This article first appeared in Salon.
In fact, one expert, physician and psychiatrist Dr. Frederick âSkipâ Burkle, told me that autocratic leaders typically have histories of being bullies, and that the most important thing about them that the public needs to understand. I first contacted Burkle by way of counselor and therapist Elizabeth Mika, whose chapter in âThe Dangerous Case of Donald Trumpâ (Salon review here) explained that âTyrannies are three-legged beastsâ: the tyrant, his supporters and the society as a whole. That perspective is vital to understand our specific predicament, which is historically unique only within our national borders.
The generic predicament of racism is nothing new â particularly for the Republican Party. (See âThe Long Southern Strategy.â Salon author interview here.) What is new is Trumpâs malignant psychology, a character disorder shared by dozens of destructive autocratic leaders whose patterns of murderous rule Burkle described in a 2015 paper, âAntisocial Personality Disorder and Pathological Narcissism in Prolonged Conflicts and Wars,â drawing on decades of experience as a world  leader in emergency public health crises such as war and conflict, as well as his background in psychiatry and pediatrics. A recent follow-up paper (âCharacter Disorders,â for short), focused on the negative impact autocratic leaders have on health security, human rights and humanitarian care.
Bullies-in-chief around the world
Burkle cites examples like Idi Amin in Uganda, Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia, Kim Jong-un in North Korea, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, who âhave emerged first as saviors and then as despots, or as common criminals claiming to be patriots.â
Amin and Milosevic are particularly apt figures to compare with Trump, given their roles in fomenting genocidal ethnic strife in Uganda and Bosnia respectively. Once in power, such a leader âthrives on continuing conflict and never seeks peace,â Burkle wrote â as a predictable description of all autocratic leaders. Characteristically they befriend and admire other autocratic leaders who have more power than themselves. Burkle reminds us that Hitler modeled himself after Mussolini and that Hitler and Stalin allied in the invasion of Poland. Before World War II started, these leaders, along with Japanese officials, met to divide up the world. But when one has power the other desires, conflict can result â as it did in Hitlerâs eventual invasion of Russia.
âThese autocrats are simply an adolescent bully in an adultâs body,â Burkle told me in early June, Iâd written a two-part story [here and here] about Trumpâs lies and his threat to democracy. Burkle and others were distraught by political leadersâ profound misunderstanding of autocratic leaders and their inability to change, because of developmental failures in their youth â failures that cannot be overcome.
Burkle cited Nancy Pelosi, âwho said only yesterday that she was waiting for [Trump] to be more âpresidential,ââ lamenting, âShe does not have a clue.â Pelosi may be Mitch McConnellâs political opposite, but when it comes to understanding who and what Trump is, she is no better off.
Trump himself supplies first-hand testimony. âIn the second grade I actually gave a teacher a black eye â I punched my music teacher because I didnât think he knew anything about music and I almost got expelled,â he wrote (or at least his ghostwriter did) in âThe Art of the Dealâ (quoted here.) âWhen I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, Iâm basically the same. The temperament is not that different,â he told biographer Michael DâAntonio.
Burkleâs work in wars and conflict has brought him face-to-face with foreign leaders who not only frustrate and impair the work done by humanitarians and their partners, but are actually the cause of much of the suffering they seek to alleviate. So he has first-hand experience of what autocratic leaders have done around the world over a period of decades. Because of the common cognitive and emotional arrest in adolescence, he says, their shared behaviors are âpredictably predictable across all cultures and bordersâ.
But Burkle also has first-hand experience of garden-variety schoolyard bullies, from an early age. He started first grade early, when he encountered his first bully. âI got pushed from behind on this knoll, and I went down, and fell and I turned around and thereâs this kid double my size sort of laughing with everybody. And I just ran back up the knoll and just tackled him out of anger.â Naturally, they both ended up in the principalâs office. âThis kid â more than double my size â the first thing out of his mouth, and I remember looking at him being so surprised, he said, âOh! He started this. He pushed me!â So theyâre always blaming it on everybody else. And they get away with it,â Burkle said. âWe were both talked to, but by responding I had to take part of the blame.â
This is the essence of bullying â not just the violence and intimidation, but the narcissistâs hallmark sense of impunity, backed up by effortless deceit, blame-shifting and manipulation. I see now that Trumpâs latest effort to disavow the âSend her backâ chant he inspired fits perfectly into the package, alongside the violence and intimidation bullies are most notorious for. But violence and intimidation are just part of the package. Itâs a big mistake to confuse the part with the whole.
Playing the victim â something Trump has perfected to a T â is absolutely crucial to a bullyâs success, as Burkleâs first experience showed. Trumpâs followers wallow in victimhood with him, especially in the aftermath of his own vicious attacks â a classic expression of collective narcissism (more on this below). Commentators and media practices demanding equal consideration of âboth sidesâ further reward the bullying behavior in all its aspects, even if they may include some narrowly targeted criticism of the most specific, blatant violence or threats.
