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We all know about Trump’s narcissim, of course, but this week’s Diary column from Alastair Campbell in The New World (formerly The New European) states it very clearly.
In case it is paywalled ( can’t tell, I have a subscription, it may or may not be available to read as a ‘free’ article) I extract the key passage here.
Some weeks are easier than others when it comes to writing a weekly column, and I guess easiest of all is when someone else writes it for me. No, I don’t mean finding myself a ghost writer – too much of a control freak for that – and I certainly don’t mean asking Chat GPT to have a go (death of journalism and all that). But every now and then an email from a stranger pops into the inbox and I go, mmmm, that is interesting; interesting enough indeed to share with the readers of The New World.
The stranger was called Michele Leembruggen, who I have since discovered is an Australian, and author of a well-received memoir about how she overcame the trauma of a childhood raised in an abusive, chaotic family. I have since checked it out, and that initial description of A Hole Where My Heart Should Be barely gets close to the scale of the trauma, the chronic depression and anxiety it led to, the self-medication with alcohol, the pathological obsession with a therapist, a relationship that became as toxic as the one she had had with her mother. Happy ending spoiler alert: she eventually finds a healing of sorts from the two conditions for which she was being treated, complex post-traumatic stress disorder and quiet borderline personality disorder.
She has been following my many and varied attempts to make sense of Donald Trump and the chaos he has been unleashing upon the world. “You often seem perplexed by Trump’s behaviour and I find this irritating,” she wrote, “because the drivers for it are actually obvious.”
Now at this point it is helpful if you know what DSM-5-TR stands for: The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, fifth edition, text revision. Published and updated regularly by the American Psychiatric Association, this so-called “psychiatrist’s bible” serves as the standard classification of mental disorders treated by mental health professionals in the US.
Michele pointed me to the latest DSM-5-TR criteria for narcissistic personality disorder:
Grandiose sense of self-importance: Exaggerating achievements and talents, expecting to be recognised as superior without commensurate accomplishments.
Preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love: Living in a world of imagined triumphs and ideal scenarios.
Belief in being special and unique: Feeling that one can only be understood by or associate with other high-status people or institutions.
Need for excessive admiration: Requiring constant attention and praise from others.
Sense of entitlement: Expecting favourable treatment and automatic compliance with their expectations.
Interpersonally exploitative behaviour: Taking advantage of others to achieve their own goals.
Lack of empathy: Being unwilling or unable to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
Envy of others or the belief that others are envious of them: Feeling resentful of others’ successes or believing others are jealous of them.
Arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes: Demonstrating an inflated sense of self-importance and looking down on others.
“First and foremost,” wrote Leembruggen, “Trump is a very damaged human being and he carries an enormous burden of shame (invisible to himself), which he projects. Do not underestimate the consequences of his mental disorder; it is the foundational motor that drives everything he is and does. In fact, it is possible to predict his reactions and behaviours when viewing him through the lens of NPD.” Her email arrived around the same time as our recent edition, adorned with a picture of an exploding Trump, and the factual headline “Weapons grade narcissist”.
Other opinions are available, of course. But since she wrote to me, I have kept a note of those nine criteria on the arm of the sofa from where I watch the TV news, and Trump manages to tick off all nine in pretty much every public appearance he makes.
Michele Leembruggen also attached three YouTube links to talks by a British psychiatrist named Russell Razzaque, who analyses not just Trump, but his deputy JD Vance, and his former best friend Elon Musk. In the case of all three, their upbringing has a lot to answer for. They all have major daddy issues. Trump longed for praise and attention that he rarely got from Fred Trump… boy, has he made up for it since! Vance grew up with an addict mother and a succession of her boyfriends, not knowing his father as a child, eventually being raised by grandparents who gave him the third surname of his childhood, Vance. Musk was bullied at home, bullied at school, and according to Razzaque has taken on the attributes of his tormentors.
I cannot cover off in a few sentences the points Razzaque makes in his lengthy assessments of these three powerful men. One thing is for sure – the world is currently paying a very heavy price for Trump’s craving for praise and attention, Vance’s anger at a violent childhood during which his father was absent and his mother tried to kill him, and Musk’s fear that he was never really rated, respected, or considered one of the in-crowd.
