Last night a friend showed me an astounding article about the life of a well-known celebrity and the ghostwriter who helped make him into a celebrity. The ghostwriter is journalist Tony Schwartz. The celebrity is presidential candidate Donald Trump.
I was particularly struck by how this article illustrated the primary characteristics of a sociopath. I'm going to list quotes from the article of those sociopathic characteristics (as seen in Donald Trump), along with a title of the sociopathic trait being illustrated.
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Lies with ease:But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One — when it was so easily refuted — he is likely to lie about anything.”
Projects a false image:Many Americans, however, saw Trump as a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business—a mythical image that Schwartz had helped create.
Lack of responsibility:“I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
Full of themselves:The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.
Attention whore:“I was shocked,” Schwartz told me. “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.”
Does not really listen:But the discussion was soon hobbled by what Schwartz regards as one of Trump’s most essential characteristics: “He has no attention span.”
Easily bored:Even when Schwartz pressed him, Trump seemed to remember almost nothing of his youth, and made it clear that he was bored.
Superficial:Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial.
Full of themselves:...it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes...
Does not really listen:“That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source—information comes in easily digestible sound bites.” He added, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.
Manipulator:“He was playing people,” Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always in a calculated way. Instead of saying goodbye at the end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with “You’re the greatest!”
Full of themselves:Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention.
Lies with ease:“Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least
ought to be true.”
Shameless:Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”
Easily angered when challenged:When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts — not an ideal quality in a head of state.
Game-player:“I try not to take any of what’s happened too seriously,” Trump says in the book. “The real excitement is playing the game.”
Lack of empathy, pursuit of power:In his journal, Schwartz wrote, “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.”
Pursuit of power:“One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ”
Attention whore (parasite):Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!” In his journal, he describes the hours he spent with Trump as “draining” and “deadening.”
Conspires with other sociopaths:...strong whiff of cronyism that hovered over some deals.
Lack of morality / ethics:Schwartz wrote in his journal that “almost everything” about the hotel deal had “an immoral cast.” But as the ghostwriter he was “trying hard to find my way around” behavior that he considered “if not reprehensible, at least morally questionable.”
Deceiver:But O’Brien believes that Trump used the book to turn almost every step of his life, both personal and professional, into a “glittering fable.”
Disingenuous, fake:As far as Schwartz could tell, Trump spent very little time with his family and had no close friends.
"It's just business" (nothing personal, lack of empathy):Schwartz says of Trump, “He’d like people when they were helpful, and turn on them when they weren’t. It wasn’t personal. He’s a transactional man—it was all about what you could do for him.”
Selfish, self-absorbed:“He was on a total run of complete and utter self-absorption,” Barrett says, adding, “It’s kind of like now.”
Lies with ease:Schwartz said that when he was writing the book “the greatest percentage of Trump’s assets was in casinos, and he made it sound like each casino was more successful than the last. But every one of them was failing.” He went on, “I think he was just spinning. I don’t think he could have believed it at the time. He was losing millions of dollars a day.
Superiority complex:An image of the book’s cover flashes onscreen as Trump explains that, as the “master,” he is now seeking an apprentice. O’Brien said, “ ‘The Apprentice’ is mythmaking on steroids. There’s a straight line from the book to the show to the 2016 campaign.”
Lies with ease:In my phone interview with Trump, he initially said of Schwartz, “Tony was very good. He was the co-author.” But he dismissed Schwartz’s account of the writing process. “He didn’t write the book,” Trump told me. “I wrote the book. I wrote the book. It was my book. And it was a No. 1 best-seller, and one of the best-selling business books of all time. Some say it was the best-selling business book ever.” (It is not.) Howard Kaminsky, the former Random House head, laughed and said, “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!”
Lack of empathy:People are dispensable and disposable in Trump’s world. If Trump is elected President, he warned, “the millions of people who voted for him and believe that he represents their interests will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows—that he couldn’t care less about them.”
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