This has been a blog with my opinions on politics, psychology, and pop culture using the Google Blogger platform with the address halbrown.org. As of Oct. 10, 2023 it has been renamed Hal Brown's Stressline and moved to the WordPress platform with the new address Stressline.org - Posts are sometimes serious and sometimes snarky.
Showing posts with label Trump psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump psychology. Show all posts
Trump's gaffe-filled speech yesterday where he said he beat Obama before and will beat him again and will prevent World War II was covered, and mocked, on "Morning Joe" as examples of declining cognitive ability tied in with his age, that is, his physiology.
Click above to watch Morning Joe segment
There's another way of looking at this which Mika did allude to, his psychology. What we may be seeing is that this off-the-wall speech was an indication that his anxiety over his legal jeopardy is manifesting itself and he isn't thinking clearly due to this.
Later on Morning Joe Al Sharpton spoke directly to this:
Click to view
This is what former federal prosecutor Harry Litman said on Sunday on "Meet the Press"
He's not afraid of prison and doesn't even think about it.
Here's the thing about this notion. It is true that if someone doesn't think about having something horrible happen to them, prison in Trump's case, they may not experience fear. Prison for Trump, after all, isn't inevitable like death. Thoughtful self-aware people think about their own mortality from time to time, and as death from disease or merely old age gets closer they think about it more often.
They key term above is thoughtful self-aware people. I defy anyone to give indesputable examples of Trump having this characteristic.
Depth psychology tells us that the unconscious mind exists. Harry Litman opined the following about what Trump thinks:
Instead, it's nothing more than a political witch hunt he assumes will disappear under the law.
I suspect that this indeed is what is in Trump's conscious mind.
He has had minor setbacks with the law but for him these were nothing more than what for a normal person would be a $25 parking ticket that wouldn't raise our auto insurance costs or add driving infraction points. It costs as much as a meal at Applebee's but won't break the bank.
Trump has believed he's so far above the law he'd need a powerful telescope to see it, and that's even if he cared enough to look. He doesn't look because at some level in his unconscious there's an awareness that he'd see it if he looked hard enough. It may seem far away and impotent to him but he should learn about trying to fight the law from the song “I Fought the Law”.
Trump seems to be playing a version of the song which goes "I fought the law and I won" in his mind.
This is the belief system of a grandiose narcissist who has his belief in his invulnerability from the consequences of bad acts baked in.
Addendum:
I nominate "I Fought the Law" as the official theme song for Trump. It's has been ranked No. 175 on the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004, and the same year was named one of the 500 "Songs that Shaped Rock" by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It can only help its standing as a rock classic if it is played at Trump on loudspeakers outside of his rallies.
Perhaps someone can record a version that goes "he fought the law, and the law won" sometime soon.
"I purposely didn’t comment on Nancy Pelosi’s very weird story concerning her husband, but now I can because she said something about me, with glee, that was really quite vicious. 'I saw a scared puppy,' she said, as she watched me on television, like millions of others, that didn’t see that. I wasn’t 'scared.' Nevertheless, how mean a thing to say! She is a Wicked Witch whose husbands journey from hell starts and finishes with her. She is a sick & demented psycho who will someday live in HELL!"
By Hal Brown
We know exactly what Trump was doing this morning at 5:37. We also know what he wasn't doing. He wasn't chillaxing with a cup of coffee and and watching Fox News hosts fawning over him and blasting his enemies. See the two articles below:
It doesn't require a graduate degree in psychology to figure out that if Trump really wasn't scared he would simply have ignored what Nancy Pelosi said about him looking like a scared puppy.
Trump wants the public to see him as a superhero, a macho-man, as demonstrated by his electonic card collection. He has a particular affection for identifying with Superman.
We might ask what Freud would say about this were he around to analyze The Man of Steel's feelings about his adoptive parents.
Whether Trump has a "mother-thing" (Freud had other terminology to explain this) for Nancy Pelosi is open to speculation. She certianly has triggered him before.
If you search Trump Pelosi on DuckDuckGo these are the first two articles:
This top article is from Dec. 23, 2019 in The Guardian while all of the other articles are about the "scared puppy"comment.
