This disorder explains the full horror of Trump
Unlike those people gathering together at either end of the anti-MAGA and MAGA continuum to engage in conflict over what looks like an emerging authoritarian, dystopian, back-to-the-future America, there are still some 40 percent of the electorate who are going about their lives undisturbed, as though nothing unusual was happening.
This trichotomous reaction to the sadomasochistic world of Donald Trump has much to do with his lifelong and chronic condition. We can blame most of the avarice and self-aggrandizement by Trump 2.0’s complot on his unacknowledged antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
In this commentary, I do not focus on the mental states of those MAGA folks who are attracted to and support Trump, or on those anti-MAGA folks who are repelled by and resist him, or on the largest group of people who for whatever reasons choose to ignore him.
Instead, my attention is focused on delineating Trump’s instances of ASPD as a means for better understanding the president’s behavioral motivations and transactional reactions in relation to his political and policymaking decisions.
ASPD is key to explaining why Trump is perpetually breaking institutional norms to save his own ass or to go after somebody else’s — as in the weaponized Justice Department’s selective releasing of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Meanwhile, the president’s corrupt FBI Director, Kash Patel, along with Vice President JD Vance and crooked Attorney General Pam Bondi each inappropriately tweeted about searches of John Bolton’s home and office, seeking classified records.
This type of public disclosure had always been a DOJ no-no. But this performative display of anti-constitutional power on behalf of a vengeful Trump occurred so he could inflict pain upon Bolton, intimidate other critics, and derive pleasure for himself.
Whatever harm may come to Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, is due to his having written a negative book about the president’s first term, and having become one of Trump’s most credible and formidable critics.
ASPD has also been critically central to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, which could not have been any uglier and less supported by the American people.
This examination of Trump’s ASPD helps reveal many other quandaries in which the president finds himself, in particular when it comes to his alleged dealmaking and peacemaking skills. Say, like diddling around for eight months without coming close to ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Earliest and latest signs
Before I turn to Trump’s racist policies on crime control, his antihuman executive orders, and his counterproductive tariffs, as derivative and illustrative of his ASPD, it is incumbent to lay out the very dangerous and unfortunately ignored dynamics of Trump’s condition.
Trump’s ASPD first publicly appeared when six-year old Donnie got up from his desk, walked over to his male teacher and in front of the whole class hit him upside the head — because the first-grader did not care for the teacher’s taste in music.
Trump’s parents would send him to a military academy for “straightening out.” It obviously failed. Then, some 66 years after Trump was sent to military school — and about 57 years after he dodged the Vietnam draft by way of his bone spurs — a very different intervention occurred.
This was when President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up at the White House on August 18, 2025. Six months after Trump and company’s earlier brutal attack on Zelensky, and a few days after Trump’s suck-up meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the Ukrainian president brought with him seven of Europe’s top leaders, all for the purposes of appeasing the president.
With the cameras rolling, the world witnessed a political intervention to stop a superpower leader spouting “old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.”
More important than merely correcting Trump’s ignorance of history, this intervention stopped him doing something really stupid like negotiating a resolution to the war that would have been harmful to the U.S. and its Ukrainian and NATO allies while benefiting Putin.
Just three days earlier, Trump had rolled out the red carpet for the dictator who invaded Ukraine — the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, for war crimes including the kidnapping and re-educating of more than 19,000 Ukrainian children.
Psychopathy and sociopathy
As used by the National Library of Sciences, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders characterizes those with ASPD as having “a pervasive and enduring pattern of disregarding and violating the rights of others, typically emerging in childhood or early adolescence and persisting” throughout their lives.
Lacking empathy and seldom feeling any remorse, these individuals tend to manipulate others, usually for personal gain. Those suffering from ASPD may regularly engage in lawless behavior and “struggle to learn from the negative consequences of their actions.”
Besides failing to conform to societal norms, other common symptoms or tendencies characteristic of those diagnosed with ASPD include aggressiveness, deceitfulness, egocentrism, entitlement, impulsivity, irritability, irresponsibility, narcissism, recklessness, revengefulness, self-aggrandizement, and superiority.
While “psychopaths” and “sociopaths” are two of the more common names for sufferers from ASPD, these diagnoses are not interchangeable. However, doing so in the case of Trump may not actually be wrong, because the 47th president does exhibit a mixture of both forms of ASPD.
Clinically, these two groups of ASPD sufferers are distinguishable by origins, traits, and behavioral patterns.
Psychopathy is typically attributed as having to do with genetics or early brain development issues affecting areas of the mind related to emotions and impulse control.
Sociopathy is typically attributed to environmental experiences such as early childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse.
As Mary L. Trump, a psychologist and niece of the president, detailed in her first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), Trump’s ASPD has been an etiological mixture of these two illnesses.
As for behavioral actions and social interactions, psychopaths tend to be more controlling, calculating, and manipulating than sociopaths. Psychopaths expend much energy planning their lawlessness and they also employ manipulative actions to avoid detection. Psychopaths can be very charming and blend into society.
Sociopaths are less adept at concealing their antisocial tendencies. They are more impulsive and erratic. Sociopaths are prone to emotional outbursts, anger, and aggression.
