Is Donald Trump a Narcissist?

A commenter asked for an examination of whether Donald is a Narcissist. It is difficult to analyze for several reasons. Everyone has some narcissistic traits, the threshold between merely normal narcissism and pathological narcissism is arguable, and I have never met Donald, and thus must examine him from a distance for a pathology that can be difficult to spot up close. On top of that all, I am not even a credentialed expert on the subject of Narcissism! That said, I do have a loose opinion, which I will present here while acknowledging its weaknesses, and the reader my take it for what it is.

First, it is obvious that Donald’s public personae could clearly be argued as exhibiting several narcissistic traits. He is attention seeking, insulting, glib, charismatic – he is even selfish about hogging the limelight. But I don’t take any of that as a sign he is a Narcissist, because I see the genius within Trump, and thus I see how he is likely adopting the tools of the Narcissist to succeed in an r-selected environment which favors Narcissism.

My own view is that Donald is learned in the art of Narcissism, and uses it as tool. Heartiste has discussed the pick-up artists who are naturals at game. They naturally find women tedious and don’t take them seriously, and they feel no need to pretend otherwise. Women begin throwing themselves at these aloof alpha bad boys when they are young, and soon they exude the abundance mentality, making them even more aloof alpha, and women notice it. Things are great. But then the armor gets dinged. They get older, those first women ignore them, and now they begin to grow desperate and the spell is broken.

On the other side is the learned master of Game. In one post Heartiste detailed an early misadventure with women, caring deeply about the happiness of his love and even at one point seeking marriage. Then he began to realize something was off about how women responded to attention. He began studying game, testing his realizations, and suddenly he found that he had become a master of Game. Everything went his way, the girls couldn’t resist him, and he understood every nuance of the mechanism behind that.

Having seen both sides of the equation, he came to understand what the natural did not – the mechanism at work. Having known both sides, he came to see the entire game with a clarity that nobody else could. Having come from the other side, what he learned stuck with him because it stood out so clearly to him as aberrant. Where a natural could barely describe his own mindset, Heartiste created a written archive of epic proportions cataloging every nuance of every psychology, from the various females to the various males.

Scott Adams has written about Donald from the perspective of the trained hypnotist and expert in persuasion. Adams sees Donald using the tools of persuasion, and in his view Donald is a master of them. I see the same thing from the cognitive neuroscience perspective, and have no doubt – Donald is a Heartiste-level genius at communicating ideas into the minds of crowds, and molding perceptions. You don’t get that adroit in the tools of the modern narcissist society without coming from the other side.

I have known several narcissists, and in each the malady itself has made it impossible for the narcissist to achieve that genius-level of understanding. A narcissist could never think about a failure without seeing it as an impossibly humiliating black mark of shame, blaming it on someone else’s stupidity, and then blocking it out of their mind. They would even rewrite the memory in their mind as a success, so painful was it to consider honestly. The idea of replaying the failure in their mind honestly, over and over, while examining every detail of it, and honestly looking at where the narcissist had made a mistake would be entirely impossible. Their amygdala couldn’t handle the strain of the self-criticism necessary to do that.

There is another aspect of Donald that makes me think he is not a narcissist, and that is that Donald makes people happy. Erik Erickson has seen Donald in private when the cameras are off, and what he described was not a narcissist.

There is one more thing I want you to know about Donald Trump. I’ve met him and interviewed him before. When the camera was not on and the interview was not going, he was not The Donald. He was a guy who cared deeply for his staff and the people who merely walked in the front door of his building. I want you to know that the Donald Trump I’ve seen in private is not the Donald Trump you see on stage because I think we are not going to see that Trump. It’s our loss and it will be his own loss. The person, a separate entity from the personality, is a good man.

