Liar or not, the end result is someone entirely unsuitable for high office. “He has the brains of a big man, but the maturity of an 8-year-old,” Frank said, summing up. “And those people are very dangerous potentially.”
The Experience of Tony Schwartz and the Art of the Deal
If Trump, who is 70 years old, in fact has NPD, the malady should have shown up long before his current presidential run. From all appearances, it did. Just ask Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump’s signature memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” originally released by Random House in 1987. No other piece of publicity did more than this book to catapult Trump into the limelight as a world-class celebrity, endowing him with the glittering image of the consummate, swashbuckling deal-maker, who always walks away from high-stakes negotiations richer and stronger than anyone else. Schwartz first came to Trump’s notice after writing an exposé for New York magazine in 1985 about the real estate mogul’s protracted battle to evict a group of rent-controlled tenants from a building he had purchased and planned to redevelop on Manhattan’s Central Park South. Although the article was extremely unflattering, the magazine pasted his photo on the cover. The resulting publicity was enough for Trump to seek out Schwartz and offer him a lucrative deal to ghostwrite his life story. Although the ensuing collaboration netted Schwartz a half-million-dollar advance and copious royalties, Schwartz has regretted the undertaking ever since. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he confessed to New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer in a tell-all interview published in late July. Schwartz told Mayer, in sum and substance, that the best-selling book is a fraud, much like its subject. Instead of a “charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business,” as depicted in the book, Trump, said Schwartz, is a human “black hole,” a man with no real friends, fixated on publicity, motivated by “gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions,” with “an absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” As Trump’s presidential bid gained traction, Schwartz decided to go public with his misgivings. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” he said. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” Schwartz also told Mayer that he kept a diary of his dealings with Trump over the 18 months that he tagged along with him to business meetings and listened in on phone conversations to acquire material for the book. From those notes and his recollection, he explained, in terms strikingly similar to the Mayo Clinic’s description of NPD and standard definitions of ADD, that Trump “was like a kindergartner who can’t sit still in a classroom. It was impossible to keep him focused on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement.” Schwartz related that Trump spoke to him, much as he does on the campaign trail, in “cryptic, monosyllabic statements.” His short attention span left Trump, in Schwartz’s view, with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance. … If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time.” Equally worrying from a public-interest standpoint, according to Schwartz, was the way Trump was always “playing people,” easily segueing from “flattery” to “bullying.” Even worse—and here, there is a slight variance from Dr. Frank’s analysis—was Trump’s dishonesty. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said to Mayer. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or ought to be true.” When confronted with contrary evidence, Schwartz elaborated, Trump would “double-down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent.” In keeping with that belligerence, Trump has responded to Schwartz’s revelations with a cease-and-desist letter penned by the chief legal officer of the Trump Organization, demanding that Schwartz stop giving interviews about his experiences writing “The Art of the Deal” and forfeit all royalties. Schwartz has hired an attorney to defend himself.
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Understanding Trump’s personal pathology is essential to any assessment of his fitness for office. But understanding the GOP nominee is only part of the task of combating his presidential aspirations. To fully comprehend Trump and the social and political dangers he represents, it’s necessary to understand the appeal he has for millions of his core supporters. To be sure, there are some legitimate reasons that explain why some have embraced Trump: The uneven economic recovery that has left large swaths of the working and middle classes behind is one. Another is the failure of neoliberalism, represented by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic leadership, which appears to many as a corrupt philosophy of governance incapable of addressing genuine popular needs. There are also some open, obvious and unsavory reasons for Trump’s popularity, rooted in racism and ethnic nationalism, as exemplified by his racially tinged campaign slogan, aimed mainly at disaffected blue-collar whites, to “Make America Great Again.” But at the same time, there is something percolating underneath the surface at an unconscious level beyond economic distress, racism and social nostalgia that keeps a candidate who should be consigned to the margins of political life in the thick of the presidential race. What is it that explains the allure that a TV strongman, a clone, some say, of Benito Mussolini, holds for broad segments of the working class, who buy into the myth of Trump as an anti-establishment champion (a “blue-collar billionaire,” to quote his son Eric) when he is in truth precisely the opposite? The Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich struggled to understand a similar question as he tried to come to terms with the rise of Nazism and Stalinism in the 1930s. The answer, Reich posited in his classic work, “The Mass Psychology of Fascism,” lies with the authoritarian and hierarchical structures of the patriarchal family, the dominance of the father as moral law-giver and bulwark against external danger. In times of extreme social stress, dislocation and fear, especially in the absence of viable alternatives, large numbers instinctively turn to figures of authority for protection, heedless of the disastrous consequences. As University of California professor George Lakoff, a specialist in cognitive linguistics, described the phenomenon in a recent Huffington Post blog: “In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right. … Fear tends to activate desire for a strong strict father—namely, Trump.” A study completed this winter by Matthew McWilliams, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, further underscored the authoritarian bent of Trump’s base. In a sampling of 1,800 registered voters across the country and the political spectrum, McWilliams found that only two variables had a statistically significant bearing on a voter’s preference for Trump: authoritarianism, followed by fear of terrorism. Northwestern University psychology professor Dan P. McAdams also explored the authoritarian strain among Trump supporters in The Atlantic magazine’s June cover story. And therein lies the rub for the rest of us. In Donald Trump, one of our two major parties has nominated for the highest office in the land a deeply troubled and volatile man with the potential to attract and unleash the darkest undercurrents of the nation’s soul. However you decide to vote come November, you can’t in good conscience help to elect him. Dig, Root, Grow

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