Make America Great Again, or Make Narcissism Great, As Always?

Is This The United States' Comeuppance?

I was in Malta, teaching a writing workshop when the election results came in. Like many of you, I’ve pretty much spent every moment of every day since then trying to make sense of what has happened to my country. I’ve mostly ignored the pundits, opining about what the Democrats did wrong and why so many people did not want a BIPOC woman in charge. So I’d understand if you don’t feel like listening to what I think. But here’s what’s rolling around inside me, in case you’re curious. Feel free to toss my two cents.

For all the noble and revolutionary poetry upon which this country is based, the reality is that the very foundation of the United States is built upon narcissistic intentions. Our founding father’s were resisting oppression, and like many people in oppressive relationships who then swing 180 degrees and wind up oppressing their next partner to avoid ever being dominated again, our founding fathers swung from being victims of a narcissistic king to being the narcissists with their own victims- the Native Americans who were oppressed, murdered, raped, and whose land was stolen, and the Africans who were enslaved and used to amass fortunes for property-owning white men.

Defining Narcissism

In the DSM-V, to make the diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, psychiatrists have to tick off 5 of the following 9 traits, along with impairment of their lives because of these traits. They include:

-a grandiose sense of self-importance

-a belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions

-a need for excessive admiration

-a sense of entitlement

-interpersonally exploitative behavior

-a lack of empathy

-envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her

-arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes

-a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

Controlling, hypercritical, bullying, manipulative, invalidating, and downright demeaning behaviors, while not necessary for the diagnosis of NPD, are also common behaviors associated with those we might call narcissists.

We don’t need to figure out whether our founding fathers had literal NPD in order to imagine how they could possibly justify the immorality and atrocity of genocide and land theft of the Indigenous people and enslavement of stolen Africans. How is Manifest Destiny, the American belief that it was the United States' God-given right and duty to expand westward across North America, regardless of the wreckage, not just a justification for a grandiose sense of self-importance, extreme entitlement, arrogant and haughty behaviors, fantasies of unlimited specialness and power, an utter lack of empathy, exploitative behavior, and a belief that you’re extra special, more special than those Native Americans or enslaved Africans?

And we don’t have to read very far through this list to see that MAGA leaders, even many MAGA supporters, once they’ve been appropriately indoctrinated, tick many of these boxes. And then just like narcissists tend to do, they justify their abusive behavior, writing it off with “But I’m voting for economic reasons” or “I don’t like Democrat elites” or whatever other excuse they might make to try to cover up that they just voted for the Narcissist-in-Chief. Trump’s outrageous behavior gives other people’s self-centered parts that override any altruism towards others permission to be as self-centered or abusive as they like, as long at they believe it might benefit themselves or their families, regardless of who gets hurt. For example, they might think a Trump vote will benefit them economically, but unless they’re in the 1%, likely will only harm them. Or they might have contrarian parts that justify voting for someone who promotes bigoted policies because they prefer rebellious bad boys to self-righteous Democrats who, like me, think they have the moral high ground in voting for anyone but Trump.

Narcissists don’t often care about the moral high ground. They care about power, domination, control, and overpowering others they judge as “less than.”

And as narcissists tend to do, these Trump voters then project their own unethical behaviors onto the Democrat “elites,” blaming others for the very things they’re doing themselves.

The MAGA cult has operated like many cults do- by actually feeding and preying upon the understandable desires we all have- to feel special, to belong, to bond over shared ideals, to have a mission and purpose. The problem is that cults also feed upon undercurrents of preexisting narcissism that might draw people into cults- the desire to be special, to be better than, to scapegoat those who are deemed less than, to suck up to those cult members judge as “one up” (the cult leader and his/her inner circle, usually) while punching down on those they judge as “one down” (anyone outside the cult.) If those tendencies weren’t there before someone joins a cult, they can certain come to the surface under the influence of a cult leader’s coercive control.

Are the cult members as culpable as the cult leader for the abuses that happen at the cult leader’s hands? Of course not. But they become unwitting accomplices to wrongdoing by enabling the Narcissist-in-Chief to get away with the kinds of abuses Trump is already getting away with, namely criminal corruption, sexual abuse, inciting insurrection, and other violations of human rights, democracy, and ethical business.

Is The American Dream Really Just Feeding Grandiose Narcissism?

