Trump Destroys

We are now in the Age of the Psychopath

In the last few days, Trump set out to burn down the world. He enacted a series of environmental rollbacks that poured gasoline on the fire that is the climate crisis.

Chief among them was the repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, decades of hard evidence that showed greenhouse gases were a threat to human health. It underpinned almost all climate legislation in the country that is the second largest contributor to the crisis.

That’s not all. Trump, who calls climate change a hoax, also dismantled all federal emissions regulations and changed legal definitions. He allowed commercial fishing in the only marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean, 4,000 square miles that is home to dolphins, endangered whales, sea turtles and deep-sea corals.

This is on top of pulling the US out of the Paris Accords, a legally-binding treaty to tackle the climate crisis.

Trump is not an American problem. Everyone on the planet is going to suffer because of his actions. And that existential threat that he poses is only going to become more of a reality for one simple reason: it is who he is at the most fundamental level.

Trump is a man who believes in absolutely nothing beyond his own advancement. America, the Constitution, religion, allies, laws, the planet, life itself. None of it matters.

Wreck the climate. Destroy nature. Bomb other countries. Oversee DOGE stopping aid and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Encourage Iran’s young people to rebel with the promise of support, then sit back and watch them slaughtered under regime bullets. Shrug off the murders of American citizens at the hands of ICE.

He can do all this because he lacks any shred of empathy. Trump looks like you and me, but inside he’s a different species. He feels nothing.

He’s the very definition of a psychopath.

This isn’t a base insult.

Psychopath is one of those words that gets thrown around, like fascism, and tends to lose its meaning. We all think it means Hannibal Lecter chewing on the liver of a census taker with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

The truth is, it’s a spectrum disorder. We all have a smattering of psychopathy — it’s how we manage to deal with day-to-day problems. Get to a five or six on a scale of ten and it’s the kind of person you recognise who makes your life miserable — the school bullies, the terrible bosses, the destructive lover.

Above that level and things get dangerous.

Psychopaths are everywhere. Their particular psychological make-up propels them to the top in politics, business, the church, the military. In fact, it compels them to rise to the top.

When that psychopath becomes the most powerful person in the world, then everyone is in peril.

Not sure if Trump qualifies? He’s just a TV entertainer and failed businessman, right? Well, you can play this game at home. Here’s Psychology Today’s checklist for identifying a psychopath:

• Glibness/superficial charm

• Grandiose sense of self-worth

• Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom

• Pathological lying

• Conning/manipulative

• Lack of remorse or guilt

• Shallow affect (reduced emotional responses)

• Callous/lack of empathy

• Parasitic lifestyle

• Poor behavioural controls

• Promiscuous sexual behaviour

• Early behavioural problems

• Lack of realistic, long-term goals

• Impulsivity

• Irresponsibility

• Failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions

• Many short-term marital relationships

• Criminal versatility (commits diverse types of crimes)

As an aside, there’s often confusion between sociopaths and psychopaths. Sociopaths are hot-headed, often unstable and find it difficult to maintain normal lives or steady jobs. Psychopaths are cold-blooded and can blend in by appearing normal.

Psychopaths are considered more dangerous due to their ability to plan, manipulate and detach emotionally.

Educated and informed people like to steer clear of hyperbole. We don’t have Lex Luthor or Blofeld in the real world. They’re exaggerated super-villains to spice up fictions.

The mistake that has been made repeatedly and which has led the world to the edge of this precipice is that far too many people refuse to recognise the current US President for what he really is. It’s psychologically easier to pretend he’s just a man-child, petulant, stupid, incompetent.

Trump is capable of literally anything.

Any atrocity. Because he feels nothing.

He’s not like us. Many in his administration aren’t like us. They’ve been chosen in his image. Psychopathy is how we got a global network of paedophile traffickers that was covered up by the most powerful people in the world.

This should inform all thinking about the way forward. Whether he’s really prepared to cede power at the midterms or step down when this term ends. The real reason for ICE, the best-funded group of enforcers in America. What will happen when he dies and who will replace him.

We are all in danger.

Trump is the most consequential person of the current century for all the wrong reasons. When his time is finally done the world is going to be a very different place and it’s going to be virtually impossible to put things back how they were before.

Day by day, step by step, he is systematically dismantling everything. Environmental protections, the United Nations, NATO which has kept the peace since the last world war. Years to build up, seconds to be smashed to pieces.

Any future US government just won’t be able to put all this right because it’ll be dealing with the global chaos of Trump’s actions.

The one ray of light in all this is that many of the things Trump is destroying were tooled for a twentieth century world that is now gone. From the wreckage, there’s an opportunity to build something that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. Arrangements that can give us the safer, more equal, free from fear existence we all desperately want.

That’s a long time to wait with a lot of misery in the meantime. For now I’d implore everyone to consider Trump’s true nature and let that colour any planned resistance. Don’t sit back and wait for elections that might never happen or never be free and fair.

The fight needs to be furious. It needs to be on every level. And it needs to be now.

* Disclaimer: Thirteen years ago I wrote a piece entitled The Age of the Psychopath is over. The thesis was that technological advancements should prevent psychopaths rising to the top in the shadows, as they usually do, and that exposed to the light of information they’d fail. It didn’t take into account that there would be a significant chunk of the American electorate who wanted a psychopath in charge.