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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 8th, 2023

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  • I don’t know how you concluded that I was using “narcissist” as an insult, because I wasn’t.

    From the linked article, written 7 years ago, only a handful of months into his presidency when there was still a swell of mental health professionals maintaining that they should remain impartial:

    Trump is an undisputed poster boy for narcissism. He demonstrates in pure form every single symptom described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM) criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, which I wrote in 1978. But lots of successful people are extremely narcissistic without being mentally ill — think most celebrities, many politicians, and a fair percentage of writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, and professors. To qualify for narcissistic personality disorder, an individual’s selfish, unempathetic preening must be accompanied by significant distress or impairment. Trump certainly causes severe distress and impairment in others, but his narcissism doesn’t seem to affect him that way.

    In the 7 years since this article was written we’ve had plenty of people testify under oath about his severe distress and impairment, if that’s the criteria that was unmet at that point in time.