The Trump Decoder
Women who have been abused by malignant narcissists are uniquely equipped to predict his behavior. Let me be your guide.
You should pack a bag,” he said. “Keep it in the trunk of your car, hidden from *Karl. Make secret copies of your keys. Are you listening to me, Rachel? You are living with a sociopath. This is serious.”
I was on the phone with our usually impartial couple’s therapist — the fourth that Karl and I had worked with in three years of marriage. Our short relationship was a cyclone of chaos, which had started the moment I became pregnant with our daughter in our first year together. Every day was a scramble to cope with Karl’s volatile outbursts while I cared for a toddler.
The doctor proceeded to tick off the threats to my safety. I heard him say that Karl was a malignant narcissist who could only see me as a plaything or an object of abuse, and that Karl couldn’t empathize with me or anyone. It was a powerful warning, but I was more stunned than able to process it. His depiction of my husband sounded foreign and overblown. I filed the advice and wound up staying another three years.
The biggest mistake of my life.
Malignant narcissists are a toxic stew of four ingredients: narcissism, paranoia, sociopathy (nonstop lying, no moral compass, no concern for the law or the rights of others), and, most ominously, sadism. They have been called human monsters, and I’ve read that if you remain in a relationship with one, you will leave it sick or dead and broke. I am writing these words with a scarf tied around my head to shield my wonky right eye from computer glare. That is necessary because of the radiation damage I sustained in three knockdown battles with cancer, the first of which made an appearance as I was fleeing my marriage in my thirties. One thing I learned in the ensuing decade, as I fought for my life and for custody of my daughter, while losing my home, career, and savings was this: I can smell a narcissist predator a mile away and can almost always guess what he’s up to.
Most abuse survivors can. When Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I spent a lot of time commiserating with women who, like me, were traumatized to see a clone of their ex-husbands closing in on the Oval Office. Half the country may have understood that Trump was a terrible candidate, but only those who had experienced a malignant narcissist knew what hell he would bring. Even now, few people are truly aware of the danger to come. It has been excruciating to watch journalists continue to ignore the psychologists, who keep trying to tell them that Trump’s malignant narcissism explains all his supposedly “inexplicable” behavior.
I had hoped that would change in July, with the release of Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. She described how her uncle was raised to see only two options in life: either victimize others, like his sociopathic father, or be prey. This type of motherboard programming is how predators are made, and she warned us that Donald would do absolutely anything to keep from being the humiliated victim. Worse, his triggers for humiliation extended far beyond those of a normal person. “He’s utterly incapable of leading this country,” she told George Stephanopoulos on ABC Live. “And it’s dangerous to allow him to do so.”
Unfortunately, reporters seized on whether Trump cheated on his SATs a lifetime ago, but they didn’t grasp the book’s message or change how they covered him. The consensus was that his niece had simply confirmed what everyone knew: the president is self-absorbed, he’s a liar, he’s cruel, and he’s spiteful. All true — and all missing the point.
I get it. Ordinary people, journalists included, can’t comprehend the malevolence of a malignant narcissist unless they’ve lived with one. You may think that you know who Trump is and what he’s capable of doing, but I promise, you do not. Our brains aren’t wired that way. We analyze situations from a baseline of normalcy without realizing. That’s why, despite four years of his gaslighting and sadistic cruelty, people still have clung to the idea that he is just too stupid to grasp the severity of COVID-19 or too egotistical to believe his medical experts.
But I see something even darker than what was revealed in the Bob Woodward tapes. A narcissist abuser usually tries to weaken and isolate his victim until she is trapped. Now that millions of Americans are sick or out of work, and we’re all socially distanced, scared, and unwelcome in most of the world, I suspect that Trump is finding the virus useful, as he pushes schools to re-open and undoubtedly spread it. We need to accept that someone this severely disordered will do the unthinkable to stay in control — including burning down the country. Or enabling a plague.
John Gartner is a psychologist who spent decades lecturing about personality disorders at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. He is also the founder of Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who are speaking out about the president’s pathologies. As he told Salon in July, “Donald Trump is not just incompetent. He’s not just delusional. He is not just narcissistic and doesn’t care about others. Donald Trump’s behavior with the coronavirus pandemic is intentional. He is malevolent. He is a first-degree mass murderer. This is a plan.”
