Your Guide to Trump's Psychological Profile!

Much has been said about Donald Trump, particularly after his nomination by the Republicans.  Of course, he’s insulted everyone under the sun, disparaged the Muslim parents of a gold star hero, he threw out a baby that was crying at a rally, threatens violence everywhere, and exhibited a knowledge about economics and foreign affairs that is less than that of a 4^th grader.  President Obama has recently said that he is “unfit to be President”.

While this is going on, all of us, whether at the water cooler or a cocktail party, are diagnosing Trump’s behavior and the psychology behind it.   People have called him a “psycho”, “nut-case”, and “crazy”.

So I thought I’d offer up a non-exclusive sampler of genuine psychological and behavioral terms and their meanings, which may be useful in describing Trump’s behavior.  I invite you to create your own diagnosis!

 

Now, there needn’t be just one of these.  Sufferers from these various maladies may have a blend of some or all of these to varying degrees.  You can put together your own profile of Trump based on these.  In a conversation about Trump, as long as you’re not conversing with a Trump supporter, you will be able, with some authority, to provide at least a parlor analysis of what is behind Trump’s curious behavior.

Fair Disclosure: I gathered these terms from Wikipedia.  The links therein will direct you to other aspects and elements of the conditions described.  Also, I hold no credentials in the psychiatric field other than my own studies.

Herewith:

Insanity, craziness, or madness is a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns. Insanity may manifest as violations of societal norms, including a person becoming a danger to themselves or others, though not all such acts are considered insanity; likewise, not all acts showing indifference toward societal norms are acts of insanity. In modern usage, insanity is most commonly encountered as an informal unscientific term denoting mental instability, or in the narrow legal context of the insanity defense. In the medical profession the term is now avoided in favor of diagnoses of specific psychiatric diseases; the presence of delusions or hallucinations is broadly referred to as psychosis. When discussing psychiatric illness in general terms, "psychopathology" is considered a preferred  term.

Delusions of Grandeur are principally a subtype of delusional disorder but could possibly feature as a symptom of schizophrenia and manic episodes of bipolar disorder. Grandiose delusions are characterized by fantastical beliefs that one is famous, omnipotent or otherwise very powerful. The delusions are generally fantastic, often with a supernatural, science-fictional, or religious bent. In colloquial usage, one who overestimates one's own abilities, talents, stature or situation is sometimes said to have "delusions of grandeur". This is generally due to excessive pride, rather than any actual delusions. Grandiose delusions or delusions of grandeur can also be associated with megalomania. Treatments have not been well studied. Therapy is often difficult as people frequently do not consider themselves to have a problem. About one percent of people are believed to be affected at some point in their life.  It appears to occur more often in males than females. Grandiose delusions or delusions of grandeur can also be associated with megalomania.


 

Egotism is the drive to maintain and enhance favorable views of oneself, and generally features an inflated opinion of one's personal features and importance. It often includes intellectual, physical, social and other overestimations.  The egotist has an overwhelming sense of the centrality of the 'Me', that is to say of their personal qualities.  Egotism means placing oneself at the core of one's world with no concern for others, including those "loved" or considered as "close," in any other terms except those subjectively set by the egotist. 

Sociopathy is traditionally defined as a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy is and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, egotistical traits.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings.  People affected by it often spend a lot of time thinking about achieving power, success, or their appearance. They often take advantage of the people around them. The behavior typically begins by early adulthood, and occurs across a variety of situations.

Trump Created the Universe in His Image

Egocentrism is the inability to differentiate between self and other. More specifically, it is the inability to untangle subjective schemas from objective reality; an inability to understand or assume any perspective other than their own. Although egocentrism and narcissism appear similar, they are not the same. A person who is egocentric believes they are the center of attention, like a narcissist, but does not receive gratification by one's own admiration. An egotist is a person whose ego is greatly influenced by the approval of others while a narcissist is not.

Delusion: a belief that is held with strong conviction despite superior evidence to the contrary. As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, or other effects of perception.  Delusions typically occur in the context of neurological or psychiatric disease, although they are not tied to any particular disorder and have been found to occur in the context of many pathological states (both physical and mental). However, they are of particular diagnostic importance in psychotic disorders including schizophrenia, paraphrenia, manic episodes of bipolar disease, and psychotic depression.

