I woke up today, and read the following headline. Donald Trump, Ivanka, Jared, and…Tucker Carlson…are in North Korea…shaking Kim Jong Un’s hand. Perhaps, like me, you have to reread that. The bewildering absurdity of it, on so many levels. Trump alone shaking Kim’s hand would have been one level of debasement. Trump and Ivanka, another. Trump, Ivanka, and Jared, a lower level still. But…Tucker Carlson? It’s like the world’s most hilarious satire. Except it’s not.

What are we to make of an American President debasing himself before the world’s last few genuine dictators? Whether it’s Putin or Kim, after all, Trump seems to love nothing more than scraping and bowing before a tyrant. But why does that disgust us so? Why is that so dangerous for a democracy? Let’s discuss it for a second — really delving into the tyrannical mind.

Here are the people that Trump thinks are enemies, of varying degrees. A free press is an “enemy of the people.” Refugees and migrants are “enemies of the state”, to be caged in camps, even if they’re babies. But that’s just the beginning. Canada, France, Germany — these countries are no longer our friends: they are something like our persecutors. Wait, what? Do you see what’s going on here?

The mindset of a wannabe dictator this way: paranoid delusional narcissism, which regresses to an infantile state. That means that it’s seeking the love it never had, but needed in childhood — and now it will destroy the whole universe around it to get it, or what element of it can be had, in the form of fear, power, and control.

Let’s really think about all that for a second.

Little babies, just because they are from a different country, have the power to wreck and destroy the United States — the most powerful country not just on earth, but in history. Even ancient Rome didn’t have the power to drone-bomb entire countries with impunity — but America does. Yet it’s little babies who are the frightening monsters.

This isn’t just paranoia — it’s an extreme paranoia, the outer limits of paranoia. There isn’t much that’s more harmless in the universe than a human child. Even a little snake can bite you, sometimes. But a human child is defenseless, harmless, and vulnerable. To believe that they are monsters — with the power to annihilate history’s most powerful armies and navies and air forces — is a form of paranoia so extreme it can only be called a delusion — something that’s completely detached from reality, which contradicts any semblance of empirical truth.

But babies are hardly the only monsters in the mind of the paranoid delusional narcissist, the aspiring dictator, the Trumps of the world. So are our former friends. Germany and France and Canada. How did they become parties to be treated with suspicion, hostility, mistrust, and rage, exactly? Because they persecuted us. Meet the second element of the tyrannical mind — the persecution fantasy. Little Mexican kids are monsters to be feared, with annihilating powers, unclean, diseased (hence, they’re not even given soap in the camps.) They don’t persecute us — they infect us.

But Canada and France and Germany persecute us. To the mind of the narcissist, this feeling, persecution, means this: they don’t recognize us for what we really are. The Best. Number One. The most special and wonderful people in all of history, period. Their worlds don’t center around us. They don’t adulate us and scrape before us. They don’t dote on us the way we need them to. They don’t give us what psychologists call our “narcissistic supply”, in other words: the feeling that we are all that matters to them.

Of course, this is not persecution. This is just a mature relationship. Two people are friends — but they are not codependent clinging things. But for the narcissist — unless you are bowing and scraping and adoring and admiring — you are persecuting them. Because in their mind, they are…

And that brings me to the third kind of delusion in the tyrannical mind, the mind of the Trumps of the world. Delusions of grandeur. We toss this word around casually sometimes, but it has a precise meaning. Often, people who are seriously mentally ill — schizophrenics — will imagine that they are from royal “bloodlines” or houses, or that they are the offspring of billionaires, or hold the secrets to eternal life and so on. These are delusions of grandeur. But they are not the only kind.

Malignant narcissists — the personality type of every tyrant you will ever meet, or ever has been, from Trump to Stalin — all share these delusions of grandeur, too. They believe that they have a destiny, and it is not just a grand one, but a special, singular, often divine one. They are going to be all powerful, omnipotent. They are going to be the most feared and respected. They will be the strongest and most famous. And so on. A thousand year Reich!

Why do we make fun of the tacky taste of aspiring tyrants, or even real ones, whether Gadhafi or Trump? Why do they all share that tacky taste, anyways — cheap furniture, gilded to look expensive, amazingly gauche decor, fake gold everywhere, maybe even in the hair, bizarre costumes and uniforms, strangely twisted and contorted faces? It’s not a coincidence — it’s a giveaway of extreme delusions of grandeur.

Narcissists, aspiring tyrants, believe that they are something like kings and emperors. Only right that they should live surrounded in gold and marble. Unfortunately they’re not usually educated or tasteful enough to know the real thing from the cheap imitation, which is why we end up laughing at them. But the delusion is the point. It’s the root of the tyrannical mindset.

