Category: Narcissism

AMERICA THE UNEXCEPTIONAL

As we bury our COVID-19 dead, let us dig the deepest grave of all for the only victim that deserved to die:  American exceptionalism.  

For more than 200 years, we have clung to the dangerously delusional notion that our country is vastly superior to all other nations. The myth of American exceptionalism has found its way into every Fourth of July parade, every Veterans Day memorial, every politician’s rhetorical flourish.

Ronald Reagan called America a “shining city on a hill.”  Thomas Jefferson referred to it as the world’s “empire of liberty.”  Abraham Lincoln said it was the “last best hope of earth.” 

And then came the Great Trump Pandemic of 2020.  The president spent months dismissing the approaching plague as a “Chinese virus” that would pose no problem for Americans.  Despite his rosy, it’s-nothing-to-worry-about prognosis, the White House, according to the New York Times, knew in January that the coronavirus would strike us so hard that the death toll could hit 500,000.  

Trump’s administration was also aware that the country seriously lacked sufficient medical equipment and gear to deal with the pandemic’s magnitude.  Yet, it did nothing in January or February to prepare for the coming avalanche.  By late March, the only sign of American exceptionalism was that the United States had more cases of the deadly virus than any other country in the world. On Saturday, it also claimed the trophy for the most COVID-19 deaths. 

The concept of America as innately superior and exceptional has long been a deeply embedded national illusion. The dynamic is reminiscent of George and Martha’s imaginary child in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf. On some level we knew it wasn’t true, but like Albee’s quarreling protagonists, the more we pretended that it was, the better we felt, and the more real it seemed.  

In a deliciously ironic twist, the term American exceptionalism was coined quite sardonically in 1929 by Joseph Stalin. American communist leaders had argued that the country’s unique brand of capitalism was an exception to universal Marxist laws.  Stalin’s response was to condemn the “heresy of American exceptionalism” and expel the U.S. delegation from the Communist International.  

As the years passed, however, American exceptionalism was thoroughly drained of any trace of Stalin’s sarcasm.  Instead, it reflected a deeply held – if misguided – belief that our country was somehow divinely inspired to be the very best the world has to offer. A 2017 Pew Research poll showed that only 14 percent of Americans believe there are countries better than ours. Obviously, this view that America is and always has been superbly exceptional, ignores a number of ignoble chapters in America’s story. To name just a few: massacres of native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow Laws and rampant, ongoing discrimination on the basis of race, sex and national origin. 

Even before the Trump pandemic, the data consistently refuted the claim of American exceptionalism. According to a variety of studies, America ranks 33rd for political freedom, 19th for happiness, 13th in quality of life, 45th in infant mortality, 46th in maternal mortality, 36th in life expectancy, 27th in healthcare and education and 48th for protecting press freedom. Of the G7 nations (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK), America’s income inequality is the highest. 

Whatever lingering doubt there may have been about America’s status as the world’s shining city on a hill was decisively resolved by our country’s despicable bungling of the biggest crisis in our lifetime.  Many other nations, with far fewer resources, have totally out-shown the United States in marshalling a response to the pandemic.  For example, to name just a few, the governments of South Korea, Germany, Finland, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada and Denmark have far and away surpassed the U.S. in battling this virus (here and here).

Amazingly, the United States had as much if not more information about the Coronavirus as those other countries.  They succeeded because they acted quickly and decisively based only on the scientific data, not on the political optics of a leader’s reelection campaign. Donald Trump, on the other hand, spent more than two months ignoring that data and rejecting repeated warnings to prepare for what would be the plague of the century.

As a result, one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, is still scrounging around for ventilators, personal protective equipment, hospital beds and body bags.  The president performs on his daily reality television show, spewing forth false information, mixed messages, and nauseating self-promotion. Anxiety-stricken Americans tune into this spectacle looking for guidance on this terror that has gripped our lives. Instead, they see a president insulting his political opponents, accusing hospital employees of stealing protective equipment, and boasting about his television ratings. 

