from Congress, Adam Schiff. He’s a lowlife. He should be forced to resign. He took a perfect conversation, realized he couldn’t read it to Congress, because it was perfect—it was a very nice conversation. I knew many people were on the phone. Not only were many people on the phone, we had stenographers on the phone taking it down word for word. He took that conversation—which was perfect—he said, I can’t read this. So, he made up a conversation and reported it and said it to Congress and the American people. And it was horrible, what he said. And that was supposed to be coming from me. But it was all fabricated. He should resign from office in disgrace, and frankly, they should look at him for treason, because he is making up the words of the President of the United States. (My emphasis.)¹¹

He called a conversation “perfect” four times, which was weird enough. (Have you ever heard someone use that word to describe a damn phone call?) But he also described Schiff’s actions as “treasonous” and, to make sure there was no misunderstanding, said Schiff should be “looked at”—meaning investigated—“for treason.” Now, I want you to read the federal statute that spells out the consequences for being guilty of treason. Pay special attention to what—not who—the object of treason is in this language from the US Code:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

Whoever “levies war against” . . . the United States.

Whoever “adheres to [the] enemies” of . . . the United States.

Whoever gives “aid and comfort” to the enemies of . . . the United States.

Treason is a crime of acting against the nation.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that nothing Adam Schiff did was—my word, I can’t believe I actually have to say this—actually “treasonous.” He embellished, overstated, what have you, the president’s portion of a call transcript with a foreign leader, and he qualified it twice by saying that the embellishment or overstatement was what he read between the lines. The issue relevant to Trump’s narcissism is that he believes this was an offense committed against the nation. In effect, Trump is saying that treason is a crime that attacks not the United States but Donald Trump. When another politician mischaracterizes Donald Trump, it is treason. He said that. And his words carry weight because he’s the president.

This is so nuts, so manipulative, so self-obsessed, so megalomaniacal that I don’t know where to begin, because there are so many places to do it. I guess I may as well start here: “treason” is not a word you bandy about when you’re the president. Look, I understand that Trump has cheapened the meaning of words—and our politics in general was already devaluing them before he came along. A progressive nonprofit called the Action Project released an ad in 2012 that showed an actor playing House Speaker Paul Ryan wheeling “granny” off a cliff—to criticize his position on Medicare reform.¹² For years, Republicans called Barack Obama a socialist—a word we’ve gained a new appreciation for in the era of politicians such as Bernie Sanders. I confess that as a talk radio host, I was part of the trend of using hyperbole to criticize public figures and government policies I disagreed with. But I can’t underscore this enough: there is a massive difference between a person who is not the president of the United States using exaggerated political language and a person who is the president of the United States saying, adamantly and repeatedly, that somebody inside the Department of Justice should “look at” one of his political opponents for the heinous act of treason just for exaggerating a comment that was clearly made for dramatic effect. If we can’t agree on that—if we can’t say that the nation’s chief executive directly accusing a member of the other party of that crime is a bridge far, far too far—then we can’t ever screw the lid back on. Because what will happen is that we will normalize presidents explicitly saying that someone on the other side of the aisle should possibly face death over something as minor as a rhetorical dispute, until one of those presidents is just crazy enough to get DOJ to try the case.

And just in case this seems like an isolated incident, the previous week Trump made a similar charge against the person who spoke to the whistle-blower who had uncovered the Zelensky phone call. “Whoever the hell they saw—they’re almost a spy,” he said at a private event. “. . . Who’s the person who gave the whistleblower information? Because that’s close to a spy. You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”¹³

Back in February 2018, Trump took issue with Democrats who refused to clap at his State of the Union address. He blustered that they were “Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not?”¹⁴

Remember something I highlighted in a previous chapter about the president abusing his power: he does not see a line between himself and the Justice Department, which is supposed to make prosecutorial decisions independent of his suggestions and free of White House interference. He bullied his first attorney general for not opening investigations he wanted opened—and that AG, Jeff Sessions, was eventually pushed out.

He said the Time Warner–AT&T merger shouldn’t happen—and the Department of Justice filed suit to block it.

He said his Democratic rival Adam Schiff should be brought up on treason charges. What will happen next?

Folks, can we not mess around with this one? Okay? Can we not? Because it’s a little too scary. It’s a little too like the totalitarian governments that sanction the murder of political dissenters. Let’s not get even 5 percent of the way to that. Let’s not even begin down that path. Let’s remember what our nation is not, which is a nation that exhibits even a morsel of the habits of Kim Jong-un and his barbaric forerunners. Let’s put a stop to this right now and say that Donald Trump doesn’t belong within a thousand miles of the type of power he threatens to use casually, all because someone hurt his feelings.

That, my friend . . . is why this matters. Rhetoric has consequences.

And then, as covered earlier, there’s Trump’s delusion that he’s the world’s foremost expert ever on virtually everything. This one flows straight from the second excerpt of Conway’s essay, in which he names all the subject areas that Trump says he knows more about than anyone else. Literally anyone else. If the president believes he knows better than anyone else how to handle the likes of Kim and Xi and Putin, how to set the country’s trade policy, how to fix our leaky southern border and immigration policy generally, and how to eliminate the national debt—then what information do you think will inform his decisions? Going back to the quote from a few paragraphs ago: “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”

When you’re drunk on your own superiority like this, you’ll reason that you can do anything, because the rules don’t apply to you. We’ve seen this with Trump and the rules of arithmetic and economics. There are also rules—even informal ones, or what are called “norms”—covering the president’s comportment in office. I want to highlight one of them here, in the context of his narcissism: not selling out your country for your personal political gain, of which there are all too many examples. One is Trump’s phone call with Zelensky the morning of July 25, 2019, which reads at some junctures like standard, diplomatic sucking up—and then some. “We worked a lot” to win an election, Zelensky said, “but I would like to confess to you that I had an opportunity to learn from you.” And then: “Well yes, to tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country.” I guess the Ukrainian leader really takes the marketing advice “Know your audience” to heart.

But other parts of the call weren’t so funny. At one point, Zelensky said his government was “almost ready to buy more Javelins [missiles] from the United States”; Trump responded right after by saying “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” which was when he went into this conspiracy theory stuff about a server being housed in Ukraine and how Zelensky’s government should work with Attorney General William Barr to investigate it. Zelensky responded approvingly: “Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. . . . I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly. That I can assure you.”

Then Trump continued, “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. . . . The other thing, [t]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it. . . . It sounds horrible to me.”¹⁵

Then there was the interview he did with Stephanopoulos about a month and a half before the Zelensky call:

Stephanopoulos: Your campaign this time around, if foreigners, if Russia, if China, if someone else offers you information on opponents, should they accept it or should they call the FBI?

Trump: I think maybe you do both. I think you might want to listen, I don’t, there’s nothing wrong with listening. If somebody called from a country, Norway, “We have information on your opponent.” Oh, I think I’d want to hear it.

Stephanopoulos: You want that kind of interference in our elections?

Trump: It’s not an interference, they have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI. If I thought there was something wrong. But when somebody comes up with oppo research, right, that they come up with oppo research. Oh, let’s call the FBI. The FBI doesn’t have enough agents to take care of it, but you go and talk honestly to congressmen, they all do it, they always have. And that’s the way it is. It’s called oppo research.¹⁶

Then there was what Trump said on the White House lawn in October amid the Ukraine mess. He was critical of business dealings involving companies associated with Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, and China: “China should start an investigation into the Bidens, because what happened in China is just about as bad as what happened with Ukraine.”¹⁷

Those are two clear-cut examples of Trump asking a foreign government to investigate his political opponent—sandwiching his admission that he’d accept dirt from a foreign government on a political opponent—in the span of three and a half months. He does it because he thinks he can get away with it. When he says, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” it’s fair to interpret him pretty broadly.

In writing about how the United States elects its presidents in The Federalist Papers, No. 68, “The Mode of Electing the President,” Alexander Hamilton stated this: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

That’s not quite so straightforward—the language is a little outdated for how we communicate today. But the point is this: it is vital that foreign governments do not influence our presidential elections. Trump asks for this influence directly—he did it in 2016 from Russia, he did it in 2019 from Ukraine and China, and he’s extended an open invitation to anyone else, because to him, it’s just “oppo research.”

He thinks he knows better than anyone else the basic definitions of a “trade deficit” and a “budget deficit.” He thinks he knows better than the economists’ consensus about trade: Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, who left the Republican Party in October 2019 partly because of Trump, wrote that “[e]conomists are famous for disagreeing with one another, and indeed, seminars in economics departments are known for their vociferous debate. But economists reach near unanimity on some topics, including international trade.” That consensus, according to a letter to congressional leaders from Mankiw and thirteen other economists who have led the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is that “[i]nternational trade is fundamentally good for the U.S. economy, beneficial to American families over time, and consonant with our domestic priorities.”¹⁸ But as unintelligent as these two things are, they do not actively betray the public trust. Trump thinks he knows better than Alexander Hamilton—than the no-brainer that another nation should not be a player in a presidential election.

That, Mr. President, is “traitorous.” And politics be damned, it’s impeachable on principle.