You can see the delusions of grandeur in a Trump everywhere. Doesn’t he have the God-given right to take his daughter to the G20 summit? So there are Merkel and Lagarde and Macron…who don’t know whether to be amused, horrified, or just plain bewildered…that Ivanka’s popped up out of nowhere, casually talking to them like a (clueless) head of state. Then there was Megan Rapinoe, the soccer star, who turned down an invitation to the White House, only to be shouted at: she was “disrespectful.” Caesar would have been proud.

Now that we really understand the tyrannical mind, let me come back to the question. Why is it so weirdly, unnervingly disgusting when an American President scrapes and bows before tyrants, seeking their approval and validation, just like a feeble little child? For exactly that reason.

It’s not just that norms are shattered and whatnot. The American establishment has always loved a dictator. Pinochet, Saddam, Gadhafi — America created all these monsters. Why? To prop up capitalism, and repel “socialism.” All these countries would have simply been gentle social democracies by now, without American intelligence agencies plotting coups, and American guns and bombs terrorizing those people. Yes, really.

The American establishment has always loved it a good dictator — as long as that dictator is their puppet. As long as he will terrorize the people they think don’t matter. So what if a few thousand Chileans or Argentinians or Iraqis die? Those dirty, filthy people — do they really matter, anyways? If the price of doing business, of keeping the capitalist machine fed with oil, labour, raw materials, is a few thousand lives that don’t matter anyways — then let’s get to work propping up these dictators. Quick, call the CIA!

The difference here, though, is that this relationship has been turned on its head. It’s not the dictator who’s the puppet this time around. It’s the American. The President, in fact. The way that Trump looks at Kim is like a lost child meeting a father figure, finally. With adoration, adulation, respect, genuine warmth. All the ways he doesn’t look at democratically elected heads of state. When he smiles at Kim, he means it.

Trump is seeking the validation and respect and approval of dictators, over and over again, whether Putin or Kim. He needs it — not just for political reasons. But because that is what a malignant narcissist is. A boy who was never loved by a cold, distant, demanding, authoritarian father. And the tragedy is that he is simply repeating that pattern now, unconsciously — unable to stop it. He is seeking out the most vicious and brutal authoritarians he can — and seeking their approval, in the most childlike of ways. When he smiles at Kim, or laughs with Putin, it’s not like two adults do. It’s the smile and laugh of a child hoping desperately to be loved by a parent. Trump is still seeking the love of the dad he never got — and never will.

Because, quite obviously, these men don’t love him. They don’t love anything or anyone — they’re not capable of it. They’re using him. To what? To destroy, to ruin, to shatter. America, Europe, Asia global order, peace, stability, progress, prosperity.

And we, my friends, are all in the path of this tornado of psychological trauma.

Trump was made a malignant narcissist in the same way that such people are always made. Distant, cold, authoritarian parents failed to provide intimacy, safety, love. The child was constantly told he wasn’t good enough, he was a failure, he was nobody. He therefore developed the mindset that only by being the center of the universe could he attain the one thing he needed most, love, intimacy, respect, relationship.

There he is, still trying. Trying so hard that even surrogate father figures have been found, to desperately provide the love the wounded child still needs.

Trump and Kim shaking hands doesn’t unnerve us just because “two tyrants flock together.” There is something much deeper going on here. It unnerves us so precisely because one of these men is clearly the father — and the other, the child, still seeking to be held, seen, and loved. This is not a relationship of equals, in other words.

That is why in these situations, we have a response that’s different from seeing the tacky furniture, or the absurdly hilarious family photos. We don’t just laugh. instinctively, we’re repelled. But we’re not just repelled because an American President is growing close to a dictator. They always have, my friends, from Reagan funding Saddam and Gadhafi and Pinochet, to now.

We are repelled because there on the global stage is a truly unbelievable, bizarre, tragic, gruesome, and ugly spectacle. A President who has become a little boy, desperately seeking validation, attention, and intimacy from…dictators. Just like a child does from a father. We watch a President literally regress to an infantile state. We get the sense that if Kim or Putin cooed, Trump would respond in baby talk, and smile a dreamy, dissociative smile.

We are disgusted and unnerved deep down, in our emotional centers, because this is something as staggering as it is strange. A man who is President becoming the boy he still is, seeking the love he never got, from an imaginary father, who is the authoritarian not just of a family, but of a country. We are seeing a mind break and shatter, revealing what is truly inside this human soul. Just a wounded child, screaming, abandoned, lost — one that never grew into manhood.

And will destroy the whole universe around it, just to be at the center of that very universe, for a moment, even if it is only orbited by wreckage, ruin, and dust. After all, what good is a universe if you aren’t at its center?

That is why we’re disgusted, shocked, and frightened, my friends. We are watching the truth of a broken human soul emerge. It is an ugly truth. The truth of trauma, abuse, neglect — and what they become. Playing out on the biggest of stages. A wounded man-child, desperately, hopelessly, seeking the love of an authoritarian father — that he will never have — even by tearing down the whole universe, after becoming its emperor. “Here is another father! Maybe this one will love me, at last,” said a sad little boy.

Perhaps he will, little boy, perhaps he will.

Umair

June 2019