Then there’s the American Dream, the dream that’s lured immigrants here for centuries in hopes of rising above one’s station in life to gain prosperity, improve one’s social class, achieve dreams that might be hard to achieve in other lands, and do it all on your own, as the rugged individualist.

It’s a lovely dream for so many, but how much of it is a pipe dream for those with fewer unearned privileges, including those who start out behind the eight ball because their ancestors were oppressed Native Americans and enslaved Africans?

Sure, there are the humble immigrants who come to America, improve their lot in life, upgrade their social status, appreciate the Land of Opportunity, and start a small family business that does reasonably well, without grabbing for more if the opportunity arises, families that can be satisfied without buying into the ravenous appetite of the American Dream’s hungry ghost. That’s the sweet, non-narcissistic face of the American Dream. People really can get opportunities here that they might not have elsewhere, and that’s awesome.

And sure, because of the American Dream, there are marginalized people who break through to the realms of power and privilege typically reserved for white, cis-, hetero-, Christian, property-owning men. The exceptions include the Black sports stars and rock stars and movie stars of all genders that earn millions and the less common Native American Olympians, politicians, acclaimed poets, academic stars, doctors, Grammy winners, and astronauts.

Sure, we know that oppressed people sometimes come out on top and become the narcissistic oppressor, which might look superficially like the American Dream. But whether you look at white ancestors of Mayflower descendants or BIPOC or immigrant American Dream winners with fewer unearned privileges, if you look into those successful American Dream winner’s personal lives, the story is often less rosy just beneath the surface.

Outer success; relational disasters.

Why? I submit because a great deal of “success” comes with power, and power frequently, but not always, corrupts and can be easy to abuse in relationships with others who have less power.

But for as many American Dream success stories that actually lead to real happiness and healthy relationships, there are arguably even more tragic failures that never work out- or American Dream successes that don’t actually result in “la dolce vita.” Think Elon Musk.

I can’t help thinking that when MAGA people are calling to “Make America Great Again,” they’re actually longing for a time where narcissism, patriarchy, and white supremacy was more normal, more tolerated, less frequently held to account, a time when misogyny was tolerated, oppressing marginalized groups was still politically correct, and healthy protest and accountability by social justice activists hadn’t taken hold very much. It was the time of the Gentleman’s Agreement not to rock the boat if anyone boldly displayed racism, sexism, or homophobia. In other words, the days before “woke” liberals finally said ENOUGH and started holding poorly-behaving entitled narcissists to account.

Narcissism In Positions Of Power

It’s not news for psychotherapists that people in positions of power are more likely to display traits of narcissism. So sure, we can probably agree that there are narcissistic politicians on both sides of the political spectrum. I’m honestly not sure you can be a successful politician without being high on the narcissism spectrum. You almost have to be power-hungry, by definition, and power-hungry people tend to be pretty narcissistic. Maybe Kamala Harris is a narcissist. I can’t say. I don’t know her personally and haven’t heard about what it’s like to live with her, but maybe she’s a real ball-buster with her partner and his kids. Maybe Joe Biden is too.

But we can’t indulge both-sideisms here. You can’t compare the perhaps grandiose fantasies of Democrats who thought we might actually see a BIPOC woman in the White House to the grandiose but also violent, sociopathic revenge fantasies of those like Trump who seek total power, domination, control, oppression, violence, sexual predation, and the ripping away of human rights. Unlike Donald Trump’s idea that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville white supremacy march, we can’t allow false equivalencies here. If both sides have narcissists representing their parties, the degree and malignancy of that narcissism is not equal here.

So we’re left wondering why the United States ever claimed that there might ever be any equality between men, women, races, sexual identities, social classes, or ableness of bodies. One the one hand, we’ve fought to uphold that fantastical experiment, one that’s never really been realized since patriarchy took hold over three thousand years ago, when it was determined that some men matter more than others and all men matter more than women.

The things is we can’t just keep our nationalistic narcissism to ourselves. We also sell this narcissistic impulse overseas, sometimes destroying entire communities or feeling entitled to bully them for our own personal gain, all in the name of selling a democracy more than half of our country just proved many do not really want because it would require agreeing that no man or woman matters more than others.