Click above to read
Remember this (photo featured in The Guardian artilce):
Perhaps Trump has both Mommy and Daddy issues. For that matter, he may also have puppy issues. Freud was a dog lover and it's been written that he was the first to use dogs as an adjunct to therapy. However, he never addressed the role pets have in our psyche in his psychoanalytic works.
“I wouldn’t mind having one, honestly, but I don’t have any time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?"
Trump wasn't too busy during his presidency to play golf and be SuperTrump hero worshipped at Mar-a-Lago but he didn't have time to even have a dog in the White House, not that he'd even have to care for it. How would he look walking a dog on the White House lawn? He'd look like millions of other dog lovers, that's how.
Perhaps Baron wanted a dog. We may never know unless Baron writes his memoirs. According to reports it was Melania who came up with the idea of highlighting the heroism of the combat dogConan, so it's possible she is a dog lover.
So far the only person who has known Trump personally and written in depth with honesty and insight about his personality is his niece Mary Trump. In the future we may learn more. If Melania Trump wants to write a book in the future, perhaps after she's divorced him or he has died, she'd be assured a record breaking book deal and sell far more copies than the aprox 1.1 million "The Art of the Deal" did. After all, Mary Trump's book outsold Art of the Deal in just one week.
Publishing books by mental health experts analyzing Trump has become a cottage industry. The ultimate best-selling and most accurate book would be co-authored by Melania Trump and Mary Trump.
Addendum:
When trying to determine the mental state of Donald Trump one has to pay attention to what he says. For example in yesterday's shower speech::
Original title from before Trump lost the election. "How I think the president may cope with losing." By retired therapist Hal Brown, MSW
I wrote this in June 2020.
This is my speculation as to how Trump will deal psychologically with losing the election. It is not particularly about what he will do to meet his narcissistic need to be the center of attention although I make some guesses. I try to apply what I know about the psychology of loss to what I understand about Trump’s personality.
No doubt you’ve been reading articles in the progressive media and listening to MSNBC and been alarmed by the dire predictions about Trump’s losing the election and using the time left before his term formally ends to wreak havoc on the rule of law and the foundations of American democracy.
As a psychotherapist who is retired after 40 years of clinical practice I have written numerous essays about Trump’s psychopathology here on Daily Kos and previously on the website Capitol Hill Blue. I am not nearly as famous as other mental health professionals who will come up if you do web searches by adding terms like psychology or narcissism to Trump’s name. If you do this you will find a plethora of articles. On Google search of Trump and psychology you have to go to number 26 on page three to find a link to my articles. (These are the only links in this diary. They will each take you numerous references.)
There is something that occurred to me which I haven’t seen addressed. It is that by the time of the election Trump will have been forced to have dealt psychologically, probably unconsciously, with the very real, if not the likelihood, that he is going to lose.
It is true that Donald Trump utilizes the most is also the most primitive psychological defense mechanism, the very most basic one, denial. It is called primitive because according to psychodynamic theory it is the one which is used earliest in life to cope with anxiety and with stress in general.
There is a time when, to put it bluntly, reality bites when someone is about to or actually suffers a loss. In other words, to extend in imagery, reality gets its teeth into a person and try as that person might to dislodge it, reality just won’t let go.
Trump still believes he can manipulate reality and his minions play into this delusional thinking. Like anyone else he believes that if something worked in the past it will work again. He currently seems to believe he can bend the truth to his will. The polls showing Vice President Biden defeating him are a good example. As you’ve probably read he thought he could deny the CNN poll and even threaten a law suit against them. Then the not well-regarded Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll, considered conservative due to the politics of the man whose company conducts it, came out agreeing with the other polls. I haven’t seen a reaction from Trump to this so I assume until he tweets something we can assume he’s in denial.
I don’t think I need a reference to remind readers of the five stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kübler Ross in her writing about death. It has been applied to other kind of loss having nothing to do with dying and found to have validity in how people handle other kinds of loss.
1 - Denial.
2 - Anger.
3 - Bargaining.
4 - Depression.
5 - Acceptance.
Note that the first stage is also the most primitive psychological defense mechanism
While grief researchers modified the Kübler Ross list as they discovered that the stages don’t always occur in order, and that people go back and forth between stages, the basic model trends to hold true for everyone.
There’s a concept called anticipatory grieving which can help someone face inevitable loss before it occurs, for example if a loved one is terminally ill. However, this won’t work for Trump until it is quite clear from the polls that there is virtually no chance he can win, and even then he may remain in denial until the actual election.
