Trump’s Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Sociopathy: The Proximate Cause of Significantly More Covid-19 Deaths

NOTE:  Since the original  publication of this post, Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have skyrocketed to over 120,000. 

In a prior post, I provided a medical explanation of President Trump’s mental illnesses and the dangers posed by his inability to control his impulses. Public policy and communications flowing from the White House bear a direct relationship to his two untreatable personality disorders: Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (commonly referred to as Sociopathy).

NPD causes him to disregard the the concerns of others and solely focus upon himself. The driving force behind his every thought and action is his self image and what he perceives (or fears) that the public will think of him and his presidency.

For example, Trump obviously harbored a false belief that the spread of Covid-19 would make him look personally weak and that a quarantine would precipitate an economic downturn that would harm his reelection prospects. The result: he ignored critically important expert advice, sat in denial, attacked others, and made excuses for his near two months of inaction. This refusal to take action and set national guidelines allowed the virus to spread faster and in more communities across the US, causing dramatically increased rates of Covid-19 deaths. Indeed, Dr. Fauci publicly admitted that the delay in taking aggressive prophylactic measures (clearly caused by these two mental illnesses) has caused — and will continue to cause — unnecessary additional American deaths. The additional number of deaths clearly runs in the thousands. Dr. Fauci stated:

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say, that if you had a process that was ongoing, and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.”

Trump’s Sociopathy has also played a part in his actions and inaction here. A severe lack of empathy enables him to solely focus upon himself and allows him to easily disregard the safety and well being of others. For example, he refused to allow a cruise ship’s passengers — some of whom were infected and needed proper medical care to stay alive — to disembark because their Covid-19 cases would increase the number of cases in the US. He stated openly that letting the sick passengers off of the ship would increase the Covid-19 case numbers. He stated: “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” He had no concern for the lives of the passengers, only the number of US Covid-19 cases, somehow believing that the new total number would make him look bad in the eyes of the public. In late March, he stated that “Easter is important to me” and that people should begin congregating in houses of worship on Easter Sunday. His disregard for human lives — other than his own — caused him to advocate for both normal Easter celebrations and the premature reopening of businesses. His statements flew in the face of the experts’ consensus that thousands more will die if quarantines are ended too early. This disregard for the lives of others is a classic symptom of Sociopathy.

As long as the media refuses to publicly cover this story, the citizenry — i.e., the voting public — will remain in the dark and continue to be aghast and confused by the actions and statements of this president. A full and open airing of his mental illnesses would reduce reliance on his routinely false public statements, rightly impair his credibility, and place pressure upon him to constrain his impulses.