He’s a NARCISSIST: How will Trump Leave Office?

During the last six months or so it has been gratifying to hear pundits on the pundit circuit making allusions to Trump’s narcissism usually by mentioning that he only cares about himself, which is the most milquetoast interpretation of narcissism ever. They clearly haven’t been reading Ye Olde Blogge or they would know the ins and outs of narcissism by now and how they make narcissists, particularly the Ol’ Pussy Grabber, extremely predictable.

It seems like instead of Ye Olde Blogge, they read this dog from Salon, What happens when a narcissist loses? Expect “rage” and “terror,” psychologists warn. Essentially, all it said is that he’s going to be mad and act out. Great. We can do better than that because we know two things: (1) Losing the election is the most significant narcissistic injury that Trump has ever experienced and (2) narcissists use specific coping mechanisms to comfort themselves once the narcissistic injury has activated their shame.

What is a Narcissist?

Essentially, a narcissist is a core of shame so dense that it is approaching critical mass and threatening to implode creating an emotional black hole where their soul should be wrapped in an overinflated Mylar sheath of delusional perfection. Their life is spent trying to keep themselves distracted from their feelings of shame by promoting their delusion of perfection.

It’s a no win situation, though, because (a) no one is perfect so there are bound to be unavoidable instances that demonstrate the narcissist’s fallibility. And (2) it’s like they’re juggling burning cats wielding chainsaws; they are working so hard trying to maintain their facade that they cannot do anything else leading to more undeniable failures.

Narcissists, by definition, live in a fantasy of their own own success, power, brilliance, beauty. They don’t deal with reality because in reality no one is perfect. Their job is to draw everyone around them into their fantasy or, put another way, to foist their pathology onto the rest of us.

What is a Narcissistic Wound?

Losing the election is the undeniable intrusion of reality onto this cozy little dream of being the most loved person in the history of human kind. Any intrusion on the veil of superiority reminds of them of their shame and is termed a narcissistic wound. What is an Ol’ Pussy Grabber to do?

He relies on a tried and true combination of so-called coping mechanisms to soothe their fraught feelings of shame and distract himself from his fears and anxieties of his inadequacies. We’ve seen these coping mechanisms on parade across the bully pulpit the past four years: lying, jactation, wishful thinking, splitting, victimhood. Are any of these going to soothe the gigantic narcissistic wound of losing the election? Let’s see.

Lying, Jactation, and Wishful Thinking

The Ol’ Pussy Grabber has made the piteous claim that “I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” on Twitter, which hung the disclaimer that it may not be true and probably isn’t on it. Lying, jactation, and wishful thinking aren’t going to work. You can’t win an election by pretending that you have. To paraphrase, President Obama, Reality has a way of biting you in the ass. Right about now, I imagine that fat flabby orange ass is feeling pretty darn sore, don’t you?

Splitting

He did his best to split us by pitting groups of Americans against each other. The country is divided, but his supporters have not come out to protest in the streets like the #Resistance has. He has goaded them ever more explicitly towards violence, but, luckily, as it turns out, the Proud Boys are a bunch of wussies who prefer bullying to actually doing anything and taking violent risks. So, that ain’t working for him.

Victimhood

He is peddling conspiracy theories on Twitter and to all who will listen about how the election has been some how stolen. So far all it’s gotten him is the untrue Twitter filter, court cases dismissed by judges, and a legal team press conference at the Four Seasons Landscaping company between a sex paraphernalia shop and a crematorium in Philadelphia. So, the victim card ain’t playing big dividends, especially with those who count, his radically unqualified Repube judges.

Rage, Revenge, and Vindictiveness

That leaves us with rage, revenge, and vindictiveness. The old stand by. The narcissistic wound causes emotional decompensation, the familiar toddler meltdown that we’ve grown accustom to seeing from the Ol’ Pussy Grabber, or being out of control. The Ol’ Pussy Grabber starts out ceding any control due to his executive dysfunction, but when the narcissistic wound is activated there is no control.

If you thought his impulsive angry sadistic behaviors were bad in the past, you ain’t seen nothing yet because nothing in the past four years compares to the severity of losing the election. The closest we came was impeachment. and we saw what that wrought: solicitation of Ukraine’s government in framing Biden and trumping up investigations into the investigators, i.e. the Mueller probe and specific FBI agents.

Even thought both resulted in zilch-o, they were both highly destructive acts. The FBI, DoJ, and the intelligence community have both been significantly damaged because of them. Our ability to protect our country from malign foreign influence has been degraded and we’ve suffered for it even if we don’t know exactly how yet.

All of his darkest most destructive actions like caging children, separating them from their parents, and being unable to rejoin them, his inaction on #COVID19, the tariffs, or environmental degradation have all been done to prove his power and brilliance to himself.

His superspreader campaign events have fed his ego while wrecking his vengeance on the suckers and losers who support him but leaving him lagging in the polls. An AP analysis of the #COVID19 surge found that 93% of the 376 counties with highest per capita cases voted for the Ol’ Pussy Grabber. If he was willing to kill his supporters, literally, for not giving him polling leads, what will he be willing to do to them and the rest of us for having lost the election?

What Might He Do?

The Ol’ Pussy Grabber’s response so far has been to rage tweet in ALL CAPS, address the nation with fact-free claims of voter fraud and malfeasance, and making hysterical demands for magical legal solutions to his electoral problems and threatening to replace his lawyers when they don’t materialize.

So what might he do? His efforts to have the Biden’s investigated on fabricated charges of doing something illegal in Ukraine and China have fizzled in a pool of Giuliani drool. This response is analogous to the post-impeachment Ukraine ploy. He’s urged criminal investigations of elections officials by the DoJ a la his investigation of the investigators. It’s turned out about as well, especially since Bill Barr-the-Door has been AWOL of late. The other ways he has harmed the country have been through incompetence and neglect — #COVID19 and having no plan to return children to their parents, for example.

What do these efforts at revenge and retribution have in common? They are legally based, other people do most of the dirty work, and they are not physical. He is a coward and will not risk injury or pain. If they go wrong, he can blame other people as we’ve seen him do numerous times.

When things go awry, it constitutes a narcissistic wound. He pre-copes with it by setting up others to take the fall like he did with the state governors for #COVID19, for example, and all the claims not to know key people in scandals.

You’re likely to see the same here. He’s likely to slink away to Mar-a-Lago to scheme believing he is on the cusp of victory and that an exception to the rules of succession will be made for him but otherwise he’ll quit pretending to president and waste his free time golfing, ranting on Twitter, calling into to increasingly obscure right-wing media outlets, and maybe having a superspreader event when he needs an adulation fix. The prospect of being drug out of the WH would be another narcissistic wound that he would prefer to avoid.

I think he will start the fade next week. I think, he travels between his resorts milking the government for the last amounts of money, he can, and just doesn’t ever go back to his day job. Not that he ever did much with it any way.

But, don’t let me hog all the prognosticating fun! Give us your thoughts and predictions in the comments!

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Image Attribution

“President Trump Departs for Ohio” by The White House is marked with CC PDM 1.0