More from Elizabeth Mika:
All tyrants share several essential features: they are predominantly men with a specific character defect, narcissistic psychopathy (a.k.a malignant narcissism). This defect manifests in a severely impaired or absent conscience and an insatiable drive for power and adulation that masks the conscience deficits. It forms the core of attraction between him and his followers, the essence of what is seen as his “charisma.” In his seminal paper on Antisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars of the 21st Century (2015), Frederick Burkle observes that narcissism augments and intensifies the pathological features of a psychopathic character structure, making those endowed with it especially dangerous, not in the least because of their ability to use manipulative charm and a pretense of human ideals to pursue their distinctly primitive goals. We talk about the chief feature of narcissistic psychopathy, the impairment of conscience, and its destructive consequences, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Narcissist (Mika & Burkle 2016).
Impulsive, sensation-seeking, and incapable of experiencing empathy and guilt, a narcissistic psychopath treats other people as objects of need- and wish-fulfillment. This makes it easy for him to use and abuse them, in his personal relationships and in large scale actions, without compunction. His lack of conscience renders him blind to higher human values, which allows him to disregard them entirely or treat them instrumentally as means to his ends, the same way he treats people.
This dangerous character defect, however, serves him well in the pursuit of power, money, and adulation. Not having inhibitions and scruples imposed by empathy and conscience, he can easily lie, cheat, manipulate, destroy, and kill if he wants to — or, when powerful enough, order others to do it for him.
The characteristics indicative of narcissistic psychopathy are observable already in childhood. Biographies of tyrants (Fromm 1973, Miller 1990, Newell 2016) note the early manifestations of vanity, sensation-seeking, and impulsivity often accompanied by poor self-control, aggression and callousness, manipulativeness, and a strong competitive drive and desire to dominate co-existent with a lack of empathy and conscience. Plato remarked on the “spirited” character of a future tyrant showing the above-mentioned symptoms already in his youth.
Trump at age 7 already was throwing rocks at a neighbor's toddler (Dennis?) in his playpen.
https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+threw+rocks+at+infant&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS1041US1041&oq=trump+threw+rocks+at+infant&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRiPAjIHCAIQIRiPAtIBCTUyMzVqMGoxNagCCLACAfEFVPt_YCNdumc&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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