While Donald Trump and Charles Manson are both charismatic cult leaders, both sociopaths, and both suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, obviously there are huge differences. Trump is a highly intelligent and successful businessman who has never been convicted of a felony. Manson was a murderer who spent most of his life in prison.
The two share the common traits of most cult leaders:
[ul]
[li] They act larger than life[/li][li] Cult members are subjugated for the good of the cult leader.[/li][li] An ‘Us versus The’ attitude prevails.[/li][li] Feelings are devalued or manipulated.[/li][li] Questioning and dissent are not tolerated.[/li][li] The ends justify the means.[/li][li] Lies are repeated so often they seem true.[/li][li] Cult leaders enrich themselves at members’ expense.[/li][li] Communication is coercvive or deceptive.[/li][li] Sameness is encouraged.[/li][li] Doing what the leader wants is presented as the path to enlightenment or happiness.[/li][/ul]
but just how closely would their detailed psychiatric diagnoses match?
I just re-watched this video, which points out some uncanny similarities in their speech patterns. They both[ul]
[li] Exhibit cartoonish confidence. They’re unable to admit faults; they love to exaggerate.[/li][li] Frequently divert attention. They answer questions with “What about?” or “Tu quoque.” They frequently switch subjects.[/li][li] Exude a sense of Moral Superiority.[/li][li] Have aimless, stream-of-consciousness speech. Listen to