The World Is Watching To See If We’re Hypocrites

My partner Jeff Rediger and I were in Malta during this latest US election and it was obvious from overseas that as Americans prepared to go to the polls, the world was watching. As we wrote in a book we’re co-writing together about the health implications of narcissistic abuse, and I quote our book here:

We met a young European in Malta who had worked hard to achieve his goal of educating himself in a posh college in America and had recently been hired to preserve, among other things, the Renaissance art of Caravaggio at the St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valleta, Malta.

He said, “Your country has started democracies all over the world. Now your reputation is on the line.”

Does our country really believe what we teach? Do we have enough of a moral compass to get ourselves back on the right side of history and fight for the life and liberty of the common person? 

The US is a country that was founded on the idea of a grand experiment: could a world be created where all human beings are regarded as being of equal value, dignity and worth? Could a government exist that was run by the people, for the people, or was the average person forever destined to be dominated and coerced by the rich and powerful, by those who sought to create a world where some matter less? 

It was a new day in the annals of human history when this republic was formed under the auspices of such a daring idea. But a crack existed in the foundation of this grand edifice, and we honestly believe it’s that unhealed crack that led us to where we are now. The creators were themselves colonizers and slave-owners whose privilege existed in defiance of the Indigenous peoples they overpowered, murdered, and stole land from and the slaves they dominated. That is what the United States of America is really about- that level of entitlement.

Donald Trump unleashed the extreme entitlement and narcissism built into the foundation of many Americans, glossed over and minimized as “culture wars” or falsely justified as “I’m voting for the economy.” The reality is that more than half the people in this country have just proven that they do not want all humans to have equal opportunity, privilege, or social safety nets. At the risk of making sweeping generalizations here, Christian Americans demonstrated that they believe they matter more than non-Christian Americans, that male Americans matter more than female Americans, that straight Americans matter more than queer Americans, that able-bodied Americans matter more than disabled Americans, and that native-born Americans matter more than immigrant Americans.

Democrats made a mistake in this way too, suggesting that Israeli Americans matter more than Palestinian Americans or that Israelis matter more than Gazans. That was a dire mistake, in my humble opinion, because young Americans who care about social justice can sniff out injustice and hypocrisy when it smells rotten. But it’s nowhere near the mistake people who voted for Trump made by endorsing a candidate who unapologetically glorifies racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and ableism and benefits the elite oligarchs by stepping on the backs of the working class, to name just a few socially unjust, narcissistic positions.

Holding Narcissists Accountable

I hear a lot of calls for unity these days, from people who want to reach across the aisle and remember that we’re all Americans. But I have parts that are resistant to doing so without holding Trump and his voters accountable. I’ve talked to a lot of people who practice couple’s therapist Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy, which specializes is helping unbalanced couples, where one person controls and dominates the other in narcissistic ways, rebalancing power in their relationships. Many of Terry’s clients are powerful men who feel entitled to dominate their partner's, because their narcissism and the patriarchal conditioning of our culture have convinced them that they matter more, their needs matter more, and they have a right to oppress their families. Terry and other RLT therapists don’t reach across the aisle and equally listen to and hold space for both the oppressor and the oppressed; they take sides. They offer care and empathy to both parties and hold a trauma-informed understanding of the wounds that cause narcissism and codependency and lead to power imbalances in relationships. But they are not neutral; they side with the more oppressed party to help hold oppressors to account, since oppressors are so often likely to shirk accountability or deny any wrongdoing.

So I was impressed when Terry Real put out a video expressing his opinions about the election. He did not say “Let’s unify and reach across the divide to be in Oneness together.” He took sides and called out narcissism where he saw it. You can watch his whole video here, but here’s a snippet of what he said if you prefer to read:

Since the Industrial Revolution, the rise of Robber Barrons, the “self-made man,” America has worshipped social Darwinism. For years pundits wondered how Trump could be so popular despite his clear lies, cons, racism, and misogyny. By now, it should be abundantly clear he is not popular despite these traits but because of them. He is grandiosity unleashed—and, just as he claims, he gets away with it. Those of us who choose him don’t really think he’ll look after us: we want to be him. The true, unacknowledged American Dream is that fame and money will transform us, render us more than human: a celebrity, a deity, a star.

