The Real Reason Trump Submits to Putin
Why Trump submits to Putin @VladVexler
Transcript
The Real Reason Trump Submits to Putin
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(0:00 – 0:24) Trump’s unchecked narcissism is destabilizing global politics, yet few talk about this directly. Every relationship Trump has with Putin, with Macron, with Starmer, his theatre of cruelty in the Oval Office with Zelensky, are all shaped by his narcissism. For Trump, every act, from lowering taxes to pouting, is designed to satisfy his narcissistic needs. (0:24 – 0:57) The type of narcissism I’m talking about is not just a trait like greed or kindness, it’s a personality disorder marked by deep denial of mental and emotional reality, and Trump has it. We usually don’t discuss the mental disorders of our public figures, but as a political philosopher, I’m saying that it’s time to put an end to that taboo. As our democracies decline, we’re at risk of electing increasingly disturbed individuals, and when the power to end democracy or start a nuclear war is at stake, public interest overrides privacy. (0:58 – 1:18) At the heart of narcissistic personality disorder is an insatiable desire for narcissistic supply. There is positive supply, for example receiving adulation. There is negative supply, sometimes called sadistic supply, stemming from being seen as omnipotently destructive, a kind of dark admiration. (1:19 – 2:03) The spectacle of sadism in the Oval Office, Trump’s demand that Zelensky offer gratitude, even as he calls him dictator, blames him for Putin’s invasion, schemes to extract Ukraine’s natural resources, toys with Ukraine’s independence, was about sadistic, narcissistic supply, being seen across the world as the master of Zelensky’s misery. When J.D. Vance ambushed Zelensky, he wasn’t merely acting on impulse, it was a calculated move designed to trigger Trump’s thirst for narcissistic supply. You see, narcissists split the world into two, people they idealise and people they dismiss. (2:03 – 2:27) In Trump’s world, Putin is idealised, Trump invites Putin into a society of his own creation. Zelensky, on the other hand, falls into the non-idealised group, he doesn’t meet Trump’s needs for narcissistic supply and therefore he doesn’t exist. During the Oval Office meeting, J.D. Vance sensed that Trump was running low on narcissistic supply. (2:29 – 2:53) Vance’s intervention from the couch was meant to dial up Trump’s narcissistic dissatisfaction by hitting respect and gratitude. And it was calculated to create a new dynamic for Trump in which he could torment Zelensky, turning a pitiful event into a moment of grotesque glory. Now, let’s explore why Putin is Trump’s narcissistic heaven. (2:54 – 3:06) There is a tendency in our culture to think that narcissism is self-obsession. But that’s not true. The antidote to narcissism is not caring for others, that’s the antidote to sociopathy. (3:07 – 5:28) The antidotes to narcissism are authenticity, being real, and growth, being able to look inside and find a steady self that can learn from experience. When Trump looks inside, he doesn’t see anything there. There is no I. All there is, is a false self, looking for narcissistic supply as a means of self-regulation. And because Trump has a false self, he cannot grow. Trump lives the same day, over and over. He doesn’t accumulate lessons or burdens. Notice how the few opinions he has haven’t changed since the 80s. This lack of emotional weight explains in part why Trump seems to be aging slowly. When Zelensky showed Trump images of Ukrainian POWs, Trump recognised what was in the picture, but had no correlate emotional response. Trump does not carry anything, whether it’s Gaza or Ukraine or Melania. For Trump, the narcissist, life is all about theatrics around authority. He either dominates, staging spectacles to assert his authority, or he submits, aligning himself with special figures so that he can bask in their glory. I call this dynamic narcissistic submission. Narcissistic submission is huge in narcissism, even if it’s not well understood. Psychoanalyst Christopher Bolas talks about the narcissistic contract. Quote, I promote you as exalted, welcome you into my world of idealisation, and then bask in the radiant light of the idealised object. Now, if I were a narcissist, I would tell you, I am a great public intellectual. But look, there is this other public intellectual, and he has won the Nobel Prize and even bested Socrates in debate. And he thinks I am amazing. And if you know narcissists, you know that they often exaggerate the achievements of others in their life so they can bask in their glow. It’s this dynamic that explains why Trump rolls out the red carpet for Putin. Trump isn’t interested in the real Putin. He’s incurious about him. What he wants is to idealise an image of Putin and then bask in its glow. (5:29 – 7:37) That’s why Trump was visibly rattled when Zelensky called Putin a killer in the Oval Office. Criticising