August 15, 2024

Putting aside Trump's dangerous psychopatholgy we're left with his personality, by Hal Brown, MSW, retired psychotherapist

 


Yesterday I wrote about Trump's psychopathology:

Does Trump have a mental illness and if he does does this make him dangerous and unfit for office? 

Today I will focus on what most readers of this blog consider to be his vile odious personality.


Having what at least half of the country considers to be a vile odious personality doesn't make someone unfit to be president. It merely could mean that they will have trouble getting elected, and if elected will have difficulty working with staff and world leaders. 

Without analyzing the why of Trump's behavior which leads to his having the personality which he does, I will consider how the most unpleasant aspects of it are manifest in his behavior. 

* He is just plain nasty. Without skipping a beat reverts from talking about issues to hurling insults at his rivals. It matters little that these insults are often juvenile. What matters is that he revels in making them whether in a Truth Social post, interview, or to cheers at a rally. 

* He takes a normal and healthy aspect of someone else's personality and turns it against them. For example saying about Kamala Harris "do you see how she laughs, that's the laugh of a crazy person."

* He brags about himself all of the time whether he's alone posting online or in front of others. The focus of attention has to be on him. He has no interest in how anyone else feels or whay their ideas on a subject are.

* If it was possible to lie one's ass off Trump wouldn't have the ample posteria he does. How would you feel if you had to be in the company of someone who not only never stopped talking about how great they were but lied non-stop to prove it?

* He thinks he's a comedian, but he tells a jokes, often using insult himor, as well as he dances. I am sure he believes he's a great dancer. In truth  he makes Elaine Benese's Little Kicks dance on the classic Seinfeld episode (view it here) look like a Broadway musical casting director's dream. George described it as looking like a full-body dry heaves set to music. (By the way, Kamala can dance - video.)


Have you ever been with someone who tells decidedly unfunny jokes and expects you to laugh at them? Have you ever been at a dance where someone (hopefully not someone you went there with) tries to hog the attention by getting in the middle of the room and, even if they can dance, tries to show what a super dancer they are.

The question sometimes asked in polls is which candidate the respondents would rather have a beer with. This is described as "the beer question" on Wikipedia as follows:

The beer question is a thought experiment in politics that attempts to measure authenticity and likability in politicians by asking or polling voters about which politicians they would prefer to drink beer with, as in, spending casual time "hanging out" with. The question has been discussed as far back as the 2000 United States presidential election, as well as in the context of fictional political works such as The West Wing. The question has been criticized for the gender bias implicit in referencing a predominantly male drinking culture, and some have questioned the relevance of likability in choosing candidates for public office.

At present Harris leads Trump in a beer poll that predicted past winners (read Newsweek article). Excerpt:

A Bullfinch survey of 1,500 registered voters, spread equally across the three key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, showed that 40 percent overall would prefer to drink with Harris, compared to 36 percent who said the same for Trump. More than one in five voters (21 percent) said they would rather drink alone than with either the Democratic or Republican presidential hopefuls.

In 2016, a Rasmussen Reports survey found that 45 percent of likely voters said they would prefer to have a beer with Trump over his Democratic election rival Hillary Clinton (37 percent).

In 2008, polls suggested Barack Obama was the candidate whom voters would rather have a beer with over his Republican challenger, John McCain.

George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 as he was widely considered the guy "you'd rather have a beer with" over John Kerry. A 2004 Zogby/Williams Identity poll that year found that 57 percent of undecided voters would rather have a beer with Bush than Kerry.

These poll numbers suggest that personality is a factor in who wins presdiential elections. 

For fun I'd much rather have a beer with Kamala. However, as a blogger and retired psychotherapist who has been writing about Trump's psychopatholgy since 2016, if given the choice I'd opt for having a beer, or a cup of coffee or Diet Coke, with Trump. 

As far as I know Trump has never sat down for an informal conversation with an experienced psychotherapist whose, please forgive the lack of modesty, colleagues used to liken to Columbo in figuring out a client's personality they way he figured out who the killer was.  40 years of experience taught me to see through, to put it bluntly, the bullshit to see the real person. 

I am open to being proved wrong about my opinions about him. As a lefty I still need my right arm, but metophically I would give it up to have a chance to do this.

Comment from Pytho Black 

I just read this in another blog, an hour or so ago.

“…the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality.  The stupider one is, the clearer one is.  Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. 

Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.  I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.” –Ivan Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov

Of course, it is easy to see how Ivan and somebody we know have a common nature. And all those somebodies who love and support that aforementioned somebody we know, they too have something in common with good old Ivan, at least in the sense of his statement regarding stupidity.

But leaving psychopathology aside for a moment, I want to say something about fools. In my old age I have developed an approach different from suffering those I considered to be fools out of benevolent exasperation, to seeing myself through their eyes, and who is the fools then?

Now, poor Donald John Trump cannot help it that he is a pathological narcissist. You of all people should know that, or else your life’s work was based on mere vanity and greed. Maybe some nerve got twisted in the womb, or from some trauma at an early age, or exposure to gamma radiation in his baby food, or god-only-knows what kind of series of circumstances that caused him to transform into the charismatic obscenity that he has become.

I feel sorry for him, and for the people who are sucked into his tornado of pathology. It has to feel good, has to stimulate endorphins, has to cause one to feel less like a fool and more like a victim of those other fools tobe on the side that adores and supports such a person. He truly is a kind of Jesus, just as delusional, just as deranged, just as mythological.

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