I work every day with enormously successful, powerful, unhappy men. I do my best to teach them the difference between gratification and relational joy. Gratification is a short-term hit of pleasure: an investment wins, a colleague flirts with you. Relational joy is the deeper down pleasure of being connected: being a parent, a spouse, a member of a community. Think of parenting. Sometimes it’s gratifying and sometimes it’s a royal pain. The joy of it goes deeper than such fluctuations.

What ails us—as individuals, as spouses, as families, and as a culture—is the replacement of real joy with the grandiose self-medication of gratification. We believe that enough achievement, success, money, power will somehow fill up the gnawing emptiness we run from—the hole where connection should be.

So where does this leave us now, at least those of us who want something more? Do we sink into silence, inaction, neutrality? No! I believe in the deepest recesses of my heart that patriarchal power is atavistic. Long as some might for the good old days of certainty and privilege, we all live in an interdependent world. We live within nature, not above it. We must learn to care for it, and one another, or face a catastrophic future.

As individuals and as a collective field, we must promote an alternative to dominance, to advocate for it, to learn to live it. We must trumpet a call to sanity wherever we can. Our rights will be assaulted. Count on it. Our environment will not be protected. Count on it. The only thing left standing between the triumph of autocracy is us and our beating hearts. Now, our greatest political resource is the beating hearts of one another. Let this night vitalize our resolve toward action.

I appreciated that Terry was willing to take sides here, siding with the oppressed and standing firmly against Donald Trump and those who voted him into power. He’s not calling for unity; he’s calling for accountability, which is what narcissists need in order to be more functioning citizens in a just society that might one day uphold the vision of all humans being created equal and deserving of equal rights.

Rock Bottom Is Sometimes The Beginning Of Real Recovery For Narcissists

My partner Jeff thinks I should hold more space to hear from MAGA voters, to lend them my platform to get their voices heard. But I’ve had to erect strong boundaries to prevent Trump voters from abusing me and my staff. I tried inviting feedback to help me feel more compassion for Trump voters in 2016, sincerely yearning to understand how anyone who followed what I teach could possibly also vote for Trump. My sincere curiosity and willingness to entertain dissent only invited vile hate mail and narcissistic defenses- DARVO (Denial, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender), gaslighting, excuses, justification, minimization, projection, and displacement. One of our staff members threaten to quit if we didn’t protect her from what she had to read in the secret emails people sent, often anonymously, to our website. People wanted me dead, and it sincerely scared me.

So I won’t ask this time, but I want Trump voters to know that I don’t believe in dehumanizing anyone, no matter what. But I do believe in accountability and standing up against bullying narcissists who threaten other people’s human rights or justify voting for anyone who does.

I do have compassion for some MAGA voters, who I believe have been indoctrinated by lies, under the sway of the coercive control of Trump and his cronies, and tricked and confused by fake media into thinking a Trump presidency will benefit them, when it won’t. I suspect some of them will feel real regret when they see what he’s capable of and what they’ve enabled him to get away with. Maybe we’ll have another tipping point, like when white people in Selma watched innocent Black children get gunned down with water hoses or when George Floyd was murdered on video by a white cop. Maybe we’ll have an upswelling as a real crisis of conscience causes confused MAGA voters to change their opinions and express moral outrage towards Trump and his actions. I will have empathy for those who were tricked into voting for someone who intends to oppress ALL Americans, except maybe the Elon Musks and Matt Gaetz’s of the country.

But I also believe Donald Trump normalized narcissistic behavior in those who voted for him, and that hit of grandiosity can feel really good when you’re feeling really scared about an uncertain future or struggling financially in a rural town that’s becoming a ghost town. I don’t know if anything good will come of all this. It’s too soon to say whether watching innocent people get oppressed in potentially murderous ways will break people out of the narcissistic delusion of grandeur and power that Trump has activated in half of our country. Maybe we’ll Make Altruism Great Again at the end of this four years of hell.

But until then, I’ll keep going to therapy to check and contain any narcissistic parts in myself and hold them to account while other Americans give those parts free rein to cause as much damage as possible. If you have parts that like power and control, get off on hits of grandiosity, feel entitled to privileges you haven’t earned, put some people “one up” and others “one down,” dehumanize and scapegoat others who aren’t like you, or otherwise tick off some of the boxes in the traits of narcissism, I’d encourage my fellow Americans to do the same.

