The U.S. needs to discuss the nature of malevolence
American voters need to consider the nature of malevolence in Trump’s case
Raymond E. Gangarosa, MD, MPH, MSEE
October 28, 2020
Evangelicals have been Donald Trump’s staunchest allies but should abandon him on the basis of character. One Christian super PAC, Not Our Faith dot com, is withdrawing evangelical support for Trump and staunchly opposing his reelection. Evangelicals have valued Trump’s inclination to “shake things up in Washington” but the real reason he is a “bull in a china shop” is his intrinsic malevolence, evidenced by:
He repeatedly cheats to win elections (illegally paying off mistresses and frequently seeking foreign interference); has refused to punish a foreign meddler who helped him gain power; has hollowed out federal agencies and vital societal infrastructures from within; has incarcerated immigrants and/or irretrievably separated children from their families as an intentionally cruel alternative to releasing them before adjudication and an aggregate deterrent to asylum seeking; has publicly lied over 20,000 times in less than 4 years; vindictively penalizes those who oppose him and corruptly favors those who support him; circumvents and sabotages the CDC during a deadly pandemic; ignores uncontrolled disease transmission to open schools and businesses so administration policies “look good” during an election; has presided over ill-conceived, nihilistic policies resulting in over 200,000 preventable American deaths, without expressing remorse or condolences; has crippled the postal system to deter mail-in ballots he deemed would be unfavorable to his reelection; advocates systematically discarding large numbers of votes under pretense of anticipating a “rigged election”; colluded with the Republican Congressional leadership to break preestablished rules to stack the Supreme Court expecting it to override the popular vote and electoral college in his favor; schemes to replace representatives to the electoral college with hand-picked substitutes; sides with malevolent foreign dictators over our nation’s allies; habitually violates norms of civility; threatens to jail political opponents and execute dedicated intelligence officers for “treason” (i.e., for daring to investigate his own wrongdoing); and shows distinct inclinations to replace democratic norms with dictatorial rule.
Over 600 articles in the psychological literature support the contention that the personality characteristics that Trump has thoroughly self-documented, especially in his Twitter feed, relate to features that researchers have linked with malevolence. In 2002, Paulhus and Williams identified a “Dark Triad” of distinct antisocial character traits — subclinical psychopathy, subclinical narcissism, and Machiavellianism — that subsequent researchers have recognized as psychological measures of malevolence or “evil”, characterized by
callous, unethical behavior; lack of empathy; abusive bullying; vindictiveness; schadenfreude (happiness at the misfortune of others); impulsive risk-taking behavior; reckless gambling with other people’s money; aggression and rule-breaking; habitual lying and cheating; crimes, misconduct, and high-stakes deception; intellectual arrogance and refusal to accept advice; hypersensitive grandiosity; malicious envy; and sexual coercion and assault.
Research psychologists have also identified the “Dark Leadership” that results when the Dark Triad is empowered within organizations to manipulate subordinates to advance malicious intent, including existential threats that such insiders can pose.
In the September 24, 2020 issue of the Daily News, clinical psychologists Alan D. Blotcky and Seth Norrholm justify the crucial diagnosis: “Say it plainly: The president is a psychopath.” Trump’s self-centeredness, extreme sensitivity to criticism, demands for loyalty, insistence on nondisclosure agreements, and vindictiveness round out the comparison with the Dark Triad. Donald Trump’s own niece, Dr. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, has detailed how his upbringing under and subsequent business partnership with a domineering, uncaring, vindictive father led to the emergence of those antisocial personality traits.
However, comparison between Trump and the Dark Triad of antisocial character traits does not depend on diagnosing a psychopath, a narcissist, and a Machiavellian — although Trump’s prolific tweeting to 87 million followers allows greater scrutiny than most psychologists have for diagnosing their patients. Ethicist Darcia Narvaez has identified three neurological axes for human behavior based on neuroanatomical structures that, when conditioned antisocially, produce ethical and personality defects that correspond, respectively, to each of those maladaptive traits. Under such pathological conditions, (1) the reptilian brain’s ethics of security, driven by instinct that ideally seeks oneness, produces a psychopath’s fragmented worldview that nobody else matters; (2) the mammalian brain’s ethics of engagement, guided by intuition that ideally offers self-sacrifice, manifests as a narcissist’s total self-absorption; and (3) the cerebral cortex’s ethics of imagination, shaped by deliberation and narrative that ideally offers nurturance and understanding, maps to a Machiavellian’s malicious compulsion to bully, misinform, manipulate, and dominate everyone.
Such malevolence manifests when a person recognizes that his/her actions can cause great harm to others, but values even trivial selfish gains much more. In the case of the Dark Triad, that inclination manifests along all three psychological axes, e.g., favoring self over others’ safety, accepted social norms, and standards for ethical behavior. We see that behavior most dramatically in Trump’s rallies, where his narcissistic craving for adulation, even in the face of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, outweighs the mandate to apply CDC guidelines for safe distancing and mask wearing (excepting the crowd that faces the camera trained on Trump, just to keep up appearances). We are used to seeing such behavior in despots like Kim Jong Un, but American leaders have heretofore relied on competence, integrity, and proactive leadership as their operative leadership triad. It seems no coincidence that Trump admires how Kim’s “subjects” jump when he barks commands and how Vladimir Putin rules Russia. If you care for American democracy, Google “Trump admires Putin” and “Trump admires Kim Jong Un” (assuming Russian trolls don’t sanitize the search results) and ask yourself why would you vote for someone who has such twisted values? And, as Barack Obama pointed out, why would it be good that dictators who are our worst enemies like Donald Trump and want him to stay in power?
For four long years, Trump supporters have not recognized that they have installed a malevolent leader in the most powerful and responsible position on earth, letting him cause great damage to our nation, our democracy, the international community, and our planet. In part, that’s due to the role the conservative media has played in covering for him. There are rumblings that people within Fox News have misgivings about Trump’s malevolent character. It’s time that his malevolence becomes a campaign issue.
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Raymond E. Gangarosa is a physician, epidemiologist, and engineer who explores using analytical methods to address societal issues.