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Gartner isn’t alone in this opinion. After the Republican National Convention, where Trump spoke to a maskless crowd sitting shoulder to shoulder, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tweeted “His plan is to kill people. Let’s just say it.”
If all this strikes you as paranoid, conspiratorial, or just crazy… well, congratulations, you now understand why women in abusive relationships stay until it’s too late. Am I imagining this? we ask ourselves. He can’t be intentionally trying to hurt me.
This is your marriage counselor calling. We need to talk.
Karl and I were still living together the night I was diagnosed with cancer. I had already told him that I wanted a divorce, so when I collapsed on the floor with debilitating pain in my side, he just stood over me smirking. Only my mother’s threats on the phone got him to drive me to the hospital, where a scan showed a ruptured ovarian tumor. By then I had been hemorrhaging internally for many hours. Doctors jammed a syringe of blood into my neck while they raced me to surgery. As I twisted in pain and sheer terror, watching the ceiling fly by, Karl smelled opportunity. He sprinted alongside the gurney, leaned in, and hissed in my ear, “This is all meant to be. This is because you aren’t meant to leave me.”
Most women who are murdered by their domestic partners are killed when they are leaving. Karl certainly tried. Although I was the one who wanted a divorce, he served me with papers from his ferocious attorney while I was still bedridden, and he drained our joint account so that I had no way to hire my own lawyer or feed our terrified five-year-old. A few weeks after a follow-up surgery, I dragged myself to court as summoned and was pushed into a “bifurcation” (I had to google), which ended our marriage without settlement, alimony, or child support. The “silver lining” was that Karl left me poor enough to immediately qualify for Medi-Cal. When he realized that I’d received health insurance, he threatened to deposit money into our account — which I needed his approval to close — and then report me to get my insurance terminated. At the same time, he stopped paying the mortgage on the house that we’d bought together. He badgered me to surrender it to him and was willing to let it go rather than share. His harassment was so relentless that I found myself on the phone pleading with banks and advocacy groups while on an examination table with my feet up in stirrups. But no one could really help. We wound up losing our lovely canyon home above downtown Los Angeles.
Malignant narcissists have an insatiable need to dominate and control. They must maintain an upper hand and view any compromise as defeat. If you upstage, contradict, or expose them in any way, however unintentionally, they will exact revenge. I see my ex-husband in Trump when he annihilates a hero like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman for telling the truth under subpoena instead of catering to Trump’s needs. It wasn’t bad enough to have guards escort the Purple Heart recipient out of his job at the National Security Council, Trump also needed to quash his promotion to Army colonel, force him into early retirement, and ruin the career of his twin brother.
His vengeance is without limit, just as my husband’s was, since there’s no humanity to get in the way. After the California wildfires two years ago — the worst on record in my state — Trump allegedly tried to cut off aid to people whose homes had burned to rubble, because Californians hadn’t voted for him. He played the same game with the ventilators and surgical masks that he withheld from blue states drowning in COVID cases. I am all too familiar with this message: agree with me, worship me, do not challenge me, or I will destroy you.
“One of the kind of monstrous things about being a psychopath is that there’s enjoyment at being vindictive, at destroying those who you think are your enemies — and if you’re also paranoid as [Trump] is, then almost everybody is your enemy, unless the person is worshipping you,” said Lance Dodes, retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. Ask yourself what normal president would want the Department of Homeland Security to “sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human flesh.” Trump was so oblivious to the horror of what he proposed that he simply wanted to know “How much would that cost us?” according to a Washington Post op-ed by former DHS chief of staff, Miles Taylor.
Any situation that affords him either revenge or admiration is a source of “narcissistic supply.” Supply is basically attention, and narcissists need it like mosquitoes need blood. It substitutes for the self-worth that they didn’t develop as children in dysfunctional families. While Trump clearly thrives on his rallies, he also gets lots of supply from watching us struggle to make sense of the lies, contradictions, and shifting ground. At the RNC, his aides told The New York Times, he enjoyed the outrage that he provoked by giving his acceptance speech on the White House lawn. He particularly loved that no one could stop him from flouting the law. Between that, his adoring fans, and sycophants from Congress and his Cabinet, the night was a jackpot of supply.