Why so many people like and admire such psychologically damaged people is a mystery for our time. Why others fear them, perhaps less so.
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Yeah, I think most people agree he was very much the kind of prisoner likely to do that, and many of the conspiracies are about the guards deliberately ignoring his attempts… except that guards normally do that. (The counter-argument being that he was an important prisoner and would have been given special attention, but that presumes competence - and concern - among those giving the orders and that guards could simply switch off being callous, incompetent and lazy.) If there was a cover-up of his death, it’s entirely the guards covering their own asses after having fucked up, as usual, but not being used to the scrutiny this case is getting.
Yeah, this wasn’t an organized blackmail scheme, it was a “men of power” social circle, where their monstrous abuses were bonding elements. Basically your traditional old boys club/network. (That there’s no list doesn’t mean there isn’t evidence - obviously there’s evidence, their actions would have created things like flight logs, photographs, etc. etc. - but also obviously, Trump and his minions don’t want anyone digging into that, either.)
She’s full of shit about literally everything else, so it’s a safe bet. I literally haven’t seen her talk about a subject without being full of it.
We’ve got all these interesting sets of dynamics coming out of right-wing grifters suddenly finding themselves in positions of power and not knowing what to do about it. (A case in point is the recent announcement of Nick Adams as ambassador to Malaysia. Adams’ entire claim to fame are his extreme parody “alpha male” MAGA social media accounts. Which he now has to find a way of acting out, stymied by the lack of Hooters in Malaysia) They’re never sure when to drop the grift even after it becomes counter-productive as they’re expected to produce things that don’t exist.
Reading more on it, it doesn’t seem like the administration is deliberately killing NASA. They’re just cutting positions to the point where they won’t be effective at doing anything, and the ignorant idiots making the decisions don’t realize (or care). And even if they were deliberately destroying NASA, that means fewer opportunities for SpaceX, because now they’re not launching rockets for scientific/manned missions. And Musk’s Mars dreams would be even more impacted, because it’s necessitates the government being a part of it (ironically, given his dream of effectively starting his own government on Mars).
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Oh sure, but same difference, at the end of it. Sure, an organization named NASA might exist, but only to support private industry…
Maybe, but there are plenty of private companies seeking opportunities to shoot all sorts of stuff into LEO… Space X might dominate the mindshare and the rocket market, but there are lots of start ups wanting to be uber for… whatever.
But he’s part of a movement that’s seeking to destroy government, so that they can do what they want. that’s the goal and always has been, make government so small, you can strangle it in the bathtub. 
Whether destroying the government gets them what they want is another question, but that’s the goal. They don’t want space exploration to be about science (except in what they practically need to get them to their goal of space colonies), especially not in a way that benefits the public. They want to commodifiy space travel and they want to extract resources from space as much as possible.
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This includes a video on that subject:
Ok, who’s gonna do the side-by-side with him and Baron Harkonnen (circa 1984)? I bet 
would love to see that… 
I wonder if his associates might’ve been the ones keeping lists and taking notes. There’s a not-insignificant number of powerful people who were brought down by folks in the room who were completely overlooked. 
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I have to say I don’t know what to make of this term. I get that this is Trump’s background and we shouldn’t ignore it. At the same time, making it a thing seems to be asking us to ignore the evidence in front of us in favor of a model.
Is Trump playing up his feud for the audience? Of course he is. He signs blank pieces of paper to prove he’s the best at deals. He brings cameras with him to accost foreign leaders because the only point is what people see. Everything is for the audience with him.
Does that mean the feud is fake? I don’t know…Trump has in every other case demonstrated he is the pettiest man alive. He requires his former opponents abase themselves to ridiculous levels, and otherwise makes his policy about revenge for the most pathetic grudges. Does it seem like he would have the world’s richest man – a natural ally against the public, but also a natural rival for needing to be the smartest man in every room – publicly insult him and not care? Sure, that’s a thing in wrestling, but has that seemed like him? Has it ever seemed like Musk, either?
