To expand on my calling Trump a Psychopath, it is a layered and complex issue to calling a public figure who displays all of the checks on the Psychopathic inventory as a Psychopath without having the qualification to make diagnosis and without having seen him in private outside the public image that is Trump.
In a treatment setting you get to know the person rather than the public image, which is why there is this proviso that you cannot diagnose people over the internet or the Telly based off the image they project in media.
However, Psychopathy was my specialty and Forensic Psychopathy (Psychopaths who commit crimes) paid my wages for decades.
That aside, Donald Trump was so overt in his psychopathic traits that twenty six preeminent American Psychiatrists broke the rule and diagnosed him as a Psychopath. This includes members who were forensic Psychiatrist who specialize in serial killers and the like and are heavy weights in the mental health industry. Bear in mind these people live by a dogma that say's they have a responsibility to not stigmatize people suffering from the disorder. So it was unprecedented for mental health professionals who protect the identity and privacy of people who cut off women's heads and put them in the oven to speak out about Trumps disorder.
- Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm
- Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth
- Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
- Item 4: Pathological lying
- Item 5: Conning/manipulative[12]
- Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt
- Item 7: Shallow affect
- Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy
- Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle
- Item 10: Poor behavioral controls
- Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior
- Item 12: Early behavior problems
- Item 13: Lack of realistic, long-term goals
- Item 14: Impulsivity
- Item 15: Irresponsibility
- Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
- Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships
- Item 18: Juvenile delinquency
- Item 19: Revocation of conditional release
- Item 20: Criminal versatility
As you can see from Robert Hares Psychopathic Inventory Trump scores in the 90 percentile which means he is an A grade Psychopath, not a garden variety psychopath, Trump displays the signs of the disorder on a continuum as having its most severe rating.
Robert Hare is the Canadian Forensic Psychiatrist (Forensic just means criminal, in the fashion of Mind Hunter, he is a profiler of the highest caliber and the greatest shrink on Psycopaths in the world).
Trumps own niece who is a registered Psychologist and well placed to rate her uncle has declared he is an extreme psychopath.
Given my background of working with murderers, cannibals, Gang leaders, serial rapists etc, when Trump came along I just switched off because he was a boring insect to me a transparent psychopath who was too much like watching work. My weakness was that I assumed the world would see through him and be repulsed by his mental condition.
Trump is evil and I say that from a mental health perspective. In Mental health the great debate has always been nature vs nurture, genes versus upbringing, are bad people born mad or created that way.
On one side you had mental health liberal thinkers who believed in nurture, that they were born normal and created, on the other side you had experts who argued that evil is in the dna and is born not made.
The interesting thing after centuries of mental health is that this argument in the modern era was split fifty fifty between experts.
Robert Hare the God father of Psychopathy argued Psychopaths are born evil and upbringing can either make them worse (to the point of becoming women hating serial killers) or upbringing can sooth them to maybe only becoming lying and cheating types who do well in spheres like politics, used cars salesmen and law, and all the other conman professions where you need liars.
BTW the way the advent of technology, MIR scanning and other imaging techniques has since proved that Psychopaths like Trumps brains are different and therefore Robert Hare was right, Psychopaths are born and not made, they can only be made worse.
