President Yahweh or: How Donald Trump Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the God Complex
“As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!).”
So read Donald Trump’s October 7th tweet, precipitating what BBC News termed a “week of confusion over US policy” concerning foreign affairs. The catalyst for said week was a White House statement which read “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria. The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and the United States forces…will no longer be in the immediate area.”
This article concerns not the foreign policy move, but the three words in Trump’s tweet which are a telling insight into the mental health of the face of the administration which executed said foreign policy move. Donald J. Trump bears the hallmarks of narcissism. I am far from the first person to say this.
Just recently, George Conway wrote at length in The Atlantic about Trump’s psychopathology. “To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism,” Conway wrote, citing a report in Vanity Fair wherein a clinical psychologist explained his practice of “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example.”
Trump’s tweet in which he mentions his “great and unmatched wisdom” — which The Guardian wryly described as a “modest claim about his intellect” — is among the many signs the President has exhibited that, firstly, he is mentally unwell and, secondly, suffers from a Messianic complex of stunning though — after almost three years of his presidency — unsurprising magnitude. “Who can advise Yahweh?”, wrote Graeme Friedman in a report on the President’s tweet and his administration’s decision vis a vis Turkish policy.
Indeed, Trump’s claim of “great and unmatched wisdom” — which can plausibly be read an assertion of omniscience — is on-brand for him. “I am the chosen one,” he said concerning the US’s trade war with China. He re-tweeted Wayne Allyn Root’s claim that Israeli Jews “love him like he is the second coming of God.” And, perhaps most notoriously, of the manifold issues facing America during his presidential campaign, he said “I alone can fix it.”
These speak to a key tenet of Trump’s psyche: he either genuinely believes he can fix these problems, or he at least wants people to believe that he can, or both. Fitting with speculation that he is a pathological narcissist, a case for which Conway lays out a convincing argument, this is fitting. And it fits with what we know of the man.
Bombast, grandiosity, and hyperbole have driven much of Trump’s career, be it in business, entertainment, or politics. His net worth, he once remarked, “fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings.”
The media and reality television in particular, more so than real estate, catalysed the shaping of his public image: one which delighted executives who could bank on his brash style as a ratings grabber and one which gratified him, as a man who compulsively needs to be adored, who needs to be respected, who needs to be acknowledged as an authority figure at a paramount level. This need is evident in his net worth claims: during 2011 speculation about whether he would run for president, of his net worth, he said “I think people will be extremely impressed”.
Trump wishes to be liked. It is why issues such as his personal popularity and his inauguration crowd size matter so much to him. It is why he has governed as a campaigner, because governance necessitates failure and failure invites criticism, which Trump cannot handle. The campaign rallies give him an opportunity to be feted, an opportunity to be adored.
It is why Trump burrows into the God complex — presenting himself as the ‘chosen one’ or one of ‘great and unmatched wisdom’ fits his worldview and fits his psyche. And in the current political climate, there are no end of sycophants who will reinforce this self-perspective even if they operate behind his back to undo the worst effects of the President’s worst impulses.
And again, I am far from the first person and I doubt I shall be the last to put these thoughts into writing. But that is kind of the point. Trump’s narcissism has played out in the public eye for decades and yet it often — albeit not always — goes overlooked. When these impulses guide a man in the public sphere with considerable power and influence, but no executive political authority, that is one thing. When that man is president, it is quite another. Vigilance against this is needed. For the most part, it is lacking.
