Listen To This Story

There are many people who believe that Donald Trump is severely mentally ill, and you can certainly count us among their number. One of the many reasons we think so is that he embodies every symptom on this list of signs that somebody may be suffering from narcissistic personality disorder (seriously, click on the link and judge for yourself).

The president is the textbook example of this particular mental illness, and down the road, when they don’t have to worry about getting harassed or killed by Trump’s supporters, psychiatrists will write many such books about him. 

Perhaps never before in history has there been a case in which a person has lived their mental illness so publicly and provided as much evidence for it.

In fact, since the president, like other narcissists, wants to be eternalized, we believe it would be fitting if the most severe cases of narcissistic personality disorder would one day be known as Trump Syndrome. 

But we digress. 

There is another reason why we are absolutely certain of this diagnosis: The people Trump surrounds himself with, i.e., the people who know him best (if that’s even possible in the case of such an extreme case of malignant narcissism) are also convinced that he is mentally ill.

Granted, they don’t come out and say so, but the way they treat him shows that they are quite aware of his disorder.

Case in point is the press conference Pete Hegseth held on Thursday regarding the recent US military strike on Iran. 

A normal Secretary of Defense would have lauded a normal president for making a tough call and showing real leadership while reserving most of their praise for the men and women in uniform who carried out this mission. 

Not Hegseth, who realized (consciously or subconsciously) that this would not suffice to mollify his mentally ill boss. 

Instead, he went to absurd and comically hyperbolic lengths to make the president feel good. 

“President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history,” Hegseth said while somehow maintaining a straight face. “And it was a resounding success resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.” 

That’s almost as crazy as Trump himself. 

Let’s break it down. 

First of all, the president didn’t “direct” the operation; he authorized it. It’s not as though he was drawing up the plans himself. 

More importantly, of course, flying a mission over a country whose air defenses have been depleted is not the same as, for example, Japan hiding six aircraft carriers and launching a surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor, or the Allies using thousands of ships to land 133,000 troops in  Normandy on D-Day after having convinced the Nazis that the invasion would take place a couple hundred miles to the east.

Claiming otherwise is sheer lunacy. 

But Trump will like it, which is the point. 

And this is just one example (although a pretty extreme one). 

While they wouldn’t admit it, everybody in Trump’s inner circle, or anybody who wants him to do something, knows that it’s not enough to flatter him as they would a sane person.

They need to go way over the top, which is why so many cabinet officials or other Republicans are calling him the greatest president of all time, want to put him on money and/or Mount Rushmore, or heap other undeserved accolades upon him. 

Most of them don’t believe those things, but they know he is mentally ill and cater to his narcissistic personality disorder. 

It’s like a family hiding the booze when an alcoholic relative comes over… just the opposite. 

Is it healthy for them to keep feeding Trump’s ego (which is the only part of him actually worthy of superlatives)? Of course not.

But it is part of the MAGA cult dynamic, and saying nice things about the president is the best way to stay in his good graces (apart from lining his pockets somehow), so this is not going to stop. 

However, it is important for the American people to realize what’s going on here. 

So, the next time somebody calls him the “greatest this or that,” you need to understand that this is just another case of that person having correctly diagnosed Trump with narcissistic personality disorder and deciding to cater to his mental illness.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.