The reason I don’t much care for Rick Santorum is that I’ve seen him, off camera and behind the scenes when no one was supposed to be watching, behave like a spoiled and entitled rich kid snapping at people in a lower position than himself when he did not need to. It’s also why I have a soft spot for Trump. From the same vantage point, I’ve seen him behave kindly to people far lower on the rung of life than him when he did not have to. Character when the camera isn’t rolling counts in my book.

A reporter in another piece wrote of how Donald was always extolling how great the people around him looked, and making everyone laugh. Even Donald admitted in one interview that one time when he will lie is if somebody doesn’t look good, he will still tell them that they look good, to make them feel happy. If you look for accounts of Donald given by his employees, they can’t rave enough about him. You don’t get that with Narcissists. Invariably the disorder produces an individual with an amygdala on fire who tries to salve the anxiety by making other people around them feel like crap.

Finally, there was Donald at his lowest, when his first financial empire collapsed around him. At one point he joked with Ivana that a bum on the street had it better than him, because the bum didn’t owe anyone anything, while Donald was hundreds of millions in debt. I do not know many people who could look into the belly of that beast with such aplomb. If Donald was a narcissist, I would expect that he would have had some sort of mental breakdown at that point, and been forced to ignore the state of his financial house.

Now does this mean that Bill Whittle is wrong to be concerned about Donald’s narcissism? No, but I think the difference is better understood through the amygdala paradigm than narcissism.

Donald is worth billions. He is surrounded by people who treat him like a God, 24/7. In short, he is in as much of an r-environment as I imagine would be possible. That he has remained as K as he has, would make me think he has some sort of super-K genes. Still, I suspect Donald has some level of a lack of amygdala-development, and diminished K-ification, if you will, due to the ease of his life as a billionaire.

We, like Ted Cruz, have been locked in a fight against the rabbits for a long time. They are our sworn enemy. We fight them all the time, we hate them with a passion, and when a rabbit says something, it immediately trips our amygdala and makes us primed to oppose it.

I don’t see this in Donald. Donald has been attacked by everyone. Liberals have attacked him, the GOP establishment has attacked him, conservatives in various areas have attacked him at times – he has been getting it from all sides. For that reason, I do not see him imbued with an extraordinarily strong anti-leftist amygdala pathway, that will make him reliably anti-liberal.

Viewed from the perspective of alliances, Ted Cruz has allied himself specifically with the opposition to liberalism. He has even aligned himself with those who oppose the squishy moderates in his own party. For Ted to align with a moderate position or liberal position would be to trip an amygdala pathway in his brain for loyalty. He reached out to us and we supported him – he can’t betray us. Additionally, Ted has been relentlessly savaged by liberals and moderates, so not only will he be driven by loyalty, he hates our enemies too. When he wins, he will know exactly who put him there and who his enemies are. When an issue with guns comes up, he will have no doubt where his loyalty lies. When an opportunity to cut spending arises, I’d expect he will seize it aggressively. If a gun rights issue comes up, he will side with us reflexively. His Supreme Court Justices will be models of conservative jurisprudence.

Donald has not explicitly reached out to the group “conservatives.” He supports what we do on immigration, he has said he supports guns, he opposes the establishment, and he is pro-American, all anti-liberal positions. But I could see him breaking away on some of those issues to compromise, and not feeling as if he is betraying us, because he never reached out to us to begin with. He supported one issue, and now he is changing to support a moderated version of that issue. I don’t see that tripping an amygdala pathway for loyalty in Donald, because he never promised us anything, or solicited our support. He just said he supported one issue, but he didn’t pledge loyalty to us.

As a result, I do not expect Donald to be relentlessly conservative. I expect he will, if elected, seek to allow illegal immigrants some sort of path to legality, if not citizenship. I expect he will go squishy on guns somewhere, as he has recently, acceding to banning those on terror watch lists from buying guns. I expect he will give in to Congress’ demands for free spending and more government, and I would expect our police/surveillance state will explode under him. I suspect his Supreme Court Justices would not be relentlessly conservative. I would expect they would be more in the mold of Sandra Day O’Conner than Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia.

