TRUMP’S WORSENING NARCISSISM

THE ROAD TO ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL CHAOS

In this passage, Manuel Hinds uses a fictional dialogue to analyze the destructive governance of "The Prince"—a clear stand-in for Donald Trump—by examining his behavior through both economic and psychological lenses. The discussion argues that The Prince’s leadership is driven not by strategy or principle but by narcissism, impulsiveness, and a compulsive need for personal validation. Psychologist Francisco explains that this narcissism, stemming from deep psychological wounds, leads to chaotic, self-contradictory decisions aimed at maintaining a grandiose image, even at the cost of national stability. Economically, The Prince’s policies—especially tax cuts for the ultra-rich funded by slashing social spending and imposing misguided tariffs—are depicted as incoherent and damaging, exacerbating inequality and undermining human capital, the key driver of growth in the knowledge economy. The overall result is a dangerously erratic administration that prioritizes personal ego over national interest, fueling social division, economic instability, and the slow erosion of democratic norms.

“Hey Jack! You will have to learn a little about economics and psychology to describe how things are evolving under The Prince’s guidance…if you can call a guide someone who walks like a drunken sailor.”

“A very special drunken sailor, Pere, because he seems to sway in the most destructive direction under all circumstances. Sometimes I suspect he does so on purpose to maximize the damage, but then I think that knowing how to maximize havoc would require a sophistication he obviously lacks. Moreover, as a narcissist who believes he is successful, he doesn’t want to fail. Narcissists only become suicidal when facing undeniable defeat, like Hitler seeing the whites of the eyes of the Russians surrounding him in Berlin. The Prince enjoys being destructive, but he thinks he is destroying his enemies while also becoming the best president of the United States, overshadowing Washington and Lincoln.”

“When narcissists think they have lost the game,” said Pere, “they want to destroy everything in sight. Hitler sent an order to destroy Germany when the Russians stormed Berlin. I don’t want to be around if one day The Prince finds that nobody wants him. But even when they are not in their most destructive mode, I believe people don’t understand how damaging his swings and sways are. They have been deceived by the stock market recoveries that occur at the end of one of his cycles of, for example, raising tariffs only to lower them within hours. They think that recoveries erase the damage from the preceding falls. Yet, each of these cycles inflicts enormous wounds that aren’t easy to heal, directly discouraging entrepreneurs who planned to invest in the affected sector and indirectly undermining the country’s credibility, which then has terrible, destructive effects in the future.

“What motivates him?” asked Jack.

“I think we make a mistake when we try to understand what he is doing based only on his limited understanding and unlimited ignorance. We are ignoring his psychological processes, which I believe are taking control of his behavior and that of this government. I brought Francisco with me,” said Pere, introducing a new man to the group, “He is a psychologist specialized in Narcissism. He is willing to chat with us about The Prince’s psychological processes.”

HIS ULTIMATE DESIRES

From Personal to National Chaos

Francisco began his chat.

“The only way to understand a person’s attitudes and goals is by observing their actions—"You will know them by their fruits”—and, with one exception, the results we see from The Prince create a stream of chaos. The exception is his transactional attitude, his willingness to do anything based on the personal benefits gained from it. This is the only consistent trait in The Prince’s personality; he is consistently inconsistent in every decision except that he is always seeking to attain immediate personal gain.

“This attitude fosters the incredible disorder that emanates from him, as his immediate gain can push him in infinite directions and contradictions in one moment, and in opposite directions only seconds later, as new offers arise.

“This disorder stems from his narcissism, which reacts to the challenges that reality poses to his grandiose self-image. If he is criticized for not having a plan, he creates one; if he is criticized because the plan is silly, he claims that he always intended to backtrack, and then he backtracks on that backtrack, denying any mistake, only to repeat this pattern in all areas of policy, thus creating a disorder that evolves into chaos.

“According to Carl Jung, who established the foundations for analyzing this pattern of human behavior, most people misunderstand narcissism primarily because the term is associated with Narcissus, a mythical young man who fell in love with his reflection in a pond and died after falling in because he could not stop seeing himself in its surface. Thus, most people believe that narcissists are in love with themselves, while in reality, they suffer from what Jung called “the narcissistic wound,” which is a terrible inner void caused by the total absence of self-esteem, in turn resulting from severe childhood abuse. The wound is so terrible that the narcissist constructs an external image of grandiosity as compensation and dedicates their life to justifying it, extracting validation from others through manipulation. To manipulate these individuals, narcissists need to confuse those around them into believing they are grandiose, mistaking weakness for strength. They achieve this confusion by overwhelming others with contradictory ideas and false realities, by gaslighting them, and by projecting their own vices onto them.

“Thus, narcissists endure by controlling people to compel them to validate their dreams of grandiosity, which they realize by creating a parallel reality and making people believe it is true. It is difficult to describe The Prince more accurately. Narcissism neatly explains why he makes bold decisions only to reverse them hours later, his macho stance when announcing a new policy, and his PACO attitude (Prince Always Chickens Out) when met with resistance, as well as the chaotic proliferation of this behavior across all areas of policy.

“Narcissism also explains the growing chaos he creates around him. Because he has a void inside, he lacks the consistency needed to maintain the inflexible image he wishes to project, and he must improvise when confronted with the complex questions posed by a complicated society. He doesn’t understand how some decisions impact others, and how everything must change to keep the country stable if one key policy is altered. When these effects and countereffects appear, or when other people tell him they will appear, he panics and backtracks, once and again, which he does saying he is not backtracking, or that he had planned to backtrack from the very beginning, until he becomes more entangled in his own chaos, weakening even more his self-esteem and worsening his internal void.

“It is because of this progression to chaos that the narcissist’s behavior becomes worse by the day, as he becomes older and old lies come back to get him, and as he becomes more involved in ever more complex decisions. If we base our projections of the future on The Prince’s psychological processes, we can forecast a worsening of what we are seeing: more swings and sways, more contradictions and reversals, and more explosions of blind rage as that which we saw yesterday turned on yet another psychologically challenged figure, Elon Musk.

“We can inspect the development of The Prince’s narcissism by looking at his economic policies in his second mandate.”

THE INCOMING ECONOMIC CHAOS

“The Ultimate Objective: Pumping Money Upwards

“The incoming economic chaos had been present since the campaign, during which he continuously added new reforms to attract more groups of supporters. This is a common trait among campaigning politicians; they all participate in it. However, they strive to design these new policies so that those necessary for attracting new groups do not contradict the existing ones. To achieve this, they need qualified advisors who can understand the complexities of a modern economy. To select these capable advisors, one must be discerning enough to differentiate a good advisor from a bad one. The Prince’s originality stemmed from the fact that he did not meet these requirements and hired yes-men who also lacked these virtues. In this way, they designed policies that were not only flawed but also contradictory.

One of the most egregious examples of this is his economic policies, which are rooted in a simplistic view of the economy. As is fitting for someone with narcissistic tendencies, these policies lack internal order and a guiding principle that would create unity and coherence between clearly stated objectives and the means to achieve them. Thus, we need to attempt to discern the fundamental ideas that shaped The Prince’s strategy—if the sum of his policies can indeed be considered a strategy.

“The most fundamental change at the core of The Prince’s reforms is the blatant redistribution of resources from the poor, middle classes, and even those who are not-so-rich to the ultra-rich. This feat is achieved through drastically reducing investments in human capital for the benefit of the entire country, specifically in health and education, to also drastically lower the taxes paid by the ultra-rich.

“Economically, the reform is stupid because in the new Knowledge Economy, the wealth of a country is given by the level and quality of its human capital. The best example of this truth is the United States, which has grown faster than all other rich countries based on its rich human capital. For example, it grew 20 percentage points more than the EU since the beginning of this century, primarily due to productivity improvements, which were driven by enhanced human capital. The Prince based his economic strategy, without saying so, of course, on stopping this process and actually reversing it, by cutting one trillion dollars from the federal government social expenditures to use the liberated funds to reduce the taxes paid by less than 1% of the population.

Thus, the transfer is extremely expensive in terms of diminishing the country’s ability to continue developing the nation. It is also very costly in terms of exacerbating the concentration of income and wealth within a small segment of society and, conversely, worsening the plight of an underclass emerging in the United States, comprising those who have been left behind by the technological revolution that generates new wealth in the Knowledge Economy. These marginalized individuals are the source of resentments destabilizing the country not only socially but also politically, which will ultimately lead to economic instability. The only peaceful way of resolving this problem is to invest in the human capital of these people, so that they can integrate in the new economy and society. The Prince is blocking this adjustment to provide more money to people who are not being constrained by the taxes they pay.

The argument for reducing taxes for these individuals is that it would provide more resources for their enterprises and allow them to invest for greater growth. However, the lack of capital is not a significant constraint for the private sector, especially not for the 1% who would benefit from this tax reduction. On the contrary, the ready availability of resources in the American economy has been one of the country’s competitive advantages. Up to the moment when The Prince was inaugurated, the dollar was strong and investors all over the world wanted to invest in the United States. Ironically, this is changing because of these and other reforms championed by The Prince.

These ill-conceived policies that are killing the appeal of the United States as a place for investors include the very same defunding of human capital investment, the tariff policies invented by The Prince to supposedly collect taxes from foreign exporters to the United States, and the infinitely stupid attacks on the universities. Altogether, these policies are not only complicating the short-term economic situation but also causing a flight of human capital that will have terrible consequences for the United States.

The Entangling

“Starting from these twisted ideas, everything worsened because The Prince chose absurd policies to attain his equally absurd objectives. One of the worst of these ideas was the use of tariffs, in addition to the parallel reduction in social spending, to fund the tax reduction to the superrich by increasing import tariffs, which The Prince believed were paid by the foreign exporters, not by the purchasers of the imported goods and services. In a process that deserves another article, and that everybody has witnessed, The Prince went back and forth, lying about what he was attaining, until he declared a trade war against China that was actually against the rest of the world, with terrible consequences for the entire world but worst for the United States.

“After proclaiming that he was winning this war, he ultimately recognized that he could not deal with China with one of his messages in his social network:

I like President Xi of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!! (TS: 04 Jun 06:17 UTC)^[1]

The defeats multiplied over the past week, both domestically and internationally, prompting chaotic responses, such as the de facto annulment of a deal with the UK regarding zero tariffs on British steel, followed by an increase to 25%. Additionally, a highly entertaining verbal confrontation with Elon Musk captivated the world. While amusing, that confrontation was also ominous because it revealed how the person able to launch a nuclear war loses control when his ego is challenged.

“Don’t you feel that this will soon end in tears?”

…..

Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He has worked in 35 countries as a division chief and then as a consultant to the World Bank. He was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His website is manuelhinds.com

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^[1] https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114623632387180206