WHAT IS A PSYCHOPATH?

Recent events—in the past few months since November—have led me to engage in a layman’s study of what is known as ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). It seems that ASPD is a somewhat broad classification of specific mental illnesses that may include sociopathy, borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. It is supposed to be more politically correct today, from our American POV, to use scientific-sounding initials to describe garden-variety behavioral aberrations, hence, ASPD, AvPD (avoidant personality disorder), BPD (borderline personality disorder), DPD (dependent personality disorder), HPD (histrionic personality disorder), NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder), PAPD (passive-aggressive personality disorder), PPD (paranoid personality disorder), SzPD (schizoid personality disorder), etc.

But sometimes nothing but the hard, unvarnished, naked word will suffice. In  this case, the word is: psychopath. 

So what—or perhaps I should say who—is a psychopath? A psychopath is defined as:
Someone with a personality disorder that involves a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. Psychopaths may also be impulsive, manipulative, and exploitative. 

Principal Characteristics 

-         Impulsivity: Psychopaths may act in risky ways.

-         Lack of empathy: Psychopaths may not care about other people's feelings.

-         Manipulation: Psychopaths may be charismatic and exploitative.

-         Egocentrism: Psychopaths may be self-centered.

-         Disregard for rules: Psychopaths may not follow rules, norms, or the law.

-         Physical aggression: Psychopaths may be violent or cruel to others.

-         Lack of remorse: Psychopaths may not feel sorry for their actions.

Psychopathy has been associated with amorality—an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. More specifically, Robert D. Hare, a renowned Canadian forensic psychologist credited with having created a definitive  “psychopath checklist” in the 1970s that is still the psychopathy gold standard test used today by forensic psychologists, writes that “Psychopaths have a narcissistic and incredibly inflated view of their own importance and self-worth. They have huge egos. They’re self-centered to an incredible degree.” According to Hare, psychopaths have “a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, justified in living according to their own rules.”

Another clue to psychopathy, according to Hare, is that while psychopaths love to talk about huge goals, “they typically have no idea of what it takes to achieve them.” And, he indicates, they definitely don’t have a plan for how to achieve them.

Everybody seeks rewards. Rewards drive a lot of our behavior. Even people who have spent their whole lives giving generously to others are at least somewhat focused on the rewarding experience of giving, and seeing the results that it brings.  But psychopaths are obsessively focused on the prize and have no moral, ethical or legal boundaries or compunction when it comes to achieving it. They are incapable of taking a step back and weighing the consequences of what they do, because they are wired to achieve their personal goals no matter what the cost, especially to others, might be. They are almost literally blind to anything other than their own personal goals.

I’ve been looking into these issues, in the interest of journalistic integrity, to ensure that I’m not talking out of turn when I’m tempted to refer to the current president of the United States as “a madman”. The more I research, the harder I’m finding it not to say the words out loud, because it’s not name-calling (something MAGA types seem to be very concerned about…unless it is they who are calling the names) when it is an unavoidable conclusion.

I submit that our country is, regardless of how many people voted for him, being run by a madman. And we should be worried.  

For instance, what sort of a man, in the face of a national tragedy, twists the facts to blame a totally unrelated policy of the previous administration for that tragedy simply because expunging that policy is what he happens to be obsessing on at this very moment? And then too, because the catastrophe in question caused attention to be taken off of him in the news cycle. According to the president, the worst American air tragedy in six decades was caused by policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in American society—which in any logical, human and socially healthy mind should be viewed as a plus in American society. But regardless of one’s feelings about (initials again) DEI, blaming a horrifying air tragedy on it is simply insane. (And was, by the way, repeated by the president’s surrogate lunatic Elon Musk on X, his social media platform).

More evidence of the president’s profound lack of empathy and humanity: When asked by a reporter, in the face of such a tragedy, with the families of the sixty-seven people who died still in shock, if he would go to the crash site, the president responded, “I have a plan to visit, not the site. Because you tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

So let’s examine that rhetorical question of mine about what sort of man would do that. The answers have been right under our noses for nearly a decade. And yet, here we are again!

The answer is:

The sort of man who said, just hours before the US surpassed two hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths (headed for a million deaths of people of all ages before it was all over),  “Now we know it. It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. But they have other problems, that's what it really affects, that's it…But it affects virtually nobody. It's an amazing thing.”

The sort of man who, speaking of one of the most iconic military heroes of the Vietnam War, says, “He's not a war hero…He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you.” He was talking about Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator, who,  during Operation Rolling Thunder in  the Vietnam War, was shot down over the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, was refused medical attention by the enemy for wounds sustained in the crash, was repeatedly tortured and beaten, and remained a prisoner of war from 1967 to 1973. During that time, since his father was a renowned admiral, the Vietcong sought to negotiate a deal for his release, early on in his captivity. McCain refused any such effort as long as his fellow US prisoners remained POWs. The man saying McCain wasn’t a hero, the man who is now president and commander-in-chief, himself acquired five college deferments and eventually managed to finagle a medical deferment for “bone spurs” in his heels, in order to avoid being drafted into the military.

The kind of man who, as commander-in-chief, stands on the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery with a retired four-star Marine general—who, himself, has lost a son in combat seven years earlier in the Middle East—looks out over the vast sea of crosses of America’s war dead and says, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Because, clearly, he can’t even imagine doing anything in which there isn’t something in it for him, and certainly can’t imagine making the supreme sacrifice for something as unrelated to his personal priorities as his nation.

The kind of man who refuses to have US combat amputees present at a White House military event because their presence “doesn’t look good for me.”

