A Narcissist Faces Indictment

Short Writes, Short Reads

I used to write about Trump’s narcissism and how it all but predetermined how he would act in a given situation. I haven’t been in that zone much since he left office. However, since a few people have asked me how I thought he would handle being arraigned tomorrow and I’m poised to be in transit most of the day, thought I jot off a quick Short Write, Short Read on the topic.

I apologize in advance if this proves to be less than stellar. I’m dead tired today. A coffee-proof exhausted. I think it’s a post-stress hangover… coupled with being harried over having five trillion things to do before heading out with my son tomorrow.

With that disclaimer issued, let’s gooooo!

As I’ve repeated ad nauseum to the point of probably being annoying, Trump is a simple machine. All narcissists are. They have incredibly uncomplicated wiring which utterly compels them to serve only two related masters without the ability to do otherwise even if they wanted to – which they do not.

If a healthy person is a computer capable of complex decision-making, a narcissist is like a Chuck E. Cheese animatronic bear hardwired to perform only the same dumb songs over and over and over while you desperately wish your kid’s friend’s birthday party would just mercifully end already.

Narcissists are driven by two extremely simply impulses:

1)      Avoid shame – not avoid feeling ashamed themselves. Avoid being seen by others as shameful. A puppy doesn’t know it isn’t supposed to chew up a pillow. It sure as hell knows when you are upset with it after having done so though. Narcissists aren’t dissimilar. They live their lives desperately afraid others will see them as unworthy of esteem; which brings us to Number 2

2)      Earn admiration – Be seen by others as special, important, powerful, smart, accomplished, strong, or anything else that comports to being worthy of other’s esteem.

At heart, narcissists are deeply broken people with no internal life. They are porcelain eggs.

Inside a healthy person’s shell is a largely stable self-esteem that may be influenced by external feedback and experience but isn’t entirely vulnerable to every breeze of approval or disapproval.

A narcissist literally has nothing inside at all. They have no actual internal sense of worth or self-esteem. As a result, they spend their lives trying to fill up their emptiness to avoid having to face their super-deeply sublimated self-loathing. They are buckets with no bottom who are doomed to spend all of their lives trying to pour in other people’s admiration to fix their own emptiness.

Of those two driving impulses, shame avoidance is by far the more powerful. A narcissist will go absolutely bonkers when faced with the prospect of being publicly shamed, embarrassed, humiliated, or made to look unworthy of admiration.

Narcissists, on some deep level, know that their entire persona is an act. They know it’s a shell around a bubbling cauldron of nuclear waste that is unbearably painful when allowed to surface. Thus, they will do absolutely anything to keep up that façade. When it is threatened, they become frantic. When they can’t stop it from being fractured, they become enraged.

They aren’t strong, resilient, strategic, or clever. They are crude, simple, compulsive, and fragile. At best, they are practiced at manipulation… but even their manipulations are formulaic and simple.

A narcissist’s two biggest tools in trying to protect their fragile porcelain shell from cracking are:

1)      Enmeshing people in a dependent, worshipful loyalty. The term for those kinds of people is ‘flying monkeys’ (a la the Wicked Witch’s evil little servants in the Wizard of Oz). Michael Cohen was a flying monkey until he wasn’t. So were most of the people in Trump’s inner circle while in office.

2)      Controlling the flow of information. You can’t be “found out” if people only see what you want them to see.

You obviously can’t control the entire information sphere when president and have even less control when just a public figure. When Trump was in the White House, his flying monkeys kept him on planet earth by making him feel like he could. They filtered what he was allowed to see and hear so that he was only exposed to what he wanted other people to see and hear. They played the player.

Now, though, his flying monkeys are way more bargain bin. Instead of the high-rent mercenaries like Kellyann Conway (herself a narcissist) he has the randos and hangers on loitering around Mar a Lago. He is neither surrounded by the same caliber of servile protectors who will go out and fight for him nor is he being fed the same volume and quality of carefully curated narcissistic fuel.

And while he can get his message out through the same ol’ media outlets, he doesn’t have the same sway and power he did as president.

So how does all of that impact how will likely handle indictment, arraignment, and a criminal trial?

Well, there are some wild cards but we can probably safely map out the general shape of his behavior for at least the near future.

A Desperate Attempt to Portray Himself as a Heroic Victim

Narcissists love little more than painting themselves as the perfect combo of their two drives: avoid shame, earn admiration

They absolutely loveeeeee to posture like they are both undeserving of how they are being treated and heroic and courageous for rising above it.

You can safely bet your mortgage Trump will stage some big, stupid, contrived, asinine spectacle after his arraignment tomorrow to insist he is actually even MORE SPECIAL now that he is bravely battling bad people doing bad things.

Dude will all but build himself a statue and reveal it at a press conference.

At the end of the day, Trump doesn’t need to actually “win” per se. He doesn’t need to conclusively prevail. He just needs to kick up enough smoke to make the public judgment not stick to him cleanly and fully. He needs plausible denial.

The above is a route to maintaining what for him will be sufficient plausible denial for the time being. Until there is a trial looming and a potential judgment up ahead that he can’t escape, he’ll flog this heroic victim thing to absolute death… and to really amp up the heroic side of that, he will become increasingly unhinged in his ranting about the “bad people” who are doing all of these bad things to him.

You can safely bet your car on Trump straying into absolutely batshit allegations about DA Bragg and anyone else involved in his prosecution within pretty damn short order. The worse he claims those people are, the more of a victim he is and therefore the more heroic he is for “fighting”.

The problem there is that the only people who are really going to buy all of that stupid bullshit are the ones who already eat up his dumb nonsense by the shovelful. The squishy layer out of people who would absolutely vote for him but aren’t nutbag MAGAs just won’t bite on the full craziness… and that will show up in polls showing a majority are fine with his prosecution… and that too will enrage Trump.

The thing that is likely to make him pop a cork in the near term though has to do with his former flying monkeys.

As we now know, a variety of people from his past or present inner circle were called to testify before the NY grand jury. Those subpoenas would have required some strong predication. Ya don’t get to just call people and fish for something you can use. You have to have a pretty strong basis for believing they have information relevant to what you already know. And if you’re the person subpoenaed, you have to at least consider that whatever you are being asked about may already be provably known to prosecutors.

That’s the kind of setup that leads people who happily lie in public to now tell the truth in private.

It seems to me, we are nearly certain to learn that some members of Trump’s inner circle testified to things that undermine his two driving compulsions and damage his façade. There will be leaks or revelations that 1) embarrass him; 2) make him look low and contemptible; and 3) pierce the illusion he was even worthy of past esteem.

Those alone would be deeply wounding to him. He would fly into a rage at just those things.

The narcissistic injury is far worse when they come from people in his inner circle though. To a narcissist, it sends them into this dizzy, destabilizing spiral as they realize the people they thought they had totally hypnotized and snowed actually saw through him the whole time… and that pulls the rug right out from under their feet since the ability to hypnotize and snow people is literally the foundation of their entire defense against their narcissistic fragility.

Not sure when that kind of thing will hit but having now bet your house and car on the predictions above, maybe wager a kidney (not both… you need one) on Trump going absolutely Loco McNuts when news leaks about someone or multiple someones in his inner circle selling him out.

When that happens, there won’t be enough Fantastik in all of Florida to de-ketchup the walls of Mar a Lago.

Near-term though – today, tomorrow… look for an absurdly cartoonish self-inflation of what a heroic victim he is. It will be ludicrous and asinine. Take some solace in the fact that the bigger the balloon, the bigger the pop when it is pierced.

And on that note, I am posting this without proofing and running off to pack. Apologies for errors.