As for violence, lawlessness, and crime, both high-functioning (HF) psychopaths and sociopaths like Trump are less likely than low-functioning (LF) psychopaths and sociopaths to engage in personal violence such as murder or felonious assault.
Deviating a bit from these patterns, the president has an extensive record of allegations of sexual assault and was found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers.
Psychopaths are viewed as more dangerous than sociopaths because of their acute lack of empathy and overly calculated actions. HF psychopaths are more likely than HF sociopaths to engage in serial offenses, such as financial fraud and corporate exploitation.
Finally, because of a greater impulsivity and propensity for recklessness, sociopaths engage in more violent outbursts or poorly executed coverups of lawlessness or corruption than do psychopaths. On the other hand, sociopaths prefer not relying on violence, rather preferring lying, extortion, and intimidation.
Whatever benefits or inflates and animates Trump’s egomania or detracts from his sense of self-worth shapes, if not determines, his cruelly irresponsible actions.
Not to be overly reductive or to oversimplify Trump’s decision or policymaking production, but these have little to do with advisers — “the last person that the president talked with” — or anything to do with whether a piece of legislation or a judicial verdict is “good “ or “bad” for the nation, the rule of law, representative democracy, or even the interests of Trump’s constituents, billionaires excepted, including the MAGA base.
I contend that Trump’s actions or decisions are purely a matter of what in any given moment he perceives to be the most beneficial and least detrimental to him.
For example, here is what the president had to say in praise of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017, when he toured the museum, led by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch and with his daughter Ivanka Trump, U.S. Senator Tim Scott, Alveda King, and the then Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson:
“It’s amazing to see. I could stay here for a lot longer. Believe me, it’s really incredible … I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage…”
This May, Trump reversed course. Six years after Bunch, the first African American and first historian to lead the Smithsonian, was hired, Trump tried to fire him, against the wishes of the Board of Regents.
No longer were anti-racists and racists alike both “good guys,” to paraphrase Trump’s comments during his first administration about the killing in Virginia of an anti-racist protester by Nazi demonstrators, some of whom shouted “Jews will not replace us.”
Just the other day, in a Truth Social post, the president showed his deep contempt for the coverage of slavery in museums:
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ Like the Smithsonian museum, they are all OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”
As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, Abraham Lincoln “urged Americans to move past the Civil War ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ unlike Trump who “has malice for all, charity toward none.”
Fascistic in nature
As a general rule, correlation should not be confused with causation. However, as an integrative criminologist with a decades-old clinical background in counseling adolescent and adult offenders and nonoffenders, I would more than suggest that Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic agendas are the consequences of his ASPD intertwined with his family history and socialization and the wider processes of cultural assimilation.
Trump’s biosocial or cultural conflict encounters predate “wokeism” and the undoing of 60 years of civil rights reform, diversity, equity, inclusion, and multiculturalism that may turn out to be his ugliest legacy. Trump’s pre-coming-of-age experiences were subject to and reflective of an age of gender polarization and of ethnic exclusion and racial segregation.
As I argued in a recent commentary on the militarization of policing in DC and the emergence of Trump’s police state, the Outlaw-in-Chief “could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure.” Similarly, the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles “had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence.”
Most everything else Trump is doing in the name of “law and order” or “crushing crime” has been fascistic in nature and antidemocratic in practice. These norm-breaking actions of militarism, as well as illegal plays by ICE agents, are simply about consolidating Trump’s executive power and desire to nationalize local and state law enforcement, as in the upcoming deployment of the National Guard and most likely active duty troops to Chicago.
All of this normative or institutional deviancy is consistent with Trump’s framework of doing away with the post-Nixon Department of Justice as well as the post-Hoover FBI, and replacing them with a Department of Retribution and Star Chamber-like “Federal Bureau of Inquiry.”
As for Trump’s antihuman executive orders to eliminate “nearly $4 billion for USAID to spend on global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs,” they could leave millions of people, mostly children, dead.
And since Trump’s tariffs will only result in what economists agree will be higher costs, slower economic growth and investment, global trade disruption and retaliation, as well as sectoral harm to U.S. manufacturing and agriculture, inquiring minds might want to know what could possibly motivate the president to pursue such a disastrous and counterproductive course of action?
Turns out it has little to do with Trump’s iconoclastic love of tariffs and much more to do with the psychologically complex interplay of dominance, personality traits, negotiation tactics, narrative construction, and cognitive biases rooted in his ASPD.
These defensive psychological projections in combination propel Trump through his destructiveness and cruelty, allowing him to transcend the pain these tariffs cause everybody. At the same time, they are not enough to prevent Trump from having to lie about the tariffs’ effects.
Other than losing the Congressional elections in 2026, the egocentric Trump could care less about the Nineteen Eighty-Four-like American dystopia he is fabricating with assistance from ICE, the National Guard, and the military.
One might even consider that the psychopathic side of the Commander-in-Chief is indeed looking for a fight, and an excuse to replace the civilian government with martial law. In all likelihood, the Boss and his gang of sycophants are already planning for it.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.