That same kid later picked on Burkle in high school before getting kicked out, he says. âThey never stop, and they have their targets that they like. But that also started my interest in, âWho are these people, OK? And why is he doing this?â I remember spending an awful lot of time in my life saying, âWhy are people like this?ââ
The bullyâs arrested developmentÂ
A major focus of Burkleâs attention is developmental failure. A degree of âhealthy narcissismâ is necessary during childhood in building a fragile ego, but childhood is where narcissism belongs. Children around the world âare sort of identical,â he said. âWhen we mix children from different cultures they get along well right away,â but thatâs not the case for adolescents whoâve developed marked differences.
âEvery single culture in the history of our world â even ones that donât know any culture outside themselves â theyâve always given special attention to adolescence and advanced education, and recognized something unique happens there,â he told me. What happens is learning to be part of a larger, less concrete, more abstract and unpredictable world, which entails a multitude of specific skills and cognitive capacities such as reasoning, insight and debate with a significant emotional dimension, as Burkle explains in his âCharacter Disordersâ paper:
For many, they feel for the first time personal anxiety, doubt, shame, depression, guilt, sorrow, make embarrassing mistakes, learn new avenues by modeling other more mature adolescents and adults, and develop both age-appropriate neurologically and socially beneficial developmental tasks, eventually leading to a sense of accomplishment.
This is the deeper meaning of the saying, âYouâre only young once.â The kind of cognitive/emotional/social development that occurs during adolescence is a one-shot deal. And Trump missed his shot, just like all others with character disorders. Because theyâve never grown up, they remain very similar, like children: Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, Trump, Mohammed bin Salman â they all recognize their reflections in one another. The fact that they all get along so well should chill us to our bones.
Not all narcissists are bullies, but all bullies are narcissists: A sense of superiority is foundational for bullying behavior. The broader lens of narcissism is how Mika approaches things. If talking about bullies tends to focus on sadism, talking about narcissism focuses on âa grandiosely overblown sense of oneâs greatness and importance, an ego â or false self â that eclipses everyone and everything around it,â Mika said. âIt often strikes us as comical and buffoonish, so unreal as to appear purposely exaggerated, but the fact is that narcissism stems from emotional and cognitive deficits rooted in a severe developmental arrest that makes growth and change very difficult, if at all possible.â
She went on to note the most significant consequence â a severely impaired or total lack of conscience, which âmanifests in an inability to empathize with others or even see them as fellow human beings,â resulting in âlack of compassion, capacity for guilt and healthy shame.â It also results in âdisregard for higher values, such as truth, justice and equality.â
The disregard for truth is especially useful as a bully ârelentlessly creates his own version of reality that serves to protect his overblown and fragile false self,â Mika said. As a result, âHe tends to be immune to cognitive dissonance resulting from the inevitable for most of us confrontation of our beliefs, especially about ourselves, with reality as mirrored to us by others and the world.â
For Mika, the greatest damage caused by ânarcissistic arrestâ is the âinability to love,â she said. âTo love one has to be able to connect with oneâs own and anotherâs true self, and this is very difficult for a narcissist as his existence is focused on enlarging and constantly defending his gargantuan false self.â The result explains volumes: âPeople who are unable to empathize with and love others relate to them through control and domination.â
Mika and Burkle differ somewhat on the development of abstract thought. âSome narcissists are brilliant, though one-sided, abstract thinkers,â Mika said. âThey may create seminal works in their domains, but their emotional growth is stunted, and this manifests in their problematic relationships with others. However, in politics, one does not need to be a brilliant narcissist to advance.â
Trumpâs well-known lack of interest in reading anything at all is typical of the type, though perhaps extreme. His inability to present any details to bolster claims about âterrificâ deals or plans is not a masterful strategy of playing things close to the vest. All heâs hiding is a handful of Jokers.
Mature politics vs. bullying
In âCharacter Disorders,â Burkle writes:
Despite their seductive talents and uncanny ability to speak to universal concerns of every citizen, [bullies turned autocrats] never attain mature abstract reasoning and avoid discussions and debates that demand levels of reasoning, observation, and objectivity, or issues that do not personally boost their own power and prestige. They expend emotional energy covering up their limitations and turn to lies, fabrications, childish insults, and unrelenting boastful opinions of themselves.
