Narcissism Comes to the White House
The White House, Washington DC
Image by wordcitystudio.com
In a global world, the rising tide of the sea change of Trump’s election was shockingly noted — not only in the hallways of the world’s governments, but in the consulting rooms of American psychotherapists.
Not even 9/11 provoked such a collective wave of anxiety as I saw showing up for therapy in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency. For many, even those not in Hillary’s camp, were having post-traumatic stress reactions, as if they awoke on the morning of November 9th 2016 in a living nightmare. Only the nightmare continued… day after day, week after week of appalling falsehoods, tweets, appointments, and executive orders; plus the mounting evidence of corruption. For many, CNN at almost any hour of any day, seemed must-watch television. As with jihadists appearing on the world stage on 9/11, here was another player on the stage trying to undo the world as we’ve known it.
The mythic nature of American comic books had anticipated such a nightmarish figure for years, in portraying such outlandish villains as Lex Luthor, the Penguin, and the Joker. Here were malignantly narcissistic figures — grandiose and entitled, unprincipled and obsessed with power and world-domination. These “arch enemies” seemed the shadow of Superman and Batman. For they were thoroughly lacking in empathy for the rest of humanity, and trying to change the world into one more akin to their own darkened sensibility.
Yet if central traits of narcissism are said to include a hubristic grandiosity, the sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy, these traits were already politically and culturally surfacing in America long before its comic books, and long before Donald Trump.
A governmental appropriation of the lands of its native peoples certainly evidences America’s sense of entitlement — an entitlement that was still being acted out in the 20th and 21st century in the hubristic regime changes America felt entitled to, and which were enacted in Iran (in 1953) and Iraq (in 2003).
And the mass abduction of Africans into slavery is earlier evidence of a historical lack of empathy, one that was also to polarize the nation. A lack of empathy that would only be continued by an immigration plan, and a plotted “Muslim ban,” that would restrict displaced peoples from the Middle East’s war zones from entering our country; war zones that only ensued in the wake of America’s disastrous military invasion of Iraq, an invasion that was based upon lies and false premises: the putative existence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction;” and the equally putative collaboration between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
This political cartoon by Franklin urged the colonies to join together during the French and Indian War.
Image courtesy Library of Congress.
America’s founding fathers were concerned about this very thing. Having faced an armed colonial occupation force at the inception of our republic, they were concerned that America not follow the same path by engaging in unnecessary military adventures. Thus, Benjamin Franklin had argued against adopting the Roman legion’s martial eagle as our national bird, suggesting the turkey instead. Franklin’s concern turned out to be prescient. For America has been engaged in some form of warfare for every decade since its founding.
Yet like individuals, America is neither solely all light, nor all shadow. We’re more like a river that contains two tributaries, one clear running, the other muddy and foul; a nation both noble and culpable. (And often rent apart between its better and worse angels). America is a conversation between these two, and not just that “shining city on the hill.” We lose our bearings when we lose sight of one — or the other. And when we confuse one for the other.
And the rise of Trump puts that conversation — and that confusion — squarely before us. If narcissism is in part an identity confusion, a confusion about who we truly are, Trump represents not only a crisis for our democracy, but a national identity crisis. For he leads us to ask: Who are we as a people? (And it’s not a bad question).
However, that question has really been with us for as long as America has existed. And though much of our media has portrayed Trump as an outlier, an alien menace — as if an autocratic dictator transported from a third world banana republic — what has been lost in a psychologically naïve nation with a diminished sense of history, is that Trump also embodies an archetype as American as apple pie.
For something Trump-like is not only found in the obsessive quests of recent comic book villains, but was already spotted in the similarly obsessive quest of the monomaniacal, one-legged whaleboat Captain Ahab, portrayed in one of the first great American novels (Moby Dick), which was published in 1851.