Narcissistic injury, narcissistic rage
By 
Election day is less than six months away, and it’s fair to say the next six months will be crucial.
The midterms were going to be bad for the Republicans anyway, but Trump has gotten himself into a total catastrophe in Iran, and the Iranian regime is well aware that it can use the next few months to punish Trump for his bottomless stupidity and arrogance.
Meanwhile, Trump is spiraling into a kind of megalomaniacal fugue state, in which he’s declaring himself to be not just the greatest president, but the greatest historical figure the world has ever seen, except for Jesus, maybe. Trump has always been obsessed with polls and ratings and popularity, and even his courtiers can only do so much to hide from him that the Fake News is declaring that he’s extremely unpopular and getting more so every day.
Beyond this, Trump represents a really extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder, which means that he’s incapable of dealing with failure, loss, and most of all the public humiliation which is a normal part of normal politics, but which is utterly unendurable to him. The events up to and on January 6, 2021, tell us what we can expect between now and the seating of the new Congress next January.
The American legal system has no mechanism for dealing with a lawless president when the president’s own party accedes to that lawlessness, so really the only thing standing between Trump and a cancellation or abrogation of the 2026 elections is his own chaotic laziness and personal disorganization.
This Thomas Edsall piece (gift link; you should at least skim it) interviews several experts regarding various ways in which Trump could use legal, semi-legal, and pseudo-legal means to disrupt, reverse, or cancel the midterms. As Trump becomes increasingly desperate, and increasingly detached from reality, the risks that he will try to do some or all of these things also increase.
I suspect that the Iran debacle represents an inflection point both for Trump personally, and for the American political and legal systems, and that Trump’s out of control narcissism and psychopathy are going to push those systems to or beyond the breaking point between now and January.
A clinical psychiatrist I have known for more than 30 years has, on the basis of his extensive clinical practice working with psychopaths, developed some strong views on Trump’s mental state. When I interviewed him, he acknowledged that diagnosis from a distance is always problematic. Nevertheless he believes, as so many of his peers do, that Trump is a textbook example of a narcissist.
But that, he suggests, is not the primary reason why he’s also dangerous. He notes that lots of Hollywood stars and other successful people are narcissists, even if they are perhaps a little more subtle about it than Trump; they may be difficult to live with, but they aren’t usually dangerous. But Trump, he has concluded, is also is what is known in the trade as a “Factor 1 psychopath.” Psychopathy has two components. Factor 2 psychopathy overlaps with run-of-the mill criminal personality traits. That type of psychopathy features a high need for stimulation as well as impulsiveness, the commission of multiple types of crimes, the motivations for which can often be seen fairly early in childhood, social irresponsibility, poor anger management, etc.
Factor 1 psychopaths, by contrast, display what most people think of as psychopathy: a persistent con man style of relating to others, high levels of callousness, lack of capacity for remorse, mostly shallow attachments to others, pathological lying even when it isn’t just to avoid punishments, and so forth.
This psychiatrist notes that there is a “gold standard” instrument for measuring psychopathy. While there is some subjectivity involved in scoring, inter-rater agreements tend to be fairly good. The instrument can also be scored without a personal examination, if other sources of information are extensive.
On this instrument (the “PCL-R”), Trump turns out to be quite easy to score: he obtains about the same score as common criminals in general on “Factor 2” – but considerably worse than most convicted felons on “Factor 1,” the con-man etc. part.
He went on to point out that, while research is somewhat still in its infancy, Trump’s PCL-R score is in a range that has sometimes been associated with qualitative differences in brain structure and function, e.g., evident in MRIs or PET scans during particular cognitive tasks. Among other curiosities, these individuals tend not to process risk like most people. “Irrespective of that” this medical expert on psychopathy concluded, “Trump’s PCL-R scores are empirically correlated with increased level of dangerous behavior of various types, especially if under great perceived threat. The one thing you don’t want to say about a person with elevated psychopathic traits is ‘Oh, I doubt he’d go that far…’”
From The Triumph of Stupidity (increasingly revised draft)