He’d rather be tearing the head off a rooster
It turns out Trump has a tendency to attack people who annoy him.
Knowing Trump’s reflex is to lash out, aides have in the past warned him that character assassination is a bad idea. They told him to avoid savaging Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for example, advising that it would do him no good. Trump didn’t listen, treating Mueller as another in a long line of antagonists to be trampled.
“He’s a street fighter,” said a former senior White House official, who like others I talked with this week spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s personality. “He’d rather be tearing the head off a rooster than putting caviar on a cracker.” A Republican senator told me the president “has two speeds: hostile, and hostile on steroids.”
In other words he’s a nasty vulgar malevolent man who never ever restrains his own bad temper.
Why exactly does Trump behave this way? Some mental-health professionals who have studied him—and a few politicians and aides who have worked with him—describe him as a narcissist whose self-image is mortally threatened by criticism of any sort. For Trump, criticism seems to amount to “an attack that is lethal to the public veneer,” Seth Norrholm, a neuroscientist who’s written about Trump’s mental state, told me. The invariable response is “not just [to] extinguish the threat, but to humiliate and destroy the threat.”
This is redescription rather than explanation. Why does Trump vomit rage and hatred all over people? Because he feels a lot of rage and hatred, and he likes to vomit it all over people.
“Some of this comes from immaturity—you can imagine a person who’s narcissistic, but has the intelligence and brains to back it up,” said Norrholm, who believes that Trump is unfit for office. “But there’s not a lot of firepower behind [Trump’s] narcissism, so you end up with grade-school nicknames and playground-level insults.”
Do intelligent narcissists also have enough (or the right kind of) intelligence to know that vulgar abuse doesn’t enhance their status and so restrain some of their hostile urges in favor of more veiled forms of revenge? I believe they do, yes.
I think this comes from a different aspect of Trump’s personality than his narcissism. It’s the military school, trying-to-impress-daddy toxic masculinity part that leads him to the belief that you are either dominating or being dominated.
Trump likes to think of himself as a tough guy, and likes to think others think of him as a tough guy. The guy’s a human marshmallow. He’s a stupid person’s idea of a tough guy. A genuinely tough person would not crave and demand constant adulation, nor would they be so easily led or manipulated. At best he’s a metaphorical street fighter, and even that’s a stretch. He’s a bully and a loudmouth boor with no impulse control. He’s an infantile insulter. Nobody would have paid him any attention if he hadn’t been born into obscene, unearned wealth (but I repeat myself).
I don’t think Capt. Bonespurs would really last very long in a street fight that involved actual fighting in an actual street. I don’t think he’d last very long against a rooster either…
^That. The idea that he’s a tough guy would be hilarious if it weren’t so disgusting. He’s rapey – he punched Don Junior to the floor once when he was about twice his kid’s size – he mocks and insults people on Twitter. Ooooooooh, check out the tuffitude. He’s not even as tough as a marshmallow, he’s as tough as fog, as melted ice cream, as a sock.
“For Trump, criticism seems to amount to “an attack that is lethal to the public veneer,” Seth Norrholm, a neuroscientist who’s written about Trump’s mental state, told me. The invariable response is “not just [to] extinguish the threat, but to humiliate and destroy the threat.”
He is completely ineffective at those goals. His nastygrams don’t extinguish threats; they often backfire and add to the charges against him. He tries to humiliate people by snarling belittling nicknames at them, but he is so puerile, so stupid, that he humiliates himself more than anyone else. The threats are not destroyed; he adds to the threat. He even seems to think he did “destroy” the threat or criticism, but he’s so stupid that he doesn’t know that he did nothing of the kind. He makes himself vicious, but his viciousness is just a disgusting boil on the body politic, full of seething pus, and poisoning itself.
Calling Trump a street fighter is something that he would love people to say about him, but is also one of the least true things ever said about him. He can’t even fire someone face to face for crying out loud, he gets them out of the White House before doing so by tweet. He’s a keyboard warrior, an internet tuff guy, with his phone as his only weapon.
And sometimes out of the country.