Is Donald J Trump a psychopath?

I think labelling his behaviour as NPD and saying he "needs treatment" is ignoring the larger problem, which is that his behaviour is not-aberrant in the broader scope of American culture, and that he continues to have so many people who support him and "get it", so to speak. I've been deliberately and ruthlessly dicked-over by Californian after Californian, from leases to employment contracts to legal agreements and so on and so on. I have started to think that for Americans, growing up in a nation that so explicitly profits off the destabilization of other countries (via bombing or invasion or fomenting political upheaval in order to keep oil-prices down) has conditioned the American mind to hold, deeply, in their subconscious, that "creating chaos for others" is "profitable", to a point where this tenet is tapped into people's pleasure centres. I saw white Americans protesting drone strikes in Pakistan and thought "you're not actually upset about this. A part of you feels more secure because of these drone strikes. A part of you is overjoyed that you're now protesting to try and cover-up how safe this destabilization makes you feel". I don't think Trump is NPD. I think America is, across-the-board, a culture of dicking people over for profit and Trump is just less-good at being discreet about it.

he's a kind of hydroponically-grown version of Americanism, a product of a culture

Bruce Gibney's book "Generation of Sociopaths" i think is pretty instructive here (good book, def worth your time imho; caveat being that Gibney is a neolib VC bro so you gotta take that into account while reading).

But honestly you could scratch "Generation" and really expand it to "Nation"-- i.e., all signs m/l pointed to us eventually ending up here.

I think there is a grain of truth to that because America—and especially New York—is the epicenter of neoliberal capitalism, which prizes disruption and “flexibility” above all else. But i also think even in this environment, trump’s behavior is aberrant

xpost

iow flamboyant goon tie otm

yeah, I have been in a low simmer annoyance with the people thinking that Trump's personality is a complete anomaly. His circumstances might be, but all of these "bad" traits are pretty accepted and even nurtured in white men.

It’s rewarded but it goes against the grain of ordinary human instincts. The normal person doesn’t relish being seen as a heartless and reckless monster, even if they’d be admired for it

I agree in general his rise is instructive about how fucked up our country is and what kinds of things it incentivizes. But i still don’t see “trump” in the people i deal with day to day—my family, friends, whatever. Maybe my landlord.

fgti ruthlessly otm

xpost, I've worked with a lot Trump derivatives. He's exhausting for me, but it's a lifetime of Trumps all the way down so I have the stamina for him.

I'm kind of in between fgti and Treesh on this - I agree that Trump is America's underbelly personified, but at the same time I have never heard of a more shameless person in my life. I guess McConnell comes close but Trump is just on another level, he's living proof that certain people in this country are so privileged that they are not only unbound by law but by reality itself. Like getting on the phone with Putin and claiming that "he smiled when we talked about how there was no collusion", who else says a thing like that? Even Kim Jong Un wouldn't say that.

Despots across the globe are enjoying this moment of letting Trump do all their work for them, et al.

"he smiled when we talked about how there was no collusion", who else says a thing like that? Even Kim Jong Un wouldn't say that.

yeah KJU is a weird horrible person but Trump is a corny ass idiot in a way no one else is.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think fgti is saying that Trump isn't a psychopath. Rather, his mental illnesses are ultimately of little consequence when set against the broader canvas of Trumpism, which is but the collective cutting edge of a continuum of values that have always undergirded 'the American experience'.

Mmm, I mean...there's undeniably an undercurrent of depravity running through the history of this country, but it's often been in the service of something. Trump often just seems like chaotic evil for the sake of chaotic evil. Like someone who will torch the building they're in just for the thrill of seeing the screaming faces of those who die alongside him.

Yeah that's exactly what I'm saying.

Insofar as the ridiculous things Trump says that "even Kim Jong Un wouldn't say", I agree, but the point isn't the specifics of the statement, but that it's the audacity of these statements that is rewarded. I remember very specifically, ten days before the election, being in Louisiana and seeing Hillary ads that said, paraphrased, "this man (Trump) has said x, y, and z (incl. "grab them by the pussy"), is that really the sort of man we want ruling this country? Vote Hillary." I thought, you're missing the point, Democrats, this ad is actually working in Trump's favour; this "sort of man" is exactly the person people want to have running their country. It was this article in The New Republic that finally verbalized what I'd been feeling, intuitively, throughout the Trump campaign: https://newrepublic.com/article/151603/nihilist-nation-empty-core-trump-mystique and I've shared it elsewhere and pretty much agree with all of it.

I mean you could easily argue that everything he says and does is in service of himself - that he's utterly incapable of seeing the world in any way that doesn't relate to himself. He can't have a single relationship that isn't predicted on "do you like Trump". Truthering the Puerto Rico death toll because he thought it made him look bad kinda lays it all bare.

I think there are pathological and antisocial aspects to our society, which is why Trump was rewarded for a life of destructive and selfish actions. But i don’t think the average person or even the average white man fully embodies these traits fully the way Trump does. If that’s *all* our country was, there would be nothing to build on.

