The elegance of an emergency is the clarity of purpose it presents. As the coronavirus pandemic gains momentum, cooperation is our best hope of mitigating mass-scale disaster. Yet Donald Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) means he is incapable of realistic risk assessment or acting for the collective good.

The term “narcissist” is tossed around loosely these days, but NPD is a serious mental disorder with profound psychoemotional and cognitive impairments. Occurring in 1–6 percent of adults, NPD is a defense mechanism that begins very early in life in response to insecure attachment with parents/caregivers. A child forming a narcissistic personality experiences fundamental developmental deficits that result in unstable self-esteem, insecure identity, poor emotional regulation, black-and-white thinking, an absence of emotional empathy, and a grandiose external persona supporting deeply repressed shame and alienation.

What this translates to in adulthood in the overt form of NPD is compulsive denial of responsibility, assertions of superiority, a need to be “perfect,” scapegoating, demands for admiring attention, and a ruthless me-against-the-world view of life used to justify dehumanizing treatment of others.

The president has routinely demonstrated all of these traits throughout his term, but the current pressures of the pandemic have intensified his dysfunctional patterns at a time when level-headed leadership is crucial to the welfare of us all.

Denial of Responsibility

Refusing to acknowledge reality or take responsibility is the narcissist’s go-to reaction to problems. Trump’s impulse to disregard calls for pandemic preparedness began as soon as he entered office, when the administration shelved a National Security Council (NSC) plan for fighting pandemics and then proceeded to gut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and eliminate the position of U.S. global health director. This January, U.S. intelligence reports warned of a novel coronavirus global threat. By February, the World Health Organization had declared the virus a “public-health emergency of international concern,” and confirmed cases were rising in the United States. But week after week, Trump ignored calls for a strong governmental response and instead offered up magical thinking, saying by turns that it was “very well under control,” it would “miraculously” go away, and a cure was on its way. When asked on March 13 about his administration’s failure to provide timely and reliable coronavirus testing, he said, “Yeah, no, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Arrogant Superiority

Narcissists support their precariously inflated persona with assertions of superiority that can become as dangerous as they are absurd. Trump’s arrogance manifests in a flagrant disregard for facts, expert opinions, and scientific institutions and protocols. Case in point is his administration’s disastrous series of missteps around coronavirus testing. In February, while the World Health Organization was shipping tests to nearly 60 countries worldwide, the administration declined the assistance and opted to create its own test. Initial American-made tests proved both faulty and hard to come by, creating widespread confusion and misinformation at a time when early containment was critical. But rather than taking quick action to rectify the problem and streamline large-scale production of reliable tests for nationwide use, Trump falsely told reporters, “anybody that needs a test gets a test; they’re there, they have the tests, and the tests are beautiful.”

The “Perfect” Defense

Narcissists’ simplistic childlike view of themselves and others as either all good or all bad (psychological “splitting”) drives them to perpetuate the narrative that they are “perfect”—omnipotent and flawless—in order not to feel existentially worthless. Anyone who questions or criticizes that narrative must be laid low. We see this play out daily in Trump’s high-profile war against the free press, from publicly shaming journalists, to attacking news sources, to labeling anything diverging from his narrative “fake news,” to accusing the media of, in his words, “doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets.” And we literally hear it in his repeated use of the word “perfect,” as when he said of the CDC’s fatefully faulty tests, “the tests are all perfect.”

Scapegoating

The need to deflect responsibility and criticism means the narcissistic personality requires a scapegoat to blame when problems arise. Recent pleas for more federal help from governors of hard-hit states have triggered Trump’s narcissistic rage and made them the targets of punitive threats and smear campaigns. Trump has called Washington Governor Jay Inslee a “snake” and “failed presidential candidate” who is “always complaining.” He has repeatedly emphasized Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s gender while calling her inept and saying “all she does is sit there and blame the federal government.” And reacting to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s request for 30,000 ventilators, Trump said, “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators”, and further insinuated that NYC hospital staff are taking “supplies out the back door.”

Need for Admiring Attention

Because narcissists lack stable self-esteem, they rely on external sources to bolster themselves. Like all extreme narcissists, Trump’s singular concern at all times is leveraging situations to prop up his ego. This is why, in the current absence of his self-aggrandizing campaign rallies, he has touted his coronavirus press conferences as ratings hits while downplaying surging U.S. COVID-19 deaths.

Ruthless Self-Interest

Relentlessly self-focused and lacking empathy, narcissists view life competitively with a survivalist mentality. For Trump, his own agenda comes first, before country, and that agenda is getting reelected. The path to reelection at one point seemed relatively simple: a strong economy (in reality only for a slim minority) and ceaseless campaigning. But the pandemic changed all that. Initially pressing Americans to get back to business as usual by mid April a stunningly unrealistic and reckless proposition, Trump is now confronted with spiking deaths, communities overwhelmed by outbreaks, and sober projections by leading doctors and economists. His response? Rewriting history with ongoing claims that the pandemic was unforeseeable.

Trump’s Lethal COVIDiocy

You don’t have to be a psychologist to recognize these pathological personality traits in the president. But just in case there was doubt, large numbers of mental health professionals (against professional protocol) have called for President Trump’s removal from office due to mental illness. One petition, initiated by prominent psychologist John Gartner, garnered over 70,000 signatures.

The narcissist’s only ideology is self-aggrandizement, which feels as urgent as the need for oxygen. He (or she) is not loyal, not curious, and not capable of moral reasoning. Alienated from his own humanity, he will never recognize the humanity in those around him. For a global population facing the catastrophic realities of a fast-spreading pandemic, the myopic and petulant whims of a disordered bully in arguably the most powerful leadership position in the world place us all at unprecedented risk.

It is too late to prevent Trump’s paralyzing cuts to pandemic prevention and protection, his inaction on testing and medical supplies, and his blame-shifting lies about his own lapses in leadership. It is certainly too late to prevent a severely mentally ill man from entering the office of U.S. president in the first place. But there is time to learn from failure and take steps to prevent more of it.

Those of us with narcissistic friends and family members know that the narcissist, if left to his or her own devices, does not change. We learn to limit the narcissist’s toxic influence, move around the narcissist’s roadblocks, take responsibility for ourselves and those we love, and get on with the business of being human together, not apart.

Without containment, Trump’s lethal response to the virus, like the virus itself, will continue to cost lives and livelihoods. The media, doctors, Congress, members of the administration, and other leaders in and outside of government must advocate for the greater good now. And citizens must demand it.

Julie L. Hall is the author of The Narcissist in Your Life: Recognizing the Patterns and Learning to Break Free from Hachette Books.

Listen to Julie being interviewed about the narcissistic family on The Addicted Mind Podcast and Narcissist Apocalypse Podcast.

Need support? Julie offers specialized narcissistic abuse recovery coaching to clients around the world.

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Sources

Image of Trump ignoring social distancing courtesy of Fox News.