BY VERN TURNER
One of my favorite comics is Bill Maher. No surprise there for those of you who read my stuff. On his latest show, he mentioned that our president possesses a malignant narcissistic personality disorder. I looked it up. There is an interesting list of characteristics and traits that define this particular personality disorder.
– Self-centered; egotistic: It’s always about themselves
– Fantasies about success, brilliance, accomplishments, power
– Believe in their own superiority over everyone
– Require constant praise
– Sense of Entitlement: Everybody owes them or should be thankful for him/her
– Exploits, denigrates others who were once friends
– Envy of just about everyone
– Must be center of attention
– Lacks empathy
There are a few more traits, but you get the idea. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading David Cullen’s chilling narrative about the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, CO, not 10 miles from where I now reside. For many years, the motive for this massacre by two teenaged students remained a mystery. Then an FBI agent named Dr. Fuselier started referring to psychological research and showing the writings and videos of Eric Harris to professional psychologists.
What emerged was an acute version of some of the major aspects of narcissism that was classified as psychopathy. It was noted that Harris was not insane, he was psychopathic. Why? Because insane people exhibit confusion while a psychopath is rational and coldly calculating. They are also callous, manipulative, comically grandiose, egocentric and totally lacking in empathy.
Moreover, psychopathic brains don’t function like normal brains. These people enjoy being bad. They exhibit a ruthless disregard for others. They will defraud, maim or kill for trivial gains. These people also have a gift for disguising their ruthlessness.
Their total life is a con job. They live to seduce others into their web so they can be denigrated later. The con job for a psychopath is total immersion into fabrication [lies] so that the “inferiors” can be suckered into whatever the psychopath intends. This research and its conclusions appeared in a 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity, by Dr. Hervey Clickly.
There’s more. Psychopaths lie for amusement. In some, lying is so profound it becomes their signature characteristic. In 1970, Robert Hare wrote Without Conscience. In it he published the 20 characteristics of psychopathy. In addition, he surmised that the condition was mostly inherited and that 80% of psychopaths were males. Using EEG [Electro-encephalogram] technology, he discovered that the brain of a psychopath exhibits completely abnormal outputs from “normal” brains.
One of Dr. Hare’s colleagues, Dr. Kent Kiehl used a different technique to examine the response of the amygdala, or emotional center of the brain, to different stimuli that should exhibit emotional responses. In normal brains, compelling, horrible and disturbing stimuli elicited the expected results; these brains were indeed emotionally impacted. But in a psychopath’s brain, these emotional stimuli elicited noresponse from the amygdala. Psychopaths simply rationalize shocking and disturbing words or displays.
So much for the Psychology lesson … The point to this piece, ultimately, is to increase awareness as to the open behaviors of the man that 62 million people and an antiquated Electoral College put into office as the president of the United States.
Moreover, I also mean to take an axe handle to the consciousness of the 92 million voters who stayed home and didn’t vote at all.
That said, it stuns me still that so many people in the “red” states lacked even the remotest sense to not see through the con job that the psychopath named Trump was perpetrating upon their souls, their livelihoods, their children and their futures. The ugliness of excessive bragging alone should have been enough to cause pause among those not underground.
Why didn’t it? Why didn’t the disgusting and disgraceful recordings of Trump’s bragging about fondling/abusing women drive allwomen away from this monster? Now, we see women from everywhere claiming of being abused wrongfully by men almost daily in the news. So, how could over 50% of white women vote for Donald Trump? Are they that easy to fool?
The parallels with Eric Harris in our current president are not necessarily Hitlerian in their creepiness, but rather more frightening to the very preservation of our democratic republic.
Forget the Republican Party as a check on the psychopathy of Donald Trump. Their politics are so corrupt that they’ll buy any con job he’s selling. And like a good psychopath, he doesn’t care.
What is most frightening is that Donald Trump, put in an extremely vulnerable position by his legal woes and crises, might just lash out against all of us “inferior beings” and destroy us all along with himself. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the other killer at Columbine, formed a suicide pact while committing to killing as many other humans as they could – indiscriminately.
Will Trump’s pathology cause his mind to snap and make a similar decision? Or will he just suspend the Constitution and all elections so he can retain his power, again like a good psychopath? That is our problem today.
Just as Harris and Klebold supplemented each others’ pathologies, are Trump and Putin doing the same thing? Probably not. Putin wants to live. He may be a thug, a murderer and a monster, but his self-service is based on power and his own peculiar, criminal view of nationalism. Trump’s condition is all about himself, and we have all seen what a pathetic, insecure, irrational and sick creature he truly is.
Ironically, Trump is the person being conned around the world. But our intellectually lazy 35% still think Trump is our savior. I can’t figure that out. I guess we’ll have to see how bad it gets before the great awakening reaches the rural farms and towns that put Trump in office. Meanwhile, the Democrats are going after this madman at full speed.
I’m no psychologist, but I learned enough this week to be frightened for our nation.
– Denver resident Vern Turner is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer. His latest book, Why Angels Weep: America and Donald Trump, is available through Amazon.