Nah but there's surely a lil bit of Trumpism in all of us, myself included

i defensively disagree

Agreed, fgti. In American politics (among others) charisma consists of creating a halo of events around your persona, of having unflinching performative heft. That requires audacity. And the most charismatic candidate always wins.

xps

For sure. We all have benevolent and malevolent instincts and need to consciously develop the former and resist the latter.

And like we shouldn’t build a society that rewards the worst parts of people but we’ve kinda done that

Agreed, fgti. In American politics (among others) charisma consists of creating a halo of events around your persona, of having unflinching performative heft. That requires audacity. And the most charismatic candidate always wins.

xps

― pomenitul, Thursday, May 9, 2019 7:59 AM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in america words mean absolutely nothing

i guess that's true

anyway i can't get on with a post that second guesses the true feelings of people protesting drone bombings, v weird way to make a point about how america loves corrupt daddy

Words do matter, but they're just another tool at the rhetorician's disposal.

This post is from 2 years ago, but I still occasionally think back on it.

https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/questions-about-rhetoric/

Lying should be more stigmatized than it is

they actually really don't! especially if "charisma" is just consistently shouting horrible things xp

Their logical truth-value doesn't matter but their performative, even 'poetic' power does.

Trump is wildly inarticulate though

One of his most obvious characteristics

And like we shouldn’t build a society that rewards the worst parts of people but we’ve kinda done that

I mean this depends massively on who you are - compare the sentences of the black woman who unknowingly voted illegally (5 years) to those who actually conspired to commit election fraud

It rewards certain people for bad actions, incentivizing bad actions

So was Bush, but lines such as 'They misunderestimated me' or, by the same token, 'covfefe' have a weird force to them that borders on poetry, as disgusting as that may seem (then again, I don't think of poetry as having a meliorative meaning – it's more like another state of language).

2xp

they actually really don't! especially if "charisma" is just consistently shouting horrible things xp

yeah I take pretty big issue with the idea that Trump has "charisma"...he's one of the most deeply unpleasant people I can think of. I thought George W. Bush was horrible too, but I feel like I could have a fun conversation with him about, I dunno, baseball or whatever. I do think there's something to the idea that the more entertaining/iconic/SNL-worthy candidate always wins, though Trump did get 3M less votes

Fwiw that and charisma are one and the same as far as I'm concerned.

Bush Jr. seemed a bit dull and misspoke a lot, but Trump is on an entirely different level - dude does not understand a single thing that doesn't pertain to himself or TV news, and we've come to see that he gets absolutely nothing about business or real estate or any of the things he was supposed to be "good" at. I think about this exchange a lot:

‘Face The Nation’ host John Dickerson tried to get Trump to muse on former George W Bush’s comment on how the Oval Office was round and therefore had no corners to hide in – meaning accountability always sat firmly at the President’s lap.

However, Trump failed to spot the metaphor and took it just a bit too literally. He said: “Well, there’s truth to that. There is truth to that. There are certainly no corners. And you look, there’s a certain openness. But there’s nobody out there. You know, there is an openness, but I’ve never seen anybody out there actually, as you could imagine.”

resentment and—an overused word, i know—nihilism can be seductive, look at online trolls or even the less ideologically driven mass shooters. trump’s “poetry”—basically a delight in triggering people—appeals to that part of people. I don’t know if i’d call it charisma

He's not a smart man but he knows what an oval is.

it's not that he just didn't understand the metaphor, it's that he didn't identify that here was even a metaphor there, he never stops to think "that's a strange thing to say" and instead just starts speaking about the layout of the room

Trump and Bush have almost opposite personality profiles. It doesn’t make sense to compare them.

Doesn't matter, he's got plenty of memorable lines, starting with Fifth Avenue and 'very stable genius' and 'look, having nuclear' and…

Bush was a figurehead for entrenched interests. Trump’s been doing things for those people too, but he got to where he is in a different way.

that's true but Trump's "memorable lines" seem to come from a totally different place; in a way he is exactly like my 4 year old, when I tell him "you need to put your jacket on, you're going to get cold", his response is "no, I'm hot! YOU'RE cold!!" Bush had difficulty recalling common phrases ("fool me once...") and his sentences were garbled but he at least knows what the words mean. I know plenty of people who speak like Bush. Nobody I know is on the same planet as Trump

@ BradNelson I get that my comment about "anti-drone activists not believing in the thing they're protesting" was perhaps inflammatory, and regrettable, and doesn't at all reflect my true feelings. A more useful example would be to consider the widely-stated criticism that many white women participants in the Women's March 2017 were not actually marching for people less privileged than themselves, but were marching to celebrate their own privilege-- but my access to that discussion is "read-only".

I guess what I'm saying is their opponents were nowhere near as memorable. They struggled to turn their patterns of speech into micro-events. I mean, Trump is memerific and Bush kind of was too.

Trump actually lost though—to a super normcore candidate, hillary. He won on a technicality

As did bush. He lost to the dullest candidate in memory, al gore

If only that were true…

He got more votes

The electoral college is a technicality?