This is when he will become the most dangerous because if he holds true to form he will lash out in anger in any way he can. This coincides with the Kübler Ross model. There is no telling for sure what he will do in the interim between his election loss until Biden is sworn in. There are lots of dire predictions.
My sense is that Trump will not go through the bargaining stage because it generally applies to grief associated with death. For example, for those who are religious it may involve promising God they will reform their lifestyle to stave off death just that much longer.
There are no indications that Trump has ever experienced depression as such. This is a man who has said he has never cried. I would look to him to somaticize his depression. We probably wouldn’t learn about some of the typical physical manifestations of depression such as sleep disturbance or minor aches and pains. However some symptoms like severe digestive problems or chest pain could cause him to take another trip to Walter Reed which he’d claim was the second half of his physical. This is something we should be alert for.
As Biden’s swearing in day approaches I think it is possible if not likely that something will “click” in Trump’s psyche which is akin to a survival mechanism. He would then enter to the acceptance phase albeit with a twist unique to him.
This would be when he realizes in his extreme narcissism that he can turn his loss into a win by parlaying the fact that he still has a huge following and is, in his mind, rightfully one of the most famous people in the world.
This is when I would look for him to go back to what has worked best for him in the past which is to do what he does best: perform. I anticipate that in losing he won't take time to lick his wounds because he won’t allow himself to admit he brought defeat upon himself. Instead I see him taking his act on the road where he will continue to draw large, if not huge, crowds. Whether or not they'd pay to see him, and what I expect would be an actual show with the D list performers he can entice to perform, remains to be seen. Of course there’s always the sale of made in China merchandise as a revenue source.
I think Trump will find ways to be in the limelight and will reconstruct his life in a way that satisfies his needs. He’ll never reach the healthy resolution of the grief stages because this would require true acceptance that he suffered a profound loss.
As time goes on we can speculate that his crowds will be smaller and smaller and his events will stop being covered as newsworthy, but he’s smart enough to make sure that he never books a venue he can’t fill and where he won’t make a profit. After all, if the reports are true that Melania reinitiated the prenup before she agreed to move to Washington, he’ll need the money to pay the alimony.
Addendum:
Keep in mind if you want to comment about your own ideas about what you think Trump will do the following:
His intense psychological need to be the center of attention
His practical need to make money
Note that doing things like starting his own cable network requires investors and sponsors.
Up until now his rallies were free. (How many MAGA hats to his supporters need to buy”?)
As a loser he will see deep pocket donors and investors disappear.
Would Fox News, even if they wanted him to host a show, be willing to pay him enough to make it worth his time? Sean Hannity is the highest paid TV host in all TV news at $40 million annually, runner up at Fox is Tucker Carlson at $6 million.
We know how Trump wants people to see him. The digital trading cards are in contrast to the photo he choose to be on "The Art of the Deal" cover.
We might conclude that something in his mind changed between 1987 when the book was published and when he put out his digital cards. Then again, we also might say that the "I'm Superman" narcissistic grandiosity has been an underlying, perhaps driving part, of Trump's personality all of his adult life. It's probably more accurate to say that the choice of the photo on his book cover was a considered marketing decision approved by Trump but that experts at Random House, the publisher, persuaded him to use this one.
All someone like me, who practiced as a psychotherapist for 40 years, or anybody else can do is make educated guesses about what motivates Trump and what he is feeling. For example, many people say he has been frequently motivated by money. On the surface this makes sense. However, nobody, not even Trump himself, knows what money unconsciously represents to him. Even a psychoanalyst would be making an educated guess.
We see what he does but when we delve into the feelings and psychodynamics underlying his behaviors we are in an unknowable realm.
“Diaper Donald will be filling up that diaper, because this is not something that Donald is capable of either understanding or contending with,” Cohen, who worked closely with Trump as his personal attorney for more than a decade, told Ari Melber on Monday on MSNBC’s “The Beat.”
“He believes he could control every situation. This is not a situation that he has any control over, and that’s making him sick to his stomach,” he added. “I think right now he’s beyond petrified.”
There's nothing in the above (taking the diaper remark as a metaphor of course) that Cohen absolutely 100% for certain knows. Even saying that Trump believes he could control every situation, which sounds accurate on the face of it, ought to include modifiers like usually or ought to.
