The Clear and Present Danger of Donald Trump’s Emotional Weakness

Throughout the campaign, a cottage industry developed around diagnosing the President-elect with a mental illness or personality disorder. Or rather, attempting to diagnose him with a mental illness or personality disorder.

This was an unproductive exercise for a number of reasons, the least of which being it is fundamentally impossible to diagnose a person you only know through your television or computer screen. There’s also the insidious yet simultaneously naive underlying premise to this analysis that assumes that just because Donald J. Trump is such a brazen racist, bigoted, sexist, lying narcissist, that he must be mentally ill. Often, people just are racists, bigoted, sexists, lying narcissists.

In the case of our President-elect, searching for some “reason” allows for the possibility of a moonshot, that if we can somehow treat him, then we can avoid the horrors to come. That isn’t going to happen. This is just who he is.

In truth, one does not need an official medical diagnosis to recognize that there is something deeply wrong with Donald Trump. Not because he is sick, but because he is broken.

Last night, the President-elect of the United States sent out this tweet:

There’s a lot going on here.

To start, the Consumer Confidence Index is, of course, just that: a measure of how confident consumers feel in the future of the economy. It doesn’t measure real economic outlook, it measures how Average Joe Schmoe Rando feels things are going. So this doesn’t actually prove that the economy is improving (though, by the way, the economy is improving and has been for years) because it isn’t a measure of economic performance. Nobody’s life is tangibly better because the Consumer Confidence Index is up. People just feel good. Which is nice! But it’s just a feeling.

And yet Donald wants our gratitude. He’s begging for it. His people feel good, his countrymen, the people he was elected to serve, but that isn’t enough for him. He wants to feel good. And to feel good, he needs the credit. He needs the gold star.

Donald Trump has no sense of self. He feels bad if he isn’t the center of attention, the subject of fawning praise and adulation. His constant assertions of his intelligence and greatness obviously belie his desperation for validation of his intelligence and greatness to keep him from lashing out or breaking down.

This neediness, this unending hunger for approbation, creates a fragile and easily manipulated psyche that leads him to latch on to anybody who delivers even the faintest of praise (no matter who it is), or to try to humiliate anybody who delivers condemnation (no matter who it is). Anybody who says he’s good is good, anybody who says he is bad is bad.

Just look at the relationship between Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Examinations of Donald’s affinity for Putin often entertain the possibility of some sort of financial dependence or kompromat. While those are certainly plausible explanations that deserve investigation, Donald himself has told us the reason he likes Putin so goddamn much: “Well, I think…he calls me brilliant.” And while it isn’t entirely true that Putin called him brilliant, what matters is that Donald thinks it is. He is willing to ally himself with literally anyone who says something nice about him because they said something nice about him. He views the compliments as a revelation of a person’s foresight. “If they can see how smart I am, then they must be smart too. As long as they say I’m smart, then they are a-ok in my book.”

On the flipside, of course, there are also countless examples of Donald’s complete inability to control himself when criticized or shamed. He can’t help but feel gravely wounded, no matter the source of the criticism, no matter how minute the slight. Despite everything, including his own self-interest, he cannot stop himself from trying to smash the perceived threat.

Not fight back. Not debate. Smash. Humiliate. Destroy. He fights filthy and he fights mean. He has no sense of scale, scope, or proportion. He becomes a massive, wounded animal, a beast recklessly thrashing about, enraged by his enemies.

And soon he will be our President.

We truly have not reckoned with the grave peril we will all be in once this man and his defective personality come into power.

One of the most fundamental aspects of the Presidency that the public generally ignores is the way that a president’s personality precurses their presidential style. The public tends to avoid personality-driven conversations about our politicians (unless their last name is “Clinton”) because the thought that our safety is entrusted to a flawed person like the kind we interact with every day and not an emotionless machine is frightening. We assume that our leaders are tabula rasae, influenced by intense academic study and considered ideology, rather than the chaos of the human soul.

Even when we do recognize the flawed humanity of our leaders, we prefer to view these flaws as the result of cold calculation, rather than emotional fragility. But in order to truly comprehend the presidency, we must understand that the personal flaws of our leaders have life and death consequences.

Take, for example, the Bush administration and it’s two biggest failures: The Iraq War and the response to Hurricane Katrina. To come to terms with these catastrophes, people often attribute them to greed or disregard for human life. In a strange way, it feels safer to assume the President Bush and his advisers knew what they were doing and just didn’t care about the consequences. It’s easier to intellectually distance one’s self, refuse to consider humanity shared capacity for folly and blunder, and simply say, “Oh, well they’re just evil, that’s how that happened”. There’s order in considered malevolence.

It’s more disquieting to examine the extensive scholarship that suggests that the War on Terror was fueled by President Bush’s religious fervor and sense of responsibility to the Divine. It’s unnerving to allow for the possibility that he was too distracted and preoccupied with the Iraq War to adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina. These are relatable errors (though “relatable” ≠ forgivable), the type we see all around us every day. Once the emotional life and intellectual capacity of the person in the Big Chair enters into the picture, so too does chaos. The world is suddenly disordered. It is no longer possible to view our elected officials as cogs in a machine. We‘re forced to see them as real life human beings, prone to fits of passion, honest-to-goodness mistakes, and bad days.

While at this point there’s little use in rehashing the 2016 election, it’s telling that what most irked those who had worked in government in proximity to the presidency, in many cases under both Republican and Democratic administrations, about the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency was his demonstrable unfitness for office. Beyond unqualified, he was unfit. They knew that he didn’t have the emotional steadiness to be president because they had witnessed themselves what type of steadiness that the job requires. For these people, that was the most potent argument, because they understood what could happen if this man who can’t control his feelings got into the Oval Office.

The problem with this argument, though, is that it’s difficult to explain this concept to the average voter in a way that it supersedes other considerations like “Who will help me? Who will help my family? Who is more likely to put me to work and put money in my pocket?” “Fitness for office”, to most, is an intellectual concept, beyond the usual scope of reviewing candidates in an election. Elections are supposed to contests of ideas, not of personalities. Moreover, promises of greatness and prosperity are far more satisfying to the viscera than “the other guy is a lunatic”.

Yet come January 20th, the greatest threat to the Republic are not Donald Trump’s policies, but his lunacy.

Through out his life, Donald has also demonstrated that his primary concern in any situation is himself. Never once has he bared any sustained interest in helping other people (thank you, David Fahrenthold). At many points through out the interminable campaign, his instinctual response to any sort of calamity or tragedy was to promote himself and his candidacy.

This begs the question: Does Donald Trump have the capacity to place the interests of the nation above his own? Is he willing to use the considerable powers of the presidency to protect his ego and exact revenge on his enemies? To what extent? How far is he willing to go to make himself feel better if somebody humiliates him?

Considerable amounts of energy have been exerted in the past few weeks investigating the seeds of considerable corruption in the impending Trump administration. While these are certainly necessary, worthwhile endeavors, in the public consciousness they represent a kind of predictability. This narrative depicts Donald Trump as wily and deliberate, although there is very little evidence that suggests he possess either of those traits.

On the other hand, the fact that our safety is now dependent on the stability of a man who has exhibited rash, impulsive, unstable behavior has gone largely unexamined since Election Day, perhaps because it is impossible to truly comprehend or quantify until he starts making decisions. We won’t know what it means until something happens.

We’ll just have to wait and see. There is nothing we can do about it, and that’s the scariest part of all.