Report: Russia Has Trump Golden Showers Blackmail

[politicat]

135. ... it didn't roll off his back.

He was furious and barely managed to stammer out his fauxpology.

DJT almost consistently displays behaviors consistent with narcissism. When someone who doesn't have that form of personality disorder is outed for something humiliating, the first response is usually defensiveness, then apology motivated by shame. With narcissistic behavior, the response is anger, because the "people" who are making the N feel bad are not entirely people in the N's head. (To use a video game analogy, we're the non-player characters to their player characters; to use a toy box analogy, we're the toys. We're not supposed to talk back.)

Narcissists are extremely sensitive to humiliation and shame, but their means of dealing with it are fury, rage and acting out. They don't have much in the way of internal resources for processing shame. The central conflict of a narcissist's internal life is that they don't entirely believe that other people are actually real (narcissism has some deep ties to solipsism) but they're deeply reliant on the approval and adulation that the not-entirely-real people provide, because they cannot provide their own self-approval.

Note that what gets under the Mendacity's skin are not accusations that align with his supporters' worst behaviors -- they're supporters, they're the toys that are behaving like good toys, so anyone who criticizes based on what the good toys are doing is just jealous that they don't have good toys. When DJT acts out, it's because the toys he wants to approve of him are dismissive or critical. His meltdowns are predictable -- when someone is dismissive of him personally, of his performances, of his sense of self, especially if that person is a) someone he feels superior to, or b) someone whom his aspires to collect.

I grew up with a pair of narcissists and entered my profession in part because of their behavior. Narcissism is baffling to anyone who hasn't lived with it, but for those of us who have and escaped, it's extremely predictable.