This would be clear in Trumpâs case if we simply compared his statements with other public figures, Burkle told me, and pointed to South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg as an example. âWhen Trump called Buttigieg some stupid adolescent name, like bullies always do, the news went wild,â Burkle said. âThey went right to Buttigieg trying to get a response, thinking that Buttigieg was going to give something right back to him, at the same level. The way he surprised everybody, he just looked at them and said, âI donât care.â And thatâs way you have to be. Buttigieg totally understands Trump.â
But Buttigieg also understands his privileged position as a white male. The congresswomen of color Trump is currently attacking have no such privilege, and attacks against them are simultaneously collective attacks on targeted communities they have a duty to defend â a complicating factor they deal with in different ways, but always with a level of maturity that Trump could never even dream of. In the four womenâs joint press conference responding to Trumpâs attacks, they struck a common theme of not taking the bait, while at the same time standing up for those being attacked, invoking Americaâs promise, and vowing to keep fighting to fulfill it. Unlike Trumpâs many attacks on America, they conveyed care and concern for how weâve fallen short.
âWe donât leave the things that we love,â said Ocasio-Cortez. âAnd when we love this country, what that means is that we propose the solutions to fix it.â
âThis country was founded on the radical idea that we are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights,â Omar said. âAnd yes, we have a long way before we fully live up to those values. It is for this reason precisely that we have to take action when a president is openly violating the oath he took to the Constitution of the United States and the core values we aspire to.â
âI encourage the American people and all of us, in this room and beyond, to not take the bait,â said Pressley. âThis is a disruptive distraction from the issues of care, concern and consequence to the American people that we were sent here with a decisive mandate from our constituents to work on, everything from reducing the cost of prescription drugs to addressing our affordable housing crisis, to ensuring that the American people have more than health insurance, but health care.â
Finally there was Tlaib, who added: âWe cannot allow these hateful actions by the president to distract us from the critical work to hold this administration accountable to the inhumane conditions at the border, that is separating children from their loved ones and caging them up in illegal, horrific conditions.â
âWe can easily observe the work of a properly functioning conscience in the actions of the four congresswomen whom Trump chose as most recent targets of his narcissistic rage,â Mika said. âIt is no accident. Malignantly narcissistic individuals react with the greatest rage to those who somehow evoke their sense of weakness, inferiority and imperfection, and individuals representing a higher level of moral development often do just that by their sheer existence.â
Whatâs more, Mika added, âtarget status is magnifiedâ if the target in question happens to represent a minority:
⌠because few things irk a narcissistic bully like a morally and emotionally advanced âother.â The ideals of equality, inclusion, justice and compassionate concern for people that these congresswomen espouse are alien to Trump and his psychologically similar sycophants and followers whose worldview is based on narcissistic us versus them distinctions. Such ideals not only conflict with their desires for power, but also expose their deficits of conscience and thus are considered especially threatening.
Collective narcissism: The bullyâs backup gang
Finally, we need to consider the role of collective narcissism â both narrowly within the power structure supporting a narcissistic leader, and more broadly in his popular base. Regarding the latter, Mika said, âTrumpâs bullying behavior serves a restorative function, patching up holes in the false self of his followers as well. The scapegoating tactics used by him make it possible for him and his followers to retain the notion of their superiority and blameless victimhood.â
As noted above, Trump has attacked America numerous times, so thereâs a surreal quality to his scapegoating these four women of color for their far more thoughtful critiques. But itâs precisely the accuracy of those critiques that makes them so painful for collective narcissists to bear, and so necessary for them to be rid of:
This is how scapegoating, the fuel of collective narcissism, works â it shifts our unacknowledged sins onto select others who may differ from us only in some details (Freud called it narcissism of small differences) and so it makes it justifiable in our eyes to punish them for those projected sins. We thus purge our individual and collective sense of inferiority, shame and guilt without ever acknowledging it, and this lets us to maintain the narcissistic image of ourselves as pure, intact, and yes, always superior to others.
Then thereâs the narrow form of collective narcissism, which Burkle writes about in âCharacter Disordersâ:
When the political party aligns itself with the narcissist, it becomes âoperationally and collectively narcissistic.â Once collective narcissism exists, the autocrat can be assured of sustaining his power base, demanding total loyalty, with followers speaking from the same playbook and daily-drilled sound bites, where disloyalty is severely punished.
More pointedly, Burkle told me, âIf the collective narcissism pack is large enough, and powerful enough, itâs almost impossible to get the narcissist, the autocrat, out of power.â
So long as Democratic leaders and the media remain oblivious to or ignorant of whatâs actually going on psychologically â not just with Trump, but his followers as well â they will continue to misjudge the situation, even as they repeatedly say how abnormal it is. And the danger will only continue to grow.
This situation is abnormal in American history. But itâs depressingly normal for a country where a narcissistic bully has gained power. We need to reorient ourselves around that fundamental fact, and stop pretending that whatâs been normal in the past provides any sound guidance now. Clinging to that illusion is, in itself, a subtle form of collective narcissism: the belief that âIt canât happen here,â the refusal to look ourselves in the mirror and confront what we truly are â which is the only way we can ever live up to what we wish to be.
