Psychopathy in the White House
Sociopath, Psychopath, Antisocial Personality Disorder - What’s the Difference and Why Does This Matter?
Early in the movie Jaws, the beach town of Amity is being threatened by a killer shark. The 4th of July is approaching, and thus the town is facing a related threat, a financial one. For closing down the beaches would also threaten the town’s economy, which is dependent on summer tourists. The mayor of Amity is facing the same “economy vs. public safety” choice as America’s elected officials in a time of pandemic. (And like Trump, the mayor’s priority is clearly the economy). The town’s citizens go to sea in a flotilla of sketchy looking boats pursuing the shark. Remarkably, a large one is caught and displayed. Now the mayor is even more convinced it’s time to open up the beaches. But when a shark expert (played by Richard Dreyfus) appears on the scene, it becomes apparent that the shark they really need to apprehend is a different, more menacing species—a Great White…
I’d never seen such a collective wave of anxiety in my therapy clients, as what ensued in the first weeks of the Trump presidency. The media had largely portrayed Trump as a textbook exemplar of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder—though Tony Schwartz who’d ghost written Trump’s book The Art of the Deal had also reflected Trump’s herky-jerky attention span (“like a kindergartner who can’t keep still”) in terms suggestive of an Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But were either of these disorders the thing my clients were sensing, and causing them to freak?
When Mary L. Trump’s blockbuster book was approaching its publication date, and prepublication passages were leaked to the press, one that caught my eye was a passage from the book where the author, who is also a clinical psychologist, tracked the toxicity in the Trump family back to the president’s father, Fred Trump, who was portrayed as a “high functioning sociopath,” who treated everybody, even his family, as pawns to be used. And if they couldn’t be used, he excised them...
What the above three vignettes have in common is that a diagnosis is made in the face of a threat, a diagnosis that is partially correct—but not the truly chilling thing causing people to freak, which is still swimming at large...
On July 16, 2020 Mary L. Trump appears for her first televised interview on the Rachel Maddow show. Her book has just sold 950,000 copies in the first day it could be obtained—even more than John Bolton’s book just a few weeks earlier, which was also an “insider’s” book that had to overcome the legal attempt to block its publication.
Whistleblowers from the Trump administration, such as Bolton, had been giving us insiders’ views into the Trump administration’s ineptitude and corruption since its inception. What was different was that here the insider was a member of Trump’s own family—who could thus link Trump’s dysfunctionality back to its family roots.
Rachel asks Mary about a particular passage in the book. It had to do with Trump’s penchant for lying. On p. 163, Donald is introducing Mary L. to Melania, his bride to be. And he’s telling Melania that Mary used to be a drug addict. That was a lie, and when Trump’s eyes met Mary’s, it was apparent to her that both she and Donald knew that he was lying. Mary said she’d never been a drug user a day in her life. Yet Trump continued with the lie, even taking pleasure in it.
Mary saw Donald’s lie in two related ways. First in the context of him having given Mary a job—like he had been “the savior” of someone once an addict. But the lie also seemed in service of a familiar Trump theme: a heroic overcoming of adversity; and against all odds (Say like him becoming a billionaire and even a president—after a history of 5 bankruptcies, and countless scandals that would have doomed other political figures). She also saw it as a kind of “power play.”
But I don’t think Mary fully accounted for the pleasure that her uncle takes in lying, and thus, why he does it so unrelentingly. (That was better revealed an hour later on MSNBC, when Lawrence O’Donnell was interviewing Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes for his responses to some of the issues raised by Rachel Meadow the hour before—which we’ll get to in a bit).
Rachel asks Mary why she thinks her uncle has responded so ineptly to the pandemic crisis. She answered: “The reason he’s failing at it is because he’s incapable of succeeding at it. It would require taking responsibility for it, which in his mind would require him admitting he’d made a mistake—which in his mind would be admitting weakness; which in my family was essentially associated with the death penalty—symbolically or otherwise.”
Mary also refers to “a learned helplessness in her family.” For going back to the impact of the family patriarch, Trump’s father Fred, only two options seemed available. You’re either helplessly a weak loser, or equally helplessly, left with the only other option being a winning victimizer. Yet by her own example, Mary L. Trump finally managed to find a third way that is neither. You can risk speaking out, though it places you at risk.
And when Rachel then asked Mary if she feared now for her safety, Mary said that she was well aware of the power the president had. And so, she’s taken precautions (which understandably, she chose not to mention). Yet putting her safety at risk is something she’s now willing to do. As we face the 2020 election, the stakes are too high not to.
And a problem Mary finds with her uncle—if not our country—is that our 45th president is surrounded and enabled by people who don’t correct, or risk challenging him. “Then he continues with impunity.” And she’s rightly--and keenly aware of him having become “the most dangerous man in the world.” Yet for being a clinical psychologist, there’s something in her understanding that doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head. Is the toxicity of Trump and his family truly because of its sociopathy? Or is that capturing “the wrong fish?”