 

Delusion of reference: False belief that insignificant remarks, events, or objects are real. Although non-specific concepts of madness have been around for several thousand years, the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers was the first to define the three main criteria for a belief to be considered delusional in his 1913 book General Psychopathology. These criteria are:

• certainty (held with absolute conviction)
• incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof to the contrary)
• impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre, or patently untrue)

Psychosis refers to an abnormal condition of the mind described as involving a "loss of contact with reality". People with psychosis are described as psychotic. People experiencing psychosis may exhibit some personality changes and thought disorder. Depending on its severity, this may be accompanied by unusual or bizarre behavior.  Depending on its severity, this may be accompanied by unusual or bizarre behavior.  People with psychosis are described as psychotic. People experiencing psychosis may exhibit some personality changes and thought disorder.

Pathological lying (also called pseudologia fantastica and mythomania) is a behavior of habitual or compulsive lying. It was first described in the medical literature in 1891 by Anton Delbrueck.  Although it is a controversial topic, pathological lying has been defined as "falsification entirely disproportionate to any discernible end in view, may be extensive and very complicated, and may manifest over a period of years or even a lifetime". The individual may be aware they are lying, or may believe they are telling the truth. Sometimes however, the individual may be lying to make their life seem more exciting when in reality they believe their life is unpleasant or boring.

Pathological lying may also present as false memory syndrome, where the sufferer genuinely believes that fictitious (imagined) events have taken place. The sufferer may believe that he or she has accomplished superhuman feats or awe-inspiring acts of altruism and love — or has committed equally grandiose acts of diabolical evil, for which the sufferer must atone or already has atoned in her/his fantasies.   The sufferer will also exhibit  certainty (held with absolute conviction) and incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof to the contrary), and the impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre, or patently untrue) and delusions of grandeur.

Power and dominance is the ability to influence the behavior of other people. When two parties have or assert unequal levels of power, one is termed "dominant" and the other "submissive". Expressions of dominance can communicate intention to assert or maintain dominance in a relationship. Being submissive can be beneficial because it saves time, emotional stress, and may avoid hostile actions such as withholding of resources, cessation of cooperation, termination of the relationship, maintaining a grudge, or even physical violence. 

Belief-bias effect: A situation that occurs when a person's prior knowledge, attitudes, or values distort the reasoning process by influencing the person to accept invalid arguments.

Id: The primitive, unconscious part of the personality that operates irrationally and acts on impulse to pursue pleasure

.

Manic episode: A component of bipolar disorder characterized by periods of extreme elation, unbounded euphoria without sufficient reason, and grandiose thoughts or feelings about personal abilities. The primitive, unconscious part of the personality that operates irrationally and acts on impulse to pursue pleasure.

Ambiguity A perceptual object that may have more than "one interpretation”.

Belief-bias effect: A situation that occurs when a person's prior knowledge, attitudes, or values distort the reasoning process by influencing the person to accept invalid arguments.

 

Power is the ability to influence the behavior of other people. When two parties have or assert unequal levels of power, one is termed "dominant" and the other "submissive". Expressions of dominance can communicate intention to assert or maintain dominance in a relationship. Being submissive can be beneficial because it saves time, emotional stress, and may avoid hostile actions such as withholding of resources, cessation of cooperation, termination of the relationship, maintaining a grudge, or even physical violence. Submission occurs in different degrees; for example, some employees may follow orders without question, whereas others might express disagreement but concede when pressed.

Manic episode: A component of bipolar disorder characterized by periods of extreme elation, unbounded euphoria without sufficient reason, and grandiose thoughts or feelings about personal abilities in one's environment have personal meaning or significance.

So here you have your list.  Make your own Sundae!!

 

Time to Brush Up My Russian

When I was 12 years old (long ago and far away in 1964) and at school, I decided to choose Spanish as my foreign language rather than French. At the time, Puerto Ricans were flooding into the U.S., Cuban refugees in dinghies were crossing shark-infested waters to get to Florida, Mexican immigration was heavy.  I realized that conquest or occupation wasn’t in the heads of any Spanish-speaking person or family either.  They wanted a new life and an escape from rotten governments and their tin pot dictators.  Though I learned French later as an adult, as a 12-year-old I was convinced that neither France or any of francophone countries were interested in emigrating to the Land of the Free. So with all these thoughts I opted for Spanish.

I couldn’t have predicted that Spanish would become the second language of America or that some twenty-five years later I would be working in Latin America.