The kind of man who publicly belittles the parents of Humayun Khan, a US Army captain, a Gold Star recipient, and a Muslim killed in Iraq, after they dared to criticize him for his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The kind of man who, as US president and commander-in-chief, didn’t want to waste his precious time visiting a cemetery in France devoted to American soldiers who fought and died on French soil during World War I, because he considered them “suckers and losers.”

The kind of man who says he’s entitled to force unwanted kisses on women—“I just start kissing them…I don’t even wait”— or to “grab them by the pussy” because he’s “a star”.

The kind of man (monster) who sexually assaults a woman in a department store dressing room. And then slanders her publicly and calls her a liar.

The kind of man, the kind of leader,  who incites his most radical supporters to “fight like hell” to halt certification of an election in which he was definitively beaten, and then calmly sits back to watch the violence unfold on TV for three hours without lifting a finger to stop it.

The kind of man, the kind of president, who, after more than sixty courts and his own attorney general have ruled out his charges of election fraud, tries to steal the election anyway by pressuring officials to falsify the results.

The kind of man who still can’t move on from that loss, even though he has again been elected to office, and who is now dividing the nation and wasting time and national treasure in mounting a widespread witch-hunt to fire, smear, sue and discredit anyone and everyone who rightly and justly took part in prosecution of the perpetrators of the violent post-2020 election uprising, which he incited.

The kind of man who makes no secret of his admiration for dictators and famous gangsters, and even less of a secret of his disdain for democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.

The kind of man who, in all the time that we, the people, have known him, has consistently and famously and provably lied about, well, just about everything you can imagine—thirty thousand lies (count them, fact-checkers did) just in his first term—a man who seems to have no concept of facts or truth, no grip on reality, a man driven only by his personal ambitions, his vendettas, and, more importantly, by his personal hatred, with which he charismatically infects his base.

Last year, forensic psychologist Dr. Vince Greenwood developed a scientific study of the current president’s background and past behavior in an attempt to establish whether the populist GOP leader is, indeed, a psychopath. He used the well-established Hare Psychopathy Checklist as the basis for his study.   According to his results, the president scored thirty-three.  The usual cutoff point for clinical psychopathy is thirty. Greenwood writes,  “For each item (on the checklist), the diagnostician is asked to give a rating on the pervasiveness of the trait. The guidelines to diagnose psychopathy are straightforward, but the demands on the diagnostician are rigorous.” The test is so rigorous, in fact, that professionals administering it have to undergo specialized training before being cleared to give it.

The doctor’s conclusion? That the president is “a garden-variety example of a particular and precisely delineated psychiatric condition.” Dr. Greenwood goes on to say that “he is, sadly for him and dangerously for the rest of us, a prisoner of his psychopathology, a puppet on the strings of a set of destructive personality traits that dictate his behavior. He is at the mercy of those traits, and, by extension, so are we.”

So what does that score of thirty-three signify on a comparative basis? According to Dr. Greenwood’s study, “The average score for individuals in a maximum security prison setting is 22. I mention that because the typical cutoff to get a formal diagnosis of psychopathy is 30. It’s a high bar that even most serious criminals don’t meet.” 

As to criteria and sources used in the study, Dr. Greenwood writes, “He (the president) is arguably the most well-chronicled candidate in history. A partial list of informational sources would include 13 autobiographical efforts as well as his social media posts, 71 biographies, many of which are richly sourced, and hundreds of interviews from print, radio, and television. A clinical interview is not necessary to diagnose the (then) former president for this condition. Indeed, there is research to indicate that the interview can detract from the assessment of a psychopath because of their facility for lying.”

This was what the president’s psychopathy scorecard looked like:

1. Glibness/superficial charm — 2

2.Egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth — 2
3.Proneness to boredom/need for stimulation — 2
4. Pathological lying and deception/gaslighting — 2
5. Conning/lack of sincerity — 2
6. Lack of remorse or guilt — 2
7. Shallow affect — 2
8. Callous/lack of empathy — 2
9. Parasitic lifestyle — 0
10. Poor behavioral controls — 2
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior — 2
12. Early behavior problems — 2
13. Lack of realistic long-term goals — 1
14. Impulsivity — 2
15. Irresponsibility — 2
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions — 2
17. Many short-term marital relationships — 1
18. Juvenile delinquency — 1
19. Revocation of parole — 0
20. Criminal versatility — 2
Total = 33

And this is not the only study that has arrived at the same conclusion since the president burst onto the political scene a decade ago. Indeed, two hundred thirty American psychiatrists last year signed an open letter affirming their belief that the man currently occupying the White House is far too mentally unstable to be president.

Also, during the current president’s former term in office, twenty-seven psychiatrists collaborated on a book entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which they agreed that, although a diagnosis should not be made without formal examination of the patient, dangerousness may be assessed from observed behavior. And their unanimous conclusion was that this man was a clear and present danger to the US and to the world. One particularly chilling passage concludes that the president “is now the most powerful head of state in the world,” but is also “one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving” of world leaders. It goes on to warn that it is tremendously dangerous, considering the president’s mental state, for him to have “his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power.” It is worth recalling that when the president first entered office in 2017, one of the first questions he asked was, if the US has nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?

The book also points to the effect the president’s psychosis has had on society as a whole, creating a “malignant normality” in which “what was previously considered unthinkable becomes the norm. Some therapists have seen patients suffering from trauma and re-trauma resulting from the president’s actions, which mimic those of an aggressive abuser.” 

So if I say that a lawless madman is running the country, it’s not hyperbole. It is a stark scientific and medical reality. The country, the world, all of us, are at the mercy of the whims of a diagnosed psychopath. And half the country has apparently fallen under his psychotic spell.

We should all, in the interest of self-preservation, be worried about that. The whole country. The whole world. It’s a monkey-with-a-razor moment in the most militarily powerful nation on earth, and we—Americans and humankind as a whole—are all potential victims of it.