It’s Not Our Fault, But It Is Our Responsibility

Fish don’t know what wet is, and if you’re a native-born American, we’ve all grown up in a culture that was built upon grandiose ideals built upon a narcissistic foundation. It’s not our fault that we’ve been influenced by collective narcissism imposed upon us from all sides in media, advertising, culture, and what we glorify- power, wealth, beauty, talent, and strongman politicians.

They call us “ugly Americans” and laugh at our election results in other countries because our entitlement and bad behavior as guests in other countries is famously abhorant when compared to many from other cultures. Being out of the country during our election was a wake up call for Jeff and I. We didn’t meet a single person in Europe or Asia who thought Donald Trump was a good choice for United States President. How surreal it was to return to a land where half this country is gloating and celebrating, when the world thinks we’ve earned this and this is the United States’s long overdue comeuppance.

Everyone makes mistakes, even countries, like Germany and South Africa. But as Americans, we have yet to do the truth and reconciliation and accountability work Germany and South Africa have at least tried to do. When narcissists refuse to be held accountable for wrongdoing, the natural history, at least in their relationships with intimate family members and friends, is typically a long, slow decline and a sad, painful, lonely death.

This might just be the death knell of this country. It’s a known historical fact that all empires fall, eventually. In the 2024 election, we might just have used our idealized democracy to elect the person who claimed to make America great again, but will likely just bring us crashing down to rock bottom, where we belong. It’s well known in the narcissism recovery and addiction world that rock bottom is often the only impetus for change with narcissistic addicts or even sober narcissists. Maybe this will be a narcissistic country’s impetus to finally begin to truly heal the wrongdoing of the past, while we slide into laughable obscurity on the world stage into the wreckage of our own making. I just pray we won’t take the rest of the free world down with us.

There’s Hope For Treating Narcissism, But Only For Those Who Seek Treatment

Terry Real believes, and I agree, that narcissism can be treated with cutting edge trauma therapies if people with narcissistic tendencies agree to be treated. We can’t just write off narcissists as untreatable or hopeless, unless they refuse to be held to account- and then we just need to use law enforcement and the legal system to enforce consequences, assuming those institutions aren’t rigged to side with the narcissists, which we clearly cannot assume.

I like to bring an IFS parts awareness lens to narcissism, since narcissism really just describes a constellation of parts, just like codependency does. And all parts think they’re protecting you, even if they’re harming you or someone else, because they’re trying to prevent you from being overwhelmed by intolerable emotions.

I also agree with Terry that if self-aware narcissists of all genders are humble and motivated enough to submit to effective cutting edge trauma treatments that not only help heal their trauma but also hold them to account for their harmful behavior, narcissistic behaviors can be tamed. It helps to validate the wounds that lead to narcissistic parts and get help for the exiles underneath. But what doesn’t help is validating, excusing, or justifying the behaviors of grandiose, entitled, overbearing, or abusive parts. Treatment requires helping narcissists come down off the pedestals of grandiosity and also developing genuine self-esteem, so they don’t need those grandiose parts to run the show because of worthless parts that don’t feel good enough.

I’ve written many articles here about how narcissism isn’t someone’s fault and nobody was born a bad baby (read this and this.) So why call this out now? Why not continue to help others understand why people with narcissistic parts behave the way they do? Well…I’m writing a whole book about that, so I do think that’s an important part of the conversation.

AND…

Sometimes people high on the narcissism spectrum need to be called out for their behaviors because they're blind to the harm they cause when they blend with firefighter parts that are indeed trauma symptoms. Their patterns and wounds are trauma symptoms, by all means, but because of their “anosognosia,” they don't know what they don't know. It's paradoxical. That's why I write about both Dick Schwartz's perspective on this, which is to extend compassion to all protector parts, including narcissistic parts, and also Terry Real's perspective, which is to hold people accountable for blending with narcissistic parts and then trying to shirk accountability.

I believe both perspectives are crucial.

I appreciate the peace-makers who are calling for partisans to reach across the aisle and make peace in the wake of this election. But as they say in social justice circles, “No justice, no peace.” I don’t believe we’ll have peace until we can make peace with narcissistic parts inside of all of us and hold ourselves accountable for any parts that think we’re entitled to more than we’re actually entitled to. Only then might we be finally ready for the democratic ideals of equality this country claims to stand upon.