My Spanish teacher was Ms. Barrera, a Cuban refugee, and she told us stories about how beautiful Cuba was, and how Communist Castro’s Cuba had ruined everything.  She told us about the hard times and stories of the various Latin American countries dominated by blustery nut-cases in splendid military garb.

In the summer of 1967 I visited Communist Czechoslovakia on a study trip.  I never saw anything so bleak and gray.  At the border, we had to exchange a pretty large amount of U.S. dollars for Czech money.  The coins were tin and paper money like little printed rags.  GUM, the Soviet department store, was nearly empty.  There was nothing to buy unless you wanted rubber farming boots.  Other than that, there were no shops, no signs, nothing.   The food was lousy.

We stayed in a grimy student dormitory.  Whenever we sat outside at a cafe, I would always be approached by young people my age to buy my jeans, my desert boots, and the shirt off my back, but what they wanted most of all were Beatles records.  I wrote to my family that I could afford a year living in Prague with a few pairs of jeans and a bunch of Beatles records.  Of course, it was all black-market and illegal, so I demurred.  

The last thing I needed was a visit to a Soviet-run jail at age 15.

The following year, in 1968, Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague to hammer Czechoslovakia for all of its sins.  There was too much liberal and seditious activity going on in that country and it had to be stopped.

With a dual foreign language requirement for most colleges, and mindful of what I had seen in the way of Soviet aggression,   In 1968 I chose Russian. 
  

My teacher was Ms. Briggs, who had somehow managed to emigrate from the Soviet Union.  A chemical engineer in the USSR, she couldn’t find work in the U.S. even with her experience and credentials in the sciences.   So she settled into teaching Russian.   As I recall, we only had three students in our class.

Russian was fascinating.  I learned the Cyrillic alphabet, which was marvelously cryptic, and was then able to read a bunch of things like Tolstoy and Pushkin in Russian.   The three of us used to pass notes to each other in Russian during our other classes, just to make sure no one, especially our teachers, would know that we were commenting on their awful ties or B.O.  The word for “crappy” in Russian is дерьмовый. Just try to figure that out, Mr. Cowing!

So I was taught two wonderful languages by refugees. 

The ‘50s and ’60s in America were dominated to a large extent by the Communist threat. The war in Vietnam was all about stopping Communism from dominating the entirety of Southeast Asia. China and/or Russia supplied the weapons and supplies to the Communist Vietcong, who came from North Vietnam, already a stronghold of Communism.  The Berlin Wall divided the East (Communist) and West (freedom) parts of that city in Germany, and horrific stories of people captured or shot while attempting to get over, under, or through The Berlin Wall from East to West were all over the newspapers pretty much daily.

   

Not so far from my school in the Bronx, NY, there was a residential high-rise that was supposedly a nest of Soviet spies and their families.  They didn’t seem to have a problem getting into the U.S. with diplomatic papers.

Another oddball and rather personal reason to learn Russian was that my father’s parents, who were Russian Jews, had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia (as it was called before the Russian Revolution) in something like 1908.  My father was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, NY.  He spoke Russian, not fluently, but in the 1930’s it was enough to land him a job at the Soviet Consulate in New York as an English teacher.  Many years later he told me, somewhat ruefully, that he thinks he taught the first batches of Soviet spies to speak English.  Of course, he had no idea about spies, but hell, it was a job to help pay his college tuition.  At breakfast in the Consulate, the Soviet spies ate American Post Toasties to appear more American, while my father dove into huge bowls of Beluga Caviar.  Of course, he brought plenty home with him.  His was probably the only family in Brooklyn in the depression year of 1933 feasting on the finest caviar in the world on a daily basis.

My ancestry aside, I thought Russian might be a useful language to have in the event of a Soviet take-over. The U.S. would be as gray and barren as Czechoslovakia in 1967.  A few atom bombs would, of course, eliminate all of us (though we had a sort of bomb shelter downstairs) and naturally my Russian wouldn’t be much help.  But in case they invaded in a non-nuclear fashion, I might be in better shape since I know what дерьмовый means.

1968 was also one of the most horrible years in America: Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, there were racial and anti-war protests, a riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and riots all over the country.  Angry students were occupying universities, the war in Vietnam was escalating, and recession was looming, as was Richard Nixon. 

 

From the miserable news I’d see every day, it seemed to me that America was buckling.  At times it felt entirely chaotic.  Surely the Soviets loved this, and their spies were running rampant all over the country reporting all this doom and gloom to the delight of the Kremlin.  