Hardly American exceptionalism.  Yet, America used to do some exceptional things.  At the very start of the Ebola crisis in 2014, the Obama administration sent thousands of medical workers to fight the disease at its epicenter in West Africa, an effort that not only slowed the disease in that country, but blocked its spread to the U.S.  

Not surprisingly, Trump has done just the opposite.  Not only has he failed to establish a cohesive national plan to combat the virus, the president has avoided any effort to coordinate with other countries, preferring instead to slam doors in their faces.  He tried – unsuccessfully – to buy a German company working on a Coronavirus vaccine so that the U.S. could horde the medication.  He ordered companies making masks and ventilators not to comply with contracts to deliver some equipment to other countries.  One of those countries was Canada, which has been sending medical personnel from Windsor, Ontario into Detroit to help care for COVID patients.

No country is inherently and permanently bad or good.  Like people, nations are mixed bags, package deals, the contents of which depend on all sorts of variables, like polices, resources and leadership.  The notion that we as a nation are exceptional, that we are the best, blocks our ability to grow, to become better, to learn from other countries. 

As our 45th president has so ably demonstrated, the narcissistic illusion of perfection is a virus of the soul that disposes of the need to change.  Until we come up with a vaccine, let’s keep our social distance from American exceptionalism. 

THE AUDACITY OF AUTHENTICITY WITHOUT VIRTUE

What do you call a president who, in the middle of a deadly pandemic, repeatedly spews falsehoods, insults political opponents and praises himself?  A-U-T-H-E-N-T-I-C. You call him authentic.

After all, the 2016 presidential election was all about authenticity (here, here and here). The pundits and the pollsters kept telling us that, for all of his failings, Donald Trump was seen by voters as being authentic. The Donald won the election, the story line went, because he was real and Hillary Clinton was fake.  This bizarre binary standard for evaluating politicians extended into 2020. Reams have been written about potential Democratic presidential candidates and their authenticity or lack thereof. 

Why are we treating authenticity – irrespective of the content of a person’s character – as a virtue?  Clearly, Trump is no phony. He’s the real deal. But the deal is terrible. He is authentically bad, immoral and indifferent to the needs of others. Why is that kind of authenticity virtuous? How did we get here?

Well, don’t blame Aristotle. The architecture he provided for ethical systems that lasted centuries revolved around such virtues as courage, honor, temperance, truthfulness, justice and friendship. Authenticity did not make his list. In fact, Aristotle went in the opposite direction, advising us to emulate others who have these virtues until they become habitual with us. 

Then, in the 18th century, a Genevan philosopher named Jean-Jacques Rousseau, advocated an alternative view, one in which authenticity – being true to one’s self – sits atop his ethical hierarchy. Rousseau, according to academicians who studied him, saw pure, unvarnished authenticity as the most important source of happiness and psychological coherence. He believed that people are naturally good and that their authentic selves cannot harm others since “their self-love is moderated by concern for others.”   Rousseau developed this school of thought roughly 300 years before Donald Trump roamed the earth.

The late social critic and academic Christopher Lasch was, however, very aware of the self-absorbed Trumpian archetype. More than 40 years ago, he wrote a book called The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. In it, Lasch noted the similarities between Narcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity. He wrote that narcissism and authenticity are both characterized by “. . . deficient empathetic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed behavior.” In other words:  An authentic narcissist is still a narcissist. And wholly without virtue.

The political fascination with authenticity did not begin with Trump. It exploded with him and, if we are lucky, it will end with him. But this bizarre phenomenon has been building for some time. Think back to the Bush v. Gore election in 2000.  The rap on Gore was that he was too stiff and had a propensity to overinflate his resume. Bush, despite – or maybe because of – an  antipathy toward good syntax, struck people as more real, the kind of guy you’d like to have a beer with.  

This desire for authenticity in leadership is certainly understandable. Politicians have long been seen as crafty, cagey characters who say one thing and do another, who appear overly buttoned down and tightly scripted.  Add to those perceptions the current environment of rampant distrust and disgust with our government and political systems, and you can begin to see the attraction of someone who simultaneously wants to trash the status quo and appears to be genuinely authentic.  

