What monsters are made of
I will be the first to admit that my long experience with only two narcissistic personalities hardly makes me an expert on the type. I claim no expertise. I will say this, however, that decades of living with narcissistic personalities made it easy to predict how they would behave in certain circumstances. That experience proved applicable to others similarly afflicted, including Donald Trump.
When many (including Hillary Clinton) were saying that we had to beat Trump decisively in 2020 in order for him to concede, I held fast to the opinion that he would never concede no matter how badly he was defeated — and I said as much in print. When many were insisting he would resign the presidency at the very end of his term and allow Mike Pence to pardon him I doubted it, and said as much in print. On the shelf next to me as I write is a book by Umberto Eco I won in a bet with a friend. He said Trump would flee the country to Russia within 30 days after leaving office. I said not in a million years.
There is, in short, a certain dispiriting inevitability about people with narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD for short. It made much of what Trump did predictable in the broad strokes. It makes Vladimir Putin similarly predictable.
It is therefore my sad duty, brothers and sisters, to tell you that I fear the situation in Ukraine will not end anytime soon. If anything Putin, who has NPD in spades, will get worse, not better. The narrative that Vladimir Putin is on his last legs and is about to turn around and go home is wholly inconsistent with NPD. The hope that he is in failing health and will soon be yielding to wiser counsel is charmingly naive and reminds me of my earliest experience with the type. You know not what with which you deal. NPD is what monsters are made of, the monsters of our worst nightmares.
The first thing when dealing with NPD that you must realise is they don’t respond to normal words with normal human emotions. You can deliver speeches of pure magnificent reason, appeal to their humanity, plead for compromise and beg for fairness and you will get nothing. People with NPD are soulless and unreachable. What 999 other people would do in the same circumstance they will do differently.
That’s why the Republican narrative of today is so insane and counterintuitive. Who would have predicted six years ago that Republicans would side with Russia in a heartless invasion? No one. No one, that is, except someone who understood what narcissists do and knew that Republicans were in the thrall of a man “suffering” from NPD.
I put the word “suffering” above in quotes because I believe it is not, in the clinical sense, a wholly accurate verb. I don’t think narcissistic personalities suffer from their condition at all. I think they like it. Given the choice to be any other way they’d stick with their affliction. It’s one of those rare instances in the human experience where the patient is glad to have the disease. And it is the stuff of evil.
But the real power of NPD comes not from the narcissist themselves, but from the people around them, their enablers. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin both have millions of enablers. It is from these people they take their power. And for their enablers they have nothing but contempt.
I fear Ukraine will remain in Russian hands for years unless Putin is overthrown. As with coronavirus, there could come a day when we learn to accept Putin’s presence in Ukraine with weary resignation, the way we learned to live with Russia in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I wish the news were better, but years of experience tells me it can’t be any other way. I hope I am wrong. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.