Ultimately the Communist Vietcong ran over South Vietnam and the U.S. ran away in helicopters and planes after almost 60,000 young Americans were killed and billions of dollars poured into the bombs and munitions that blasted the country apart.

Which brings me to Donald Trump and Vlad the Impaler.

 

Trump’s characterization of the U.S. as being on its knees just as in 1968, and spreading his grim Boschian view of a country in chaos, is music to Vladimir Putin’s ears.  Trump, who seems to have hypnotized no small number of Americans into believing his bullshit, is being set up by Vlad.   Armed with his so-called “business savvy” (bilking Americans and non-Americans alike), Trump has no clue that Vlad and his comrades have him in the palm of their hands.

While Trump is extolling the virtues of Vladimir Putin, he forgets (or never knew) that his new buddy once headed the KGB.  Other than the CIA, and its predecessor the OSS, the KGB was the biggest intelligence organization in the world from the 1930’s to the 1990’s, created by none other than Josef Stalin himself.  During WWII, while Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin held meetings to defeat the Nazis, Stalin was murdering tens of thousands of people in his country, primarily based on domestic intelligence, or just his own list of people who appeared to threaten him, or to eliminate past enemies.   

According to my father, most of his family, still in Russia, were shot by Stalin. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the KGB morphed into the GRU, but it’s still the same, and possibly worse.

To characterize Putin in more biblical terms, he is the ultimate Silent Snake.  Putin cut his teeth on espionage tradecraft.  Now he runs Russia.  Should Donald eat one of Vlad’s tempting apples, we’re in for some real problems.  It’s possible that he has already.

It is doubtful that the Second Amendment, which ensures the right for citizens to bear arms (muskets) against hostile marching forces from places like Britain, and is now a license to shoot any citizen or cop you want to, will not accomplish much against whatever is being concocted at the Kremlin.  Cyberwar has blossomed from countries that don’t like America and want to spy on or cheat Americans.  (Right up Donald’s alley!).  Trump doesn’t even know how to use a computer.  According to him, he writes memos and letters by himself and has them hand-delivered.  Huh?

Then there is Trump’s assertion that NATO countries have to pay up or the U.S. is out. NATO countries, anywhere near the border of Russia, will have little protection against incursion by Russia.  NATO requires that any member nation will participate together to thwart an enemy advance into their sovereign territory.  Of course, Russia grabbed the Crimea overnight, and funded a war against Ukraine.  So any weakness in NATO spells opportunity for Vlad.

Next, Trump has publicly invited Russia to do more spying and cyber penetration in the U.S., giving the Russians carte blanche to seek and hack emails.  Really?   Aiding and abetting an enemy is treason, and reaching out to foreign countries to solicit espionage activities on American soil or servers as an American citizen is simply against the law.  That’s nothing for Trump, who has something like 2,300 lawsuits he drags around with him like Marley’s chains across the campaign trail.  He’s above the law of course, as most dictators are.

Trump has said that his comments were “sarcastic.” 

  

There are a lot of countries that don’t understand “sarcasm.”  And plenty of Americans don’t either. They read things literally.  So should the justice system in this country.  I’ll bet thousands of our enemies and spies have been mobilized behind the Cyber Curtain as a result of Trump’s “sarcasm”.  And It’s all in Vlad’s playbook. 

 

It’s time for Donald the Sarcastic to shut up.  He won’t do this of course.  But Vlad the Silent Snake has his tasty apples on the dining table.  Try making a “deal” with Vlad.  It will be as hollow and far more venomous than most of the “deals” Trump has made throughout his career as the Champion Snake Oil Salesman and Carnival Barker.  It takes one snake to know another, but Vlad is the craftier and larger snake.   

Vlad wants Trump to win to destabilize the United States and Eastern Europe.  He doesn’t even need to drop an atom bomb when he has a Clown-Haired Godzilla stomping around the amber waves of grain, deporting millions, and building a “wall” between Mexico and the U.S. (which will be penetrated in a matter of minutes).  Not unlike the Berlin Wall, Trump’s Wall, if it ever comes to be, will eventually be torn down, probably by Americans who want to get out.

And speaking of expulsion from The Garden of Eden, it’s not too wild a thought that Trump would have to seek refuge in Russia with Edward Snowden once the “Deal” goes down. 

 

Yep, I think I’ll just brush up on my Russian.