To me it feels almost like how people elevated fascism to a “political ideology” and then were suddenly confused that Trump could be smart enough to be a fascist, as if the intellectual arguments were ever more than set dressing for being a racist thug. He knows the cameras are rolling and he has an idea of what they love. I’m not convinced that means he fakes his spite.
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Maybe they are adding flesh-eating bacteria to his spray tan compound?
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Maybe… but we should also take serious that there is a method to the madness here? Trump isn’t particular smart, but he knows enough to understand the manipulation of the media, which is part of what drove wrestling for years (until McMahon revealed ye old carney tricks). He’s always been on the cutting edge of using his name as a brand and shaping that brand to the public. By engaging in the racist birtherism, he found a group of easily manipulable people via the media.
But both keep pushing talking points and then backing down. Trump could have cut the contracts with Space X or actually moved to deport Musk, but he didn’t. He just posted about it.
But he cares about staying in the public eye and in power more, I think.
Yeah, for sure… but he knows enough to know that really alienating Musk could pose a real threat.
Part of the problem is that there is so much shit in the zone these days, it’s hard to know what is real and what is for the cameras…
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But “Trump” is not just Trump, but also whoever is manipulating him and/or wielding power while he is unaware of what’s going on. 
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Well, but that’s speculation, too, isn’t it? That he’s being manipulated and there is someone else actually wielding power… Do I think it’s likely he’s not cognizant of what’s happening around him? Sure, but they said the same shit about Biden, too.
I guess part of my argument is that we don’t know, because it’s all being fed through a weird ass prism of multiple media platforms (TV/Radio, social media, AI-warped internet, etc).
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That on the other hand makes perfect sense to me. Trump is a bully who loves to pick on people who can’t defend themselves. If someone can, he’ll bluster about all the things he could do to them in hopes they will back down, but he won’t dare escalate past that. Is that what “kayfabe” means here? Because I think TACO makes so much more sense than a fake dispute – especially since Musk never really carries through on anything on his own.
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“Manipulated” may have been too strong a word, but he’s certainly easily influenced by whoever spoke to him last. That’s been fairly well documented, I gather.
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Yeah, maybe so… but maybe it’s not either/or? Like, it could be part that, and part kayfabe?
Yeah, that’s seems fairly true, yes. But it likely depends on the person. If it’s someone he’s decided to smart (Musk, Putin, Miller, Bannon, Thiel, etc - a bunch of white dude pseudo-intellectuals with power and money), then he’s likely to be swayed, but you or I could say something smart to him, and he’d reject it out of hand, because we’re not rich or powerful, or saying things that either flatters him or his worldview. We could be saying something that is obviously smart, but because of who we are and what our worldview is…
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Trump definitely has his own beliefs too. Like he is not pretending to hate minorities, and someone who explains why attacking them is bad would get nowhere. But I bet they could easily swing his opinion between deporting them all and enslaving them all. 
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Now this is interesting.
Another Christian who wants Christian laws is doing something not so Christian.
Weird.
“I believe marriage is a sacred covenant and I have earnestly pursued reconciliation,” she wrote on social media. “But in light of recent discoveries, I do not believe that it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage. I move forward with complete confidence that God is always working everything together for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.”
Angela Paxton is seeking “a disproportionate share” of the estate, claiming Ken Paxton is at fault for the breakup of the marriage, committed adultery, that he may have benefited from her staying with him and that he has a higher earning power than she does.
Kenny had this to say, because of course when he’s involved he wants privacy.
“I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time.”
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This is really Occam’s razor here. People commit suicide in prision all the time. I find it more plausible that Epistein knew he was cooked and decided to take the coward’s way out rather than face justice or his victims. Do I think it’s possible he had “help”? Sure, it’s possible – and that “help” could be something as benign as prison staff apathy, incompetence, or simply looking the other way. The biggest proof to me that this wasn’t some sort of carefully orchestrated Hollywood-style hit job on Epstein is the very fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is still breathing.
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