I wrote the following as a comment to the article:
All people like Cohen can do is speculate on what Trump is actually feeling, on the emotions he is experiencing. All anyone knows for certain is what is observable. Let's not forget that he is posting all cap messages on Truth Social in the wee hours of the night. This could be performative but it is a fact that the time stamp say it is, for example, 3AM. Trump has been an actor for decades. Even trying to analyze his facial expressions, even if he tears up, even if his sing-song voice quivers this is an exercise in drawing a conclusion about what is in what Cohen calls his headspace. Add to this imprecision is the possibility his feelings may vacillate. He may experience fleeting anxiety but then may push these feelings down (into the unconscious) and replaces them with anger. Like anyone he has psychological defense mechanisms, the most primitive of these is denial and another is projection. More about this here: https://www.halbrown.org/2023/04/nobody-knows-for-certain-how-trump.html
I admit that part of why I did this was to promote my blog. However this speculation in the media continues to be rampant so I thought a reprise of what I wrote in the blog from April 2, was warranted.
This is what Omarosa Manigault Newman told Joy Reid (video here):
Donald Trump is approaching his arraignment in a Manhattan courtroom. "Yes, he is going to try to pivot and distract and make you all think that he's not upset or nervous, but Donald Trump is terrified,” Omarosa Manigault Newman tells Joy Reid. “I can just certainly tell by his telltale signs... he doesn't look well."
These are the photos the two New York City tabloids used:
You can also make your own conclusions based on what Trump isn't doing in these photos. For example, below he is waving but not smiling at cameras he knows are taking pictures of him.
On Fox News with Sean Hannity Trump said (about the documents at Mar-a-Lago) "I would have the right to take stuff, I have the right to do stuff." Talking heads, for example on Morning Joe, are pointing out that this was basically him admitting to having done something being investigated by Jack Smith.
We can conclude that admitting something that will be likely be used against him should the documents case go to court shows poor judgement. We can with a high degree of confidence say that in his "headspace" or gut when he said these words he wasn't experiencing anxiety. What we don't know is that whether or not just below the surface of awareness anxiety was roiling around in what is sometimes referred to as the preconscious mind (see below).
Here's the public domain iceberg graphic of the mind I used in my other blog story.
Al Sharpton, also on Morning Joe, said Trump is humiliated. Again this is a speculation about what Trump feels. He said people underestimate the effect this has on Trump psychologically. It would be correct to say that if Trump was like the vast majority of people this and all these conclusions would be accurate.
Here's someone else assuming they know what Trump is feeling (From Raw Story)
"The View" co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin worked for Donald Trump in the White House, and she's not buying reports that he's calmly relishing his legal predicament...
..."I know him well enough to know he is not loving this. He is spiraling. As someone, who despite his terrible actions, does think about legacy and how he is perceived. Now, his life, whether it's his obituary, is going to say he was indicted, the first American president to be."
Trump isn't psychologically like most people. See my Daily Kos essay from 2020
Is he sad or maybe just tired? After all he is posting on Truth Social in the middle of the night. The panelists said he had to feel lonely too. They would feel lonely in a similar situation. Most people would. At the risk of repeating myself, Trump is not most people.
So many in the media are making assumptions abut Trump's emotions based on what they and everyone they know would feel. He could be feelings this way, but he may not.
Andrea Mitchel on MSNBC just got got it right. She asked if Donald Trump is different and does he process things differently. She asked whether these things penetrate.
Trump just leaving and heading to courtroom where the indictment will be read and he will plead:
The MSNBC commentators observing the pictures below are saying that this is what Trump didn't want televised. They were taken prior to the cameras being removed from the courtroom. They are saying that he looks like someone reacting to being is a situation he doesn't want to be in.
Since a grand jury issued charges related to hush money to an adult film star, the former president has cycled through a range of emotions and postures.
This is an article by Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey
I added this comment to the article:
Nobodyknows how Trump isfeelingexcept Trump himself. All that can be reported on withcertaintyis what isobservable. The words "as if he is" should preface any sentence purporting to describe how he feels. Thus even the title of this article makes assumptions. This to be accurate it should readActing shocked and expressing defiance.
