He is the world

It will be bitter brain candy when, in the near future, studiers of Trump chew on this question: Why was this president able to be nothing other than – to be blunt – a lowlife?

Many psychological facets of the man are known or obvious: his narcissism with narcissism’s insecure “inner child”; his immorality and amorality; an organic “tilt” or imbalance that prevents peace, makes the baseline of frustration and anger; his lack of subtle intelligence; his primitive goals of money and power; his instinctive need to proactively defy humane feelings and principles. Psychologists and others may explain his complacent degeneracy as the simple fusion of these factors. But there remains another factor, which necessitates a different explanation: the global, public arena in which he practices, that would lead others in his position to mitigate or conceal themselves. Most power-hungry narcissists would take into account either shame, or a felt or strategic need to impress, or the goal of having a less-embattled path to success, and would show lip-service decency or compatibility. The fact that Trump is oblivious to these possibilities alters the conclusion of a mere fusion of ingredients and points directly to the base of his psychological abyss: Here is a man who is so psychically alone, at the level of birth or perinatal flaw, that he could not be part of the world. He had to be the world. I acknowledge that this is a feeling it will take science a long time to find under the microscope.

With no other consciousnesses around him to consider, in his psyche, there can be no reason to accommodate or struggle.

James Gilligan, M.D., psychiatrist to maximum security prisoners,* described how a criminal’s excruciating transparent sense of shame – someone’s eyes looking into his soul – is a common provocation for murder. One man, in his twenties, killed and cut out the eyes of a woman who had known of him in high school and who’d been aware of his prestige as an auto mechanic. One day she noticed him walking down the street and offered him a ride: He had not been able to repair his own car. Sitting in the passenger seat, he could not stand her seeing him, knowing his worthlessness. My theory is that Donald Trump is so fundamentally disconnected, so solipsistic and averse to the world of people, that he lives even beneath the shame of some of the most damaged criminals. He could not feel shame despite millions of eyes seeing his soul. Nor could he, the world incarnate, care about strategizing, about working with “friends” or colleagues or adversaries to realize his aims. He would frustrate members of his own party, alienate allies, burn those who cared about him. All would eventually be destroyed as he continually constricted to his aloneness, his birth imprint. I suspect that Trump’s alignment with Putin and the “very honorable” Kim Jong-un is essentially an affirmation supply: no bond at all, but a support of his sense of life as carnivorous, adversarial, alien. I don’t doubt, though, there is a strand of him, the empty child, that leans on an unloving father figure.

It may be that molecular strand of need, which he senses, that is enough to make him feel alive inside,** and prevent a murdering character.

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* James Gilligan, M.D., Violence, Vintage Books, 1997. I no longer own the book and may be mis-remembering details of the murder scenario.

** “Some [prisoners] have told me they feel like robots or zombies, that they feel their bodies are empty or filled with straw, not flesh and blood, that instead of having veins and nerves they have ropes or cords” (p. 33, Violence).

“Provisional commentary”: I may have a very wrong impression of Gilligan, but I came away from his book thinking that he doesn’t recognize the existence of psychopaths. His many examples of murderous prisoners all fall on the spectrum of the wounded abused, those who had a human heart that was injured in childhood, enabling their desperate behavior. Compare the first few chapters of his book with the first few of Robert D. Hare’s Without Conscience, that describes unrepentant, incorrigible, lizard-brained psychopaths. One would think these two experts live in perpendicular universes, one where good youth are bent by tragedy to murder, the other where an inhuman species walks among us. My article suggests the slight continuum difference between a Trumpian narcissist and a card-carrying psychopath: the molecular strand of need that did not burn out in a troubled birth.