“It needs to be completely no shock that that is the place we’re,” Jennifer Chatman, a professor of administration on the Haas College of Enterprise at Berkeley who has written extensively about narcissistic leaders, informed me. “It’s by no means a reasonably transition once they should go.” They’re too entitled. They’re too within the behavior of sowing mistrust. They’ve disdain for guidelines — which the truth is made them horrible leaders within the first place, liable to dishonest and stealing and grift. “They depart their organizations in horrible form, each from a structural and cultural standpoint.” As Trump has left the Republican Get together. And the nation at massive.
Charles O’Reilly, a administration professor at Stanford and a frequent collaborator with Chatman, jogged my memory that Adam Neumann, the disgraced, extravagantly grandiose former C.E.O. of WeWork — his ambitions included turning into the world’s first trillionaire and dwelling eternally — introduced an I.P.O. prospectus that was patently bonkers in a last-ditch effort to avoid wasting his firm. It sounded awfully harking back to Trump’s deluded lawsuits. O’Reilly added that the majority boards fail to cease such leaders, swooping in solely when the corporate is falling aside, as a result of they’ve too many incentives (cash, energy) to see them succeed. It sounded an terrible lot like Congress. And each former White Home official who’s lastly talking up.
You understand the place else yow will discover letter-perfect predictions of the president’s present conduct? Self-help books devoted to serving to folks break up with the rotten narcissists of their lives. Severely. I began burrowing into them in the previous few days, extra on a daffy hunch than the rest, and it turned out I might principally open any web page — and I imply any web page — and discover one thing related to the president’s present conduct: That narcissists lurch between the function of sufferer and tormentor; that they’re minor Shivas, destroyers of worlds; that they howl on and on about betrayal.
However it was this frequent thread that stood out: Pathological narcissists make a degree of claiming that their former companions would have been — and can be as soon as once more — nothing with out them.
It rhymed with one thing a White Home official lately mentioned Trump was spewing about Pence: “All day, it was a theme of, ‘I made this man, I saved him from a political demise, and right here he stabbed me within the again.’”
I don’t by any means want to recommend that Trump’s disordered persona is the important thing to understanding his presidency. It’s, in some methods, virtually tedious, precisely what makes him boring and uncomplicated, as shallow as a spoon.
However I additionally assume it’s unattainable to know Trump’s conduct with out taking a look at him by way of the prism of his pathologies, which at this second are threatening lives. He could have made a robotic assertion on Thursday that condemned Wednesday’s violence and implicitly conceded the election. It’s too late. Trump stays a home safety threat, and he’s made us a goal for our enemies. They know {that a} fragile, unbalanced man is on the helm, his nerves as flamable as dry leaves. He’s determined, and he’s offended, and he’s baitable. It makes us unsafe. We have to get him out.
You needn’t be a very astute observer of the Trump presidency to know that his incendiary, hateful insurance policies and rhetoric and mirthful disregard for the regulation would at some point finish in violence. However you needn’t be a very astute observer of character, both, to see {that a} man who feels no empathy, exploits ruthlessly, lies reflexively, seeks success at any value and lives in terror of seeing it vanish would by no means go quietly.
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