Even Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, is speculating each time she describes her uncle's inner life. Her describing Uncle Donald feeling narcissistic injury makes sense. Look at the definition here and see what you think.
I am as guilty of speculating as all the other mental health professionals who have gone public with their psychological analyses of Donald Trump. Look my name up with Trump and this is what you'll find:
My articles and those by mental health professionals who are prominent in the field all helped inform the public as to the likely psychodynamics of Donald Trump, emphasize likely.
If a research psychologist was to construct an experiment in an attempt to determine whether a subject met various diagnostic assessments such as their being a malignant narcissist they could begin with a list of observable behaviors they would predict would manifest themselves in the future if they had the theorized diagnosis.
Donald Trump has been diagnosed as both an extreme narcissist, a sociopath, and a malignant narcissist which combines the two disorders. We don't actually know, absolutely know, that any of these diagnostic assessments are 100% accurate.
100% certainty is a standard rarely met with a psychiatric diagnosis. There's no MRI machine to scan Trump's brain. There's no pathologist's microscope to put a slide of his mind under to see just how malignant it is.
As Trump will find out within a year or so, 100% certainty isn't even a standard relied on for conviction in a criminal court where the standard is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Ashley Parker and Josh Hawley, not to pick on them, are not mental health experts. Here's an excerpt of what is in today's article:
Yet in the immediate aftermath of the grand jury’s decision related to hush money paid to an adult-film star, Trump was not happy, said one person with direct knowledge of his reaction. Others described Trump as “upset,” “irritated,” “deflated” and “shocked,” though some noted that he also remained “very calm” and “rather stoic, actually.”
Even they are relying on second hand reporting, and they only say that "others" who aren't identified described Trump's behavior. We don't know if these are people who actually were with him.
More people described in the article say they know how Trump feels:
“He’ll do Trump,” said David Urban, a longtime Trump adviser who is not working on his 2024 campaign. “He’ll show up. He’ll be indignant.”
“He initially was shocked,” said Joe Tacopina, a Trump lawyer, on NBC’s “Today” show Friday. “After he got over that, he put a notch on his belt and he decided we have to fight now, and he got into a typical Donald Trump posture where he’s ready to be combative on something he believes is an injustice.”
“He has never been concerned about any story that paints him as a moral reprobate,” one Trump ally said. “His whole life and career have been full of those stories and they’ve never harmed him, in his mind.”
There's one quote at the end of the article which makes sense:
But the defiant posture seems likely to remain. In a statement, Taylor Budowich, the head of MAGA Inc., railed against the indictment and promised it would deliver Trump another stint in the White House.
The use of the word "posture" is accurate. The head of MAGA Inc. isn't saying he knows for sure what Trump is feeling. He is predicting how he will act. He's probably correct.
Only Trump is capable of knowing whether he's playing a role or whether he's struggling to avoid experiencing fear. I say "capable" because Trump, like anyone, has psychological defense mechanisms to prevent anxiety from percolating into conscious awareness.
Bottom line:
Only this guy knows what is happening in his conscious mind.
By definition, nobody knows what is occurring in their unconscious mind. Self-aware people can make informed guesses about this but the unconscious is not conscious. It manifests itself though feelings, behaviors, and hints as to what is going on in the recesses of our minds often comes out in our dreams.
An iceberg is often used to provide a visual representation of Freud's theory that most of the human mind operates unconsciously. Public domain
Donald Trump faces the embarrassment of arraignment, fingerprinting and a police mugshot in Manhattan on Tuesday, but one legal expert suggested his worst nightmare will come from a jury made up of New Yorkers who know him all too well.
Here again we see Trump being described as if he is psychologically normal. He faces what we would be embarrassed by, hell, we'd be mortified. There are two meanings of the word "nightmare" of which one is being applicable here, ie. a terrifying experience. Trump may find it exhilarating. What he can't control is an actual nightmare occurring while he is sleeping. I'd say there is more chance he'll have one or more of these than his actually experiencing conscious manifestations of anxiety.
3) There is one thing we know for sure abut Trump. It is that yesterday he took a motorcade to play golf (article). However this was arranged, it was done is such a way that he would pass by his supporters. I think it is significant that there were no photographs of him actually playing (at least none that I could find). These might have captured expressions that suggested he was feeling the stress of being indicted.