Like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  Yes, they are lightyears apart in so many ways.  Yet their appeal has embraced the same two elements: being authentic and promising to blow the system up.  Sanders’ brand of authenticity is considerably different than Trump’s.  Bernie is not a narcissist.  But his fans constantly boast about how their candidate hasn’t changed in 40 years.  Indeed, there is a lot of truth to that.  Sanders has forever believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the evil of capitalism and value of class warfare.  

In many ways, Sanders’ authenticity is more pure and moral than Trump’s.  In the finest Rousseauian tradition, Bernie is stridently faithful to his principles. They reflect his true self and he is not of a mind to modify them in order to enlarge his base.  Therein lies a serious problem for a presidential candidate. His allegiance to an ideology makes him authentic, endears him to his followers and advances his movement. But given his narrow appeal to a minority of the electorate, and the absence of the slightest rhetorical nod to wanting to be “president for all Americans”, he lacks the votes to win.  To Bernie, being true to himself is more important than winning.

That is decidedly not the case for Donald Trump.  To him, it’s all about winning. He has no ideology or core beliefs. His positions on . . . well, on everything, change with the wind, depending on what he thinks will help him win.  He spent the first three weeks of the coronavirus crisis insisting it was a hoax that would soon go away. Then he became a “wartime president”, leading the battle against the dreaded enemy virus. As cases started doubling every few days, as temporary morgues were built near hospitals, he talked about a quick return to normal. On Sunday, responding to a bipartisan outcry, he backed away from abruptly ending the war, saying, “Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won.”

 All of these dramatically disparate moves were about only one thing: Trump’s perception of what would best help him win reelection.  That’s authenticity. That’s being true to his narcissistic self. 

It has been said that this life-and-death crisis we are going through will forever change us. Let us hope that one of those changes is a massive rejection of the notion that we should pick our leaders on the basis of unbridled authenticity, regardless of how obnoxious and odious a candidate’s behavior may be.  

Aristotle had it right. Virtue doesn’t lie in being true to whatever kind of self we may have. Virtue is about qualities like courage, honor, honesty and justice that provide a better life for all of us.  Authenticity without virtue is no more than a fool looking into a mirror.

TRUMP’S REAL ART OF THE DEAL: DON’T NEGOTIATE, BLOVIATE

One of the biggest boasts behind last fall’s election died suddenly last week. Now buried in the Republican Graveyard of Wishful Thinking is the congenitally defective assertion that Donald Trump is a master negotiator.

“There’s going to be health insurance for everybody,” the new president declared in January, insisting it will cost far less than it does now. Asked how Trump could be so confident of those claims, his resident sycophant, Sean Spicer, had a quick-but-ludicrous answer: “He knows how to negotiate great deals.”

Nothing is ever final in Washington, but hopefully the Republican healthcare debacle of 2017 has forever put an end to the utter foolishness that Donald Trump is a world class negotiator. The guy huffed and puffed his way through real estate sales, insulting, assaulting or suing anyone who got in his way. That’s not a skillset that translates into effective leadership on the world stage.

Yet, there is this lingering myth, a distorted caricature, of what an effective negotiator looks like, and the composite, unfortunately, bears a strong resemblance to guys like Trump: a loud, brash, boorish, bullying slug who pounds the table while lobbing loud threats and insults. The archetype represents an archaic bargaining style that was occasionally effective in limited circumstances involving one-shot transactions and no ongoing relationship. It has absolutely no application to resolving conflict with Congress or foreign leaders.