The problem is also that Donald has little to irritate him. He has a beautiful wife, a wonderful family, no money concerns, plenty of people telling him how great he is, and the only hostility he gets is from politicians on both sides of the aisle, left and right. He has no sense of being in danger and under siege from one single enemy named leftwing liberalism, and of conservatives being his only allies in that battle. As a result, I do not see Donald being as relentlessly driven to support conservatism out of loyalty as Ted Cruz would be.

I think Donald will have far fewer amygdala pathways driving him to fight it out, and his amygdala will be much more prone to enter a relaxed state, allowing him to compromise. He won’t see his amygdala fire up opposite a liberal, the way our amygdalae would.

Now there is an upside to Donald’s brain, and a downside to Ted Cruz’s. Ted wants to win, and his amygdala pathways related to that make him play it safe. Ted’s amygdala is focused on winning, and not on how best to mold the opinions of the public. In playing it safe, Ted will not radically change how the public views issues,

Donald, by comparison is a master of negotiation and manipulation, and he has shown an incredible skill at getting attention, framing arguments, molding opinions of the crowd, and motivating those who he needs motivated. Even yesterday, I was expecting to see his poll numbers drop precipitously due to his support of a no-fly-list ban on buying guns, and yet he effortlessly changed the subject, got a ton of free publicity, and altered how people view our immigration options with his statement on banning Muslim immigration. Of course now that banning all Muslim immigration is on the table, restricting it by 98-99%, and banning 100% from hotbeds of ISIS seems like a good moderate compromise. Again, Donald has changed the debate and in doing so, changed the very opinions of the public. Now, liberals are suddenly on the run instead of advancing on us.

The real risk with Donald is that he could end up compromising something important away, like gun rights. If he gives the libs the terror-watch-list gun ban, we could see our gun rights being decided in fifteen years by an Obama clone putting every NRA member, hunter, and male on the terror watch list by executive order or administrative fiat, based on them being more aggressive than the average person. It could take decades to set that right in the courts, and all along the way the rabbits would be laughing at us, as our guns are taken.

At this point, if Donald doesn’t back-track on his terror-watch list gun ban, the decision will already be made, and Cruz will be the nominee, easily. Nothing, at this crucial point, is as important as protecting gun rights. That Donald didn’t see that is a big red warning flag that Donald is looking at the movement from the outside in – something I expect Donald will see himself in the coming months. I suspect that the announcement today that he wants to ban all Muslim immigration may be a desperate attempt to change the subject away from something which I suspect early internal polling has already told him could be a fatal mistake if it gets publicized. Hopefully Donald’s sudden drop in the polls will produce a massive amygdala pathway in everyone’s mind showing that the quickest way to sabotage even the most bullet-proof candidacy is to be less than steadfast in protecting gun rights. At this point I actually expect that Cruz will win it, solely off the gun thing.

So to summarize, Donald is not a Narcissist, but his acclimatization to ease and the fact that he hasn’t in-grouped with conservatives as strongly as Cruz, means he could end up squishy on some conservative issues. But the effect he is having on the race, and the attitude change of the populace as he tears it up is terrific, and I still support him on that basis alone. Little at this point could be worse than Donald pulling out of the race at this moment. If he stays in, then by the time the election is held, whoever it is that wins, will have an immensely K-ified population seeking a conservative candidate to vote for.

As one poster here observed, it is highly likely that the anti-Donald forces will all coalesce behind Cruz to try and stop Donald when the time comes. It seems almost impossible that they would fail now, given Donald’s misstep on gun rights.

Either way, you know things have turned K when it seems that the race will inevitably come down to either Trump or Cruz, and the only deciding factor is who was most perfectly conservative. This is K-selection beginning, and the Apocalypse hasn’t even started.

It is good, but only if you are heavily armed and primed to take life to protect your own.

Apocalypse cometh™