It’s no accident that every day brings a new assault. Goodbye protections for our air, water, wildlife, health insurance, social services — not all at once, but in a steady drip to demand our constant attention and overwhelm us, which brings him a daily buzz. In October, Trump will finalize a rule to make Social Security Disability more difficult to get and keep, just as Reagan did early in his first term. Congress reversed that mistake in 1984, after hundreds of thousands of deserving recipients lost their benefits, and it is still considered one of the worst policies of the Reagan Administration. There is no other reason to bring it back except cruelty, says a senator who is fighting it.
I endured similarly relentless, incremental assaults from Karl before I finally connected the dots in a support group for abuse victims. The other women’s stories were shockingly similar to mine, as if our husbands had taken a Master Class together. That’s when I learned that malignant narcissists are very predictable, once you are alert to the patterns. And that’s why I can say without hesitation that we are entering our country’s most dangerous moment — when Trump could suffer his ultimate narcissistic injury.
That’s an actual psychological term, which describes the moments when the mask slips and a narcissist’s shameful core is exposed to the world. It is followed by swift and typically brutal retaliation. You witnessed both in real time, with Trump’s unhinged tweeting during Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. Hearing the target of his obsession describe him as a loser was probably the worst injury in a summer loaded with them — from dismal poll results to humiliating turnout at his rallies to two widely lampooned interviews. Trump’s charade as the world’s most successful and powerful businessman is poised to explode, both at the hands of voters and of the Manhattan district attorney, who could send him to prison for fraud. “On a deep level, he understands that he is not at all the person he claims to be or pretends to be,” Mary Trump said in a video conversation with forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee. “The danger inherent in being faced with his inadequacies is astronomical.”
With all that looming, coronavirus has taken away his beloved rallies. That leaves him with only the most alarming options for self-soothing — displays of power and abuse. If you consider that the brutal, unprovoked attack on protestors in Lafayette Square came right after being shamed for hiding in the White House bunker, you will understand why the hits are coming at us faster now that he feels besieged. On September 1st he flew to Kenosha to stir up trouble. On the 3rd he told the Department of Justice to draw up a list of “anarchist” cities and promised to cut off funding to them. The point isn’t whether he can legally do that or not; it is excellent supply just to watch us twist with anxiety.
Trump knows no greater shame than showing what he considers weakness. As we learned from his niece, displays of kindness and sensitivity were ridiculed in his family, which led him to worship tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey. My guess is that many of Trump’s most rabid supporters have had their own issues with vulnerability. It would explain why their favorite insults are words like “triggered” or “snowflake,” and also why they melt down at the sight of masks. Wearing one is literally like tattooing on your nose “I am afraid.”
Speaking of Trump’s minions, every disordered narcissist has them. They are popularly known as flying monkeys, named after the ones in The Wizard of Oz who did the bidding of the wicked witch. Flying monkeys typically mount an assault on whoever the narcissist has named as his tormentor. In my own case, Karl reconnected with his estranged family and concocted a narrative about me (she was unfaithful, she kicked me out of our home, she brainwashed our daughter). The opportunity to re-establish bonds over a common enemy was irresistible to them, and they jumped in with gusto, finding his attorneys and researching ways for him to avoid alimony. My sister-in-law, who had always been close to me, texted shortly after my diagnosis to say that they would soon have custody of my daughter, “when you are dead.”
COVID-19 has raised the stakes in this dynamic. On the surface, his followers are soldiers in his culture war, raging against science and snowflakes. But on a deeper level, Trump has turned them into martyrs by herding them together and discouraging masks. According to psychologist Gartner, Trump’s rallies are now a loyalty test to see if his followers would knowingly harm themselves for him. Their willingness to do so is a delicious pleasure. If this strains belief, I can tell you that Karl softly encouraged me on more than one occasion to consider suicide when I was in tears from his aggression, and I now understand that it would have been the ultimate testament to his power.
“The idea that [you] would lead your own followers to their deaths is not unusual in the broader context of history,” Gartner told Salon. “This is how malignant narcissists work…. Of course, the American news media is unable to accept such a reality, that there are leaders who would actively hurt their own followers and others.”