Here, thanks to Politico’s reporting, is all you have to know to conclude that President Donald J. Trump is a terrible negotiator: In a last ditch effort to change the minds of conservative House Republicans, Trump The Closer summoned the 30-some members of the Freedom Caucus to the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Although these folks had been a thorn in House Speaker Paul Ryan’s side, they liked Trump and were excited about the opportunity to get the president to make some changes in the healthcare bill in exchange for their support. They thought they could deal with him. After all, he knew how to negotiate. So they laid out their problems and sent some clear signals about what needed to be changed and why it mattered to them. And here is what the master negotiator told them: “Forget about the little shit. Let’s focus on the big picture here.” The “big picture”, Trump told them, was that the bill’s failure could imperil his reelection chances in 2020. Self-absorption might have served The Donald well in his mogul life, but it’s one of the worst traits a negotiator can bring to the table.

I don’t profess to be an expert on legislative negotiations but, over a career of more than 30 years, I helped bargain hundreds of contracts in the news industry. In order to get a deal, I had to know everything I could about the little shit. I wallowed in the little shit because somewhere in all that excrement was a key that would unlock the door to settlement. Obviously, I had to know what was important to our side, but I also needed to know management’s issues and what it needed in an agreement. That was the only route to a resolution that would have value for both sides.

Most negotiations are long and drawn out. Arguments are repeated ad nauseam, and it often appears that agreement will never be reached. There are, however, rare moments when the parties tire of the conflict and really want a deal. A good negotiator knows how to recognize those moments and seize them. Trump had that opportunity in the meeting with the Freedom Caucus and he totally blew it. Not only that, he blew it for the worst reason imaginable: he didn’t understand any of the issues. He acknowledged he was “not up on everything” in the bill. Hardly the mark of a master negotiator.

In his much touted book, “The Art of the Deal”, Trump offers this pearl of wisdom on his style of conflict resolution: “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” If he doesn’t get what he wants, he says he walks away and gets it someplace else. That might work for building casinos and hotels, but it’s a recipe for disaster in government. Trump views a negotiation as a zero-sum transaction, one that produces a winner and a loser. Virtually all of the academic literature on effective dispute resolution rejects that approach (here, here and here). Effective negotiating in an ongoing relationship – which is to say 95% of all negotiations – means doing the very things Trump disdains. For example: show respect for the other side; never lie; forget about an “amazing” deal so you can focus on getting one that works for all sides; try to overcome mistrust; find a way to let everyone win a little; and help your adversary save face if they back down on an issue.

Obviously, those of us appalled at the prospect of 24 million Americans losing health insurance, can find easy solace in the president’s incompetence as a negotiator. Sadly, the feeling won’t last long. If this guy can’t find common ground with members of his own party, what happens when he takes on Iran, North Korea, China , or other hot spots? With a bag of tricks consisting of aiming high, pushing and walking out when you don’t get your way, don’t count on world peace anytime soon.

TRUMP RULE OF MENTAL HEALTH: IF HE LOOKS, ACTS & GOVERNS CRAZY, HE’S CRAZY

There is an intense and amusing battle raging in the psychiatric community over whether the president is nuts. Specifically the controversy is focused on whether it is ethical for a shrink to declare Donald Trump insane without having examined him. There is a growing plethora of practicing therapists who have publicly diagnosed The Donald as bonkers, albeit in more elegant and clinical prose. And they have all incurred the wrath of the American Psychiatric Association whose rules prohibit members from publicly diagnosing political figures unless they have examined them and obtained their permission to release the findings.

This is known as the “Goldwater Rule”, and it evolved from a controversial psychiatric survey taken during the 1964 presidential campaign between Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson. A magazine polled more than 2,000 psychiatrists and a majority said the Republican senator from Arizona lacked the mental stability to be president. After losing the election, Goldwater sued the magazine for libel and won. Years later, the psychiatric association adopted the rule now being invoked, without much success, to keep its members from commenting on Trump’s mental state.

Dr. Allen Frances, a psychiatrist at Duke University School of Medicine and an author of the standard manual on psychiatric disorders, wrote a letter to the New York Times defending the president against the insanity label lobbed at him by some of the doctor’s colleagues. He said the commander in chief lacks the “distress and impairment required to diagnose a mental illness.” Trump might have tweeted the good doctor’s endorsement, if not for the sentence that followed: “Nevertheless,” Frances wrote, “he can and should be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

Thankfully, bloggers are not covered by the Goldwater Rule. That means I can go out on a limb and say publicly what most world leaders have to be thinking: President Donald J. Trump is batshit crazy.

