A narcissist’s inner life is chaotic. They do not have the same relationship with the past or the future that normal people have. Most normal people have a relatively stable idea of what happened and what their goals are. This is not the case for the narcissist. A person in a relationship with a narcissist can be surprised because the person can suddenly be attacked independent of anything the person has said or done. It is completely random. For anybody in a relationship with a narcissist, it is one of the most troubling aspects of the relationship. In a normal relationship with a normal person, each person has a more-or-less stable set of characteristics and values to the other person. They are consistent from day to day. Your wife, if you respect her and lover her, is a good person today and was a good person yesterday and you expect her to be a good person tomorrow.
This is not the case if you are a narcissist and you are evaluating you wife. If you are a narcissist, your wife is who she is in the moment, and if you are having a bad day she is bad and if you are having a good day she is good. If you are having a terrible day, she is not only terrible now, she has always been terrible, and in the future her goal is to do nothing but torment you. The next day, if you are having an excellent day, your wife is excellent, always has been excellent, and your future together is rosy.
This can be extremely disorienting.
The reason narcissists lie all the time is that they live only in the now. That the “now” can change 180 degrees from minute to minute does not trouble a narcissist the way it would a normal person. If it is important today to the narcissist that the inauguration crowds were large, then they were large. If it is important tomorrow to the narcissist that the inauguration crowds were small (for example, if some enemy of the narcissist undermined him by preventing crowds from attending the inauguration), then they were small. Narcissists reconfigure the past to fit their protean present, they do it constantly and because they believe in their reality, normal people have real problems in picking up the non-verbal cues that alert them to what they more easily perceive as lying in other normal people. A normal person who lies knows he is lying. He can remember what really happened. He knows he is doing a bad thing, but is hoping he can get away with it. He is a little afraid of being caught. Another normal person watching a normal person lie picks up on a lot of this, and becomes suspicious. But these cues are not present when a narcissist lies, because a narcissist does not know he is lying. He does not remember what really happened. He is not doing a bad thing (a narcissist is unable of criticizing his own behaviour). He has no social anxiety.
So let’s step back a bit and take a look at what this is like from the inside of the narcissist.
It is chaos. Nobody is reliable. Friends become enemies, and enemies become friends. The watchword of the narcissist is not “what have you done for me lately” but “what are you doing for me *at this very minute*”. If a narcissist owes you money, you may as well write it off. A narcissist himself will have no qualms about hurting people. In fact, he thinks it’s funny to hurt people, or he scorns people who are hurt.
Narcissists are exhausting to be around.
The thing about narcissists is that they are very simple to figure out. Normal people have hidden agendas. Narcissists only have agendas, and it’s always right out in the open. They are not devious. They do not, in fact, understand that other people can be devious. You can hate the narcissist and tell him he is wonderful, and he will not understand that you really hate them. Narcissists take everything at face value. Also, they parrot whatever it is that they have had most recently from whatever patsy it is that is their current best friend.
So, what can we take from this with regard to Donald Trump? First of all, he is a black hole at the center of our government. Things will not change for as long as he is President. He will not have stable advisors. Good people will be driven out. Bad people will survive for a while, but even they will not be able to take the constant anarchy.
Where is he vulnerable? Three important things, to my mind.
1. Why did Donald Trump invite the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails? If he wasn’t a narcissist, I’d say it was a joke, but with a narcissist, what you see is often what you get. I think he knew that the Russians were hacking the DNC ahead of time, and I think he colluded with them (or, more properly, that Manafort colluded with them) to spy on the DNC. I think this rises to the level of treason.
2. Why did the Trump campaign change the RNC platform on the Ukraine? With a normal person, I’d look deeply into possible motivations, but since this is a narcissist, I’d say it’s about the only thing that matters to Trump. The only two things that matter to him are adulation and money, and this wasn’t adulation. So it was money. Somebody paid him to put that plank into the RNC platform.
3. And that brings us to Putin. Why does Trump express admiration for Putin? It is not because Putin is Trump’s role model as an autocrat. Narcissists don’t want *anybody* to be better than they are at anything. They want to be the best. If they think somebody is better than they are at something they aspire to, they are jealous of that person and they hate that person.
So why does Trump like Putin? He likes Putin *because Putin is currently giving him money*. That is the only reason he could possibly like Putin. My guess is that Trump owes Putin, or indirectly Putin via Russian oligarchs or lending institutions, a boatload of money, and Putin is directly or indirectly forgiving interest on these loans.