Maybe you aren’t ready to believe the worst either. But if nothing else, I hope you will hear me about this: breaking up with Trump will be worse than anything you may have envisioned. Just because you are on to his manipulation of the Postal Service, or because you take seriously his threats to not accept the results, don’t imagine that any of us are prepared for the chaos he will unleash. The prevalent belief seems to be that if we turn out in droves to vote, if we protest the removal of mailboxes and trucks and sorting machines, if we get people to vote early, justice will prevail. This is very concerning to me, as I have seen the same mistake countless times in support groups. An abuse victim steels herself for the horrible break-up scene, but trusts that it will get sorted out in court. That simply does not happen. Not ever. Dealing with a narcissist is like looking both ways before crossing the street, and getting hit by an airplane. Of course we should turn out in massive numbers. We should do everything we can — short of relying solely on the elections to save us. In my opinion, there is zero chance that Trump is going down without a knockdown fight of epic proportions.
The positive news is that we have some important advantages over him. Like every narcissist, he telegraphs his intentions. If you want to know what Trump is up to, don’t let yourself get rattled by his irrational accusations and paranoid rants. Instead, pay close attention; his projections are a road map to what he is thinking and planning.
I am focused on a recent one. Until March, Trump had been full of compliments for Xi Jinping, especially about China’s “professional” handling of coronavirus and the great relationship between the two of them. Politico even compiled a list of fifteen of his fawning tweets, speeches, and interviews from January to March. And then in April, Trump did an about-face. Xi was the enemy and Joe Biden was “weak on China.”
I didn’t start to pay attention until Trump suggested that it might be Xi, not Putin, who was meddling in our elections. He whined a couple of times to reporters that they never asked about China in connection with election tampering, only Russia, Russia, Russia. And on cue, last month an intelligence report materialized naming three countries that had a stake in our elections: China, Russia, and Iran. Although the report listed specific ways that Russia was actively working to undermine Biden and promote Trump, China was mentioned first and got a third more commentary. Odd, because there was no suggestion that China was doing anything at all, except hoping that Trump would lose.
Here’s why all of this matters. Trump has hinted in the past few months that he has total authority and more power than anyone knows. When he first slipped that notion by us at a COVID briefing, reporters corrected him and shook their heads at his ignorance. I felt a wave of nausea, sensing it was a narcissistic telegraph of something in the works. And sure enough, it turns out that aside from his power to declare a national emergency, and perhaps to shut down all wire communications, there is an even more terrifying power at his disposal. Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs, are secret even from Congress and basically give him the ability to suspend the Constitution.
Yes, you read that right. Elizabeth Goitein has been researching them at the Brennan Center for Justice, and the wall of secrecy surrounding PEADs has prevented her from even determining whether there are limits to this power, although it does appear that they need to be reviewed by the Justice Department (hardly a comfort anymore). All we know about PEADs comes from the few times they have been mentioned in other documents that were later declassified. Those few mentions say enough: they have sanctioned clearly unconstitutional things like martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the detention of people not suspected of any crime, as Goitein said on CBS Sunday Morning in August.
Trump has already ranted about fraud, so it’s not much of a stretch to imagine him invoking emergency powers because China has supposedly infiltrated our voting process. Could it even happen before the elections? None of the reassuring articles that I see are factoring in PEADs. The Constitution doesn’t really help us if Trump is able to suspend its protections. And then there’s the matter of the federal troops that he has scattered around. Narcissists often do a toe-dip of the terror to come, to gauge reaction before the real attack. It wouldn’t surprise me if their real purpose is to be in position should he want to impose martial law.
Our power lies in outing him. As we say in support groups, an educated victim is an abuser’s worst nightmare. Narcissists hate to have the curtains pulled back — it robs them of control, and forecasting their intentions can disarm them. While that move could be fatal for a solitary victim, we have numbers on our side and should use any tool it takes to extract ourselves, regardless of the rage it will provoke. Above all, we need to stop trying to reason with the unreasonable. This isn’t just a bad president; he is deranged and will destroy us. The only way to win with a narcissist is not to play at all.
*not his real name
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