Former President Donald Trump regularly makes self-pitying statements about the multiple legal challenges he's facing after having been indicted on 91 felony counts in four different congressional jurisdictions.
The Washington Post this week talked with Paul Elovitz, a psychohistorian at New Jersey's Ramapo College who creates psychological profiles of past presidents and who believes that Trump's habit of making himself out to be a martyr figure likely stems from having an unloving family.
"When he’s in trouble, he goes back to this sense of grievance and the grandiose language," Elovitz explained. "Grandiosity is a coverup for a hurting little kid who can never fill that pit of neediness, that sense of grievance that goes back to when his mother couldn’t give him the love he needed at a very young age."
POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?
Former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who knows Trump on a far more personal level than Elovitz, shared a similar assessment about the former president's psychological makeup.
"To protect his incredibly fragile ego, he needs to create this victimization,” Cohen explained to the Post. “The problem can’t be him, so who else can it be? That’s where the martyrdom comes in: He has to shift the blame on someone else, and then he can say, ‘The only one standing in between them and you is me.’”
