As George Conway (@gtconway3d) wrote on Twitter…
This terrific essay by Richard North Patterson describes how one man’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder has sabotaged America’s standing in the world.
Trump’s Personal Pathology Is America’s Foreign Policy
In Ukraine, Donald Trump’s comprehensive misconduct of foreign relations has ripened into the most pregnant of our current public controversies-an impeachment inquiry. But his psychological unfitness for world leadership was apparent well before he took the oath of office. Since…
From the article…
—“Blinded by his insoluble inability to accurately process external reality, Trump had no design for realizing his most fantastical promises—let alone any grasp of the long-term consequences to America stemming from his zero-sum instincts. In his fantasies of greatness, Trump-as-Superman was strategy enough.
For nearly three years, we have seen the consequences of this worldview. He disparages our intelligence agencies when they reach conclusions which displease him. He treats the State Department with contempt, compelling an exodus of career professionals and eviscerating our diplomatic capacity. He replaces the language of democracy with venality and vulgarity, He greets the world’s autocrats as his geopolitical kin. The global image of America has become the gargoyle visage of a bigot and bully.
Inevitably, Trump’s craving for attention and inability to transcend his own impulses leads to verbal incontinence, intellectual incoherence, and contradictory actions. Nor is this likely to change: Trump’s subjective and ever-shifting sense of reality and addiction to instantaneous self-gratification leave him utterly incapable of thinking strategically.
For Trump, there is no strategic through-line. While the Chinese think in epochs, Trump thinks in fragments of news cycles dissociated from each other, his frequently self- cancelling behaviors driven by his oscillating needs of the moment….”—