Putin isn’t just a political problem for Trump because he’s negotiating with him, it’s an attack on Trump because Trump is dependent on an idealised image of Putin for narcissistic self-regulation. It gets worse. People around Trump exploit his narcissism for their own gain. Trump is easy to manipulate because his false self leaves him with no sense of direction. He is not goal-oriented. Trump has a small number of beliefs, but aside from those, he has not beliefs, but dispositional states that come and go. If something promises to feed his narcissistic hunger, he’ll probably go after it. The ideal operator to manipulate Trump is a non-narcissistic psychopath, somebody who is goal-oriented, strategic and unburdened by false self. Unfortunately, Putin meets this description to some extent. Putin may not be a psychopath, but he’s a master of sociopathy with pronounced psychopathic traits and his narcissistic tendencies are there but fall short of a personality disorder. At the level of exploitation, Trump’s and Putin’s relationship is unbalanced. Trump uses Putin for self-regulation to meet his narcissistic needs to bask in the idealised image of Putin he has created, while Putin uses Trump to achieve real geopolitical goals in the world. Still worse, Trump’s narcissism is amplified by his suspected ADHD. While many brilliant and ethical people have ADHD, combined with narcissism, it can have an explosive effect. In Trump’s case, it’s like steroids. Elevating impulsivity, think of Trump’s stance changing from day to day. Contrarian behaviour, if everybody says X is right, Trump’s going to want to do Y. And inattention, which means that Trump is bad at noticing when people manipulate him. (7:37 – 9:36) Now a word of caution. What we’ve discussed so far is only the psychological side of Trump. We need social and ideological explanation too, something my channels focus on, but we’re not doing that today. But we do need to say this. Ideologically, Trumpism shares key elements with Putinism. Both embrace what I call hyper-neoliberalism, an approach that treats the world as a market where everything can be bought. And what cannot be bought is extorted, threatened into submission, or conquered by force. Indeed, this fusion of neoliberal ideology and Hobbesian war of all against all is at the heart of the authoritarian wave sweeping the globe today. There’s nobody better, smarter, or a better leader than Victor Orban. But now we’re going to draw some big lessons from the psychological issues we discussed, which imperil our politics. Lesson one, our culture amplifies narcissism, sociopathy, and even psychotic thinking. Social media overwhelms us with tragedy, fueling both sociopathy and apsychology of moral disgust at the ghastliness of the world that makes us want to tune out from politics. Post-truth politics weakens our sense of reality and fuels psychotic patterns of thought when we find the world so unbearable that we destroy it in our mind in order to bear it. This partly explains the Trump vote. Consumerism twists our search for truth into self-obsession, amplifying narcissism. You search for the news that matches your identity. All this transforms our politics because societies that are sick elevate sick people into positions of power. Lesson two, we rarely link personal psychology to large-scale problems. (9:37 – 11:25) Psychological professions focus on personal life and ignore politics, and professions studying politics largely ignore personal psychology. We need more psychological insight into our relationships mediated by the institutions we share, and we need more insight into what happens when we enter a vicious cycle, when our institutions get sick, corrupting mass psychology, which makes our institutions more sick, which corrupts mass psychology more. Lesson three, many of the daily messages we are exposed to are psychically destructive for us. They leave us feeling unsafe, powerless, lost, and with a fractured sense of reality. This creates another vicious cycle. Destructive communication begets destructive communication. This is a self-perpetuating disinhibiting effect which makes us fragment into ever smaller distinct mental and fact worlds. Lesson four, don’t vote for narcissists. They distort reality and use you for their gain, especially if you are their supporter. They act malevolently when it suits them and endanger your country. And by the way, it’s not true that most leaders are narcissists. They have narcissistic traits, but they don’t have narcissistic personality disorder. And don’t vote for psychopaths. This is a warning that will be more important in the 2030s when populist buffoons like Donald Trump are replaced by more determined and dogged authoritarians like Orban. But now, to put what we have discussed in context, we need to understand the role of post-truth politics and Russian propaganda in the world. And for that, watch this video next.
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