Let’s count the ways:

• Turned the Nuclear Codes into a Facebook Moment. Since the start of the arms race, a military attaché, clutching a briefcase that can be used to launch nuclear missiles, has always been in close proximity to the commander in chief. All previous presidents have treated this sobering arrangement with well-deserved discretion. Not The Donald. He invited fellow diners at his Mar-a-Largo resort to pose with the “nuclear football” and its carrier for cute social media fodder.

• Thinks Frederick Douglas is Still Alive. Trump kicked off Black History Month with a lengthy monologue about how the “dishonest media” incorrectly reported that Martin Luther King’s bust had been removed from the Oval Office. Then, trying to think of other black people to mention, he gave a shout out to Douglas, saying the abolitionist who died 122 years ago “is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job.”

• Called for the Destruction of a Court that Ruled Against Him. Trump went to Nashville this week to deliver a carefully scripted speech in support of the Republican health insurance bill. Minutes before taking the stage, the president learned that his second attempt at an anti-immigration order had been blocked by a federal judge. So he jettisoned the insurance pitch and ranted about how he’d like to “break up” the Ninth Circuit.

• He Sees Some Holocausts as Better than Others. Asked what he learned in his first intelligence briefing, Trump said, a “nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

• Declared Unconditional Love for Himself. In an interview with an ABC reporter, Trump said, “I don’t want to change . . . I can be the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, but I may not be able to do the job nearly as well if I do that.”

• Repeatedly Sticks his Foot in his Mouth. As his lawyers draft briefs supporting his second travel ban order on the basis that it substantially resolved legal objections in the original document, Trump grabs a microphone and says the new order is “just a watered down version” of the first one.

• Thinks he is the Least Racist Person Ever. Seconds after making that declaration during a news conference, Trump asked a black reporter if she could set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus since they must be her friends.

• Comes out of his Own Little World Just Long Enough to Create International Incidents. The Obama-wiretapped-me fantasy now seems destined to have a longer life than the Iraq War. By now, Trump’s belief that the former president electronically surveilled him has been repudiated by every major Republican leader in Congress and the head of the FBI. But being The Donald means never having to say you’re sorry, or wrong. He doubled down this week and suggested that British spies planted the bugs for Obama. The Brits were enraged, but Trump wouldn’t back off, insisting he heard it on Fox News so it must be right. Fox News quickly said there was no truth to the story, but Trump kept right on mumbling about it, and even tried to drag a mystified German Chancellor Angela Merkel into the fracas late last week.

And on and on the list grows. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted yesterday, the insanity of the Trump administration can be measured by the fact that the new secretary of the interior rode to work on a horse named Tonto, and nobody paid much attention. Somewhere, in some afterlife, a bemused, and oh-so-very sane, Barry Goldwater is shaking his head and muttering, “And they called me crazy!”

PRESIDENT NARCISSUS: NOBODY LOVES TRUMP LIKE TRUMP LOVES TRUMP

Donald Trump has inhabited the White House for less than two months, but he is already the most psychoanalyzed president in history. A Google search of “Trump narcissism” turns up 449,000 entries. Here is a quick sampling: “Coping with Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the White House”, “Donald Trump, Narcissist-In-Chief”, “Trump is an Extreme Narcissist, and it Only Gets Worse From Here”. There are scholarly treatises portraying Trump as a posterchild for narcissism. There are letters from psychiatrists suggesting that the president undergo immediate treatment for the personality disorder. There is a ponderous analysis of whether narcissism could lead to impeachment.

Diagnosing a mental disorder is far beyond the reaches of this blog. Yet, there is a piece of this Narcissus stuff that is politically compelling, particularly as it relates to predicting the future of the Trump Administration. It is that aspect of the phenomenon that I want to explore here.

