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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 9/24/22

Is Something Called "Narcissistic Collapse" Coming To America?

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Reprinted from hartmannreport.com

Trump's Fuhrerbunker moment, his abused-wife-is-leaving moment, his Jim Jones-in-the-jungle moment, when he turns on America, trying to destroy whatever he can in and of this nation, is coming...

Rev. Jim Jones
Rev. Jim Jones
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In President Biden's speech yesterday, he spoke tough truths that had to be said out-loud. This country is under attack from within. And the attack is led by a madman.

Donald Trump may be about to throw America into a crisis that could make January 6th look like a romp in the park. It has to do with something called "narcissistic collapse."

Trump is a classic extroverted, grandiose narcissist of such severity that numerous professionals in the psychology field have pointed out how he could easily be diagnosed as suffering severe Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).

Narcissists of this type are often at the top of their fields, driven to over-achievement by a deep underlying sense of inferiority and shame. In Trump's case, this probably came from his having a criminal psychopath as a father and a mother who so disliked him that she sent him off to military school at a young age and went, alone, to Scotland during the summers when he was home from school in New York.

He grew up filled with shame, lying and cheating to "win" the love and approval of others, stealing from his family and people he did business with to physically build around himself the trappings of success.

NBC taught him how to do television and turned him into a star, and he leveraged that into politics where he gets constant daily affirmation from people often damaged the same way he is. On the outside, he seems rich, powerful, and successful.

Deep down inside, though, he knows he's a failure. He'd failed at school; he failed repeatedly at business; he failed at marriage; he pissed away the entirety of the more than $400 million he stole from his father's estate and still had to be bailed out by the Russians; he'd even failed at being a child loved by his parents and siblings.

His narcissism is his defense against this history of failure and the inevitable shame associated with a lifetime of it. And his narcissism is of the most severe variety "- the grandiose form "- where he makes grand claims to the effect of, "I, alone, can fix it," and, "I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and my people would still love me and vote for me."

This is the behavior of criminals and mobsters: in his father and Roy Cohn "- both mobsters and narcissists themselves "- he learned from the best.

When narcissists are publicly outed as failures, particularly if the outing is public and high-profile, it often provokes a condition called narcissistic collapse.

For a narcissist like Trump with considerable power, the ability to harm organizations/institutions, or who can meaningfully threaten damage to other people, this is the moment of maximum danger for those around him.

Hitler, another classic narcissist with a similarly unloved and miserable childhood, confronted his failures in the last weeks of World War II. In the movie Downfall, which portrays Hitler's final days, you can see and hear him disintegrate (it's a brilliant film and really worth watching!).

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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