In my last two posts, I wrote about how modern media have created images glorifying certain politicians in order to sell them to us, and discussed those aspects of our nature that leave us vulnerable to exploitation by a so-called leader, whether king, president, televangelist, or cult guru.

Today I want to speculate about what goes on inside the heads of some politicians, along with members of their coteries.

Anyone who aspires to the presidency must have an enormous ego. And once in office, he is surrounded by flatterers, told he is the “leader of the free world,” and given the “nuclear football”—the power to launch a nuclear strike, to kill hundreds of thousands of people and countless other creatures anywhere in the world.

Even without nuclear weapons, he can order mass murders around the globe, and on the flimsiest of pretexts.

However, some of our presidents have promoted legislation that benefited ordinary people. For example, President Lyndon B. Johnson won passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and signed Medicare and Medicaid into existence.

He also escalated the Vietnam War, supposedly because he didn’t want to appear “soft on Communism,” increasing the number of United States troops there from 16,000 to over 500,000. Thirty to thirty-five thousand of those Americans lost their lives, while slaughtering 1 million to 1.4 million Vietnamese men, women, and children.

I remember those marches on Washington in the 1960s, when we chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

Johnson was succeeded by Nixon, who opened diplomatic relations with China, negotiated arms limitations treaties, established the Environmental Protection Agency, withdrew our troops from Vietnam, and ended the draft.

But before the withdrawal, he and adviser Henry Kissinger ordered secret carpet bombings of Laos and Cambodia—two officially neutral nations—and North Vietnam, killing as many as 150,000 civilians in Cambodia and 20,000-50,000 in Laos. I don’t have figures for Vietnam, but unexploded cluster bombs and landmines are still killing people in those countries.

I don’t have space to list the good and bad done by all our presidents, not even all of those who held office during my lifetime. One, however, seems an utter disaster. I bet you know who I’m talking about.

Gallons of digital ink have been spilled in articles attempting to psychoanalyze the current occupant of the White House (with a few quarts dropped on members of his inner circle). Is Trump merely a spoiled child? A jealous ignoramus? Or, as some mental health professionals have described him, a malignant narcissist?

I propose another diagnosis that would be more apt. How many of the items in this checklist from Simply Psychology do you think describe Trump?

• A lack of empathy and emotional depth
• Manipulative behavior, narcissism, and superficial charm
• Impulsivity and irresponsibility
• An inability to form genuine emotional relationships
• A lack of guilt, shame, or moral conscience
• Deceitfulness, habitual lying
• Grandiosity
• Tends to be successful

And an additional item, from Science Direct:

• Sadism. As others have said, cruelty is the point.

In my opinion, Trump displays all of these tendencies.

They are the distinguishing characteristics of a psychopath.

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Trump is not alone in this. He surrounds himself with people who share his worldview, such as Elon Musk, who opined that “®he fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Then there’s Kristi Noem, famous for murdering her puppy in a gravel pit and for strutting around in front of near-naked inmates in El Salvador’s torture prison wearing her $50,000 watch.

Attorney John Yoo, while working for the G.W. Bush administration, wrote justifications for torturing prisoners, for warrantless spying on U.S. citizens, and for the “unitary executive” theory—in other words, presidential dictatorship. Early in his career, Yoo clerked for Clarence Thomas (no surprise there). In 2020 Trump appointed him to the National Board for Education Sciences. He is still teaching law at UC Berkeley.

According to the Journal of Applied Psychology, men with psychopathic tendencies are somewhat more likely than other men to rise to the C-suite in business and to be considered effective leaders, but are actually somewhat less effective in their positions than others. The same study showed that women with those tendencies are less likely to rise. Again, no surprise—men, and many women, kowtow to a male boss and resent a female one.

Moving down the social scale, we have the mobs of whites who attended public lynchings, took photos of themselves smiling over the bodies of those they’d tortured, and mailed those photos to family members as souvenirs.  Today we have ICE thugs.

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These are grim times, but as I have said on previous occasions, if we fight back we have a good chance of winning. If we give up, we consign ourselves to perpetual servitude. So what can we do?

Fortunately, the majority of human beings are not psychopaths. I am buoyed by recent protests in Minneapolis, Portland, and other cities, and by recent polls showing that 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of ICE, and of Trump.

Of those who disapprove only a small number are willing and able to take action—but that’s all we need. Extensive research by Professor Erica Chenoweth of Harvard University and Maria J. Stephan of the Horizon Project has shown that when around 3.5% of a population participated in sustained nonviolent protest, their government folded.   Interestingly, violent protests were only half as likely to succeed. Their findings were published in 2011, in Why Civil Resistance Works.

A word of caution:  Since the initial research, Chenoweth has observed that both nonviolent and armed resistance have been decreasing in efficacy since 2010, concluding that this is the result of authoritarian regimes learning from history, coordinating with one another, and training their armies and police to discourage defections within their ranks. Consequently, civil resistance movements should take these changes into account and alter their tactics accordingly. Just one example—if security forces are unlikely to defect, then activists need to concentrate on peeling away economic elites or other segments of society that may be more “wobbly.”

Readers, we need to study and learn from those successes and failures. And we need to be part of the 3.5%.