Although narcissism at its extreme is a recognized mental disorder, Sigmund Freud originally used the term to describe a personality type. He saw narcissists as emotionally isolated, very distrustful, poor listeners, lacking in empathy, dependent on adulation of others and likely to react to perceived threats with rage.

However, Freud also noted, according to a paper written in 2000 by the noted psychoanalyst and anthropologist Michael Maccoby, that “people of this type impress others as being ‘personalities.’ They are especially suited to act as a support for others, to take on the role of leaders, and to give a fresh stimulus to cultural development or damage the established state of affairs.”

Over the past 20 years, experts like Maccoby, and Sacramento psychologist Mark Ettensohn, have taken a close look at how narcissists perform as leaders. Despite their self-involvement, Ettensohn notes that narcissistic leaders can be very tuned in to what people are thinking or feeling, more so than their non-narcissistic counterparts. “Because narcissists spend so much time trying to manage deeply felt insecurities and trying to read other people for whether or not they’re liked,” Ettensohn said, “they tend to get pretty good at knowing what’s going on inside of others.”

Trump, more than any other player on the national political stage, picked up on the intensity of the dissatisfaction and frustration of a large segment of left-behind working class voters. They became his rally crowds, forming a perfect symbiotic relationship between those who wanted to pound the system to smithereens and the crazy, larger-than-life narcissist who spoke loudly and carried a large sledgehammer. Daniel Bober, a clinical psychiatry professor at Yale University School of Medicine, said narcissistic leaders project far more self-confidence than they have and “people tend to follow them because of that confidence.” Think about it: How many times, before and after the election, did we read comments like this one, from a Wisconsin woman quoted by the Washington Post?: “. . . he’s got this crazy character, he’s very flamboyant and irrational. (We) supported him not because of his character, but because he represented substantial change.”

The professionals who study the dynamics of narcissistic leaders have identified two key causes of their downfall, both well worth keeping in mind as we watch Trump in the days ahead. One of them, identified by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychology professor at London’s University College, is that the seductive charisma of inflated promises burns off when they aren’t fulfilled. Losing the adulation of the masses is as frightening to a narcissist as a crucifix is to a vampire.

That kind of rain has just started to fall on Trump’s parade. The Washington Post reported yesterday that many of his true believers are mortified over his backing of a health care bill that would take away their insurance. It’s a classic breakdown between a narcissist’s grandiose promise and the disappointment of his followers who believed in them. After all, it was just a month ago when his fans cheered the president’s words: “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. (You) can expect to have great health care. Much less expensive and much better.” Earlier this week, Trump threw his support behind the House Republican plan that will leave an estimated 24 million Americans without insurance, including many hard core Trump backers who would lose their Medicaid coverage.

Maccoby, the psychoanalyst and anthropologist who has written extensively about narcissistic leaders, says they can succeed for the long haul only if they have an effective lieutenant by their side, helping them avoid the most destructive behavior. In Trump’s case, that would include taking control of the Twitter account. Maccoby used the late Steve Jobs and Apple as an example. Jobs’ narcissistic style got him fired when he tried to run the company by himself. He later succeeded, Maccoby noted, when he came back and partnered with Tim Cook in operations and Jony Ive in design. Maccoby also said Napoleon fit the narcissistic mold and was functioning quite well until he discharged his close adviser, Talleyrand, leading to Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia since there was no one there to talk him out of it.

If Maccoby’s theory that narcissists can succeed only with the wise guidance of an able assistant, Trump is doomed. After all, Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist and bomb thrower, was writing racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic screeds for a far right wing website before he ended up in the west wing. Nobody else on the White House staff has yet shown any promise at being able to save Trump from Trump. If the psychological experts are right, the drama of the Trump presidency will grow even more dark and dreary in the days to come. As his fans grow disillusioned and withhold their love, the president will respond with more rage, furor and desperation. And there seems to be no adult in sight capable of holding him back. That means only one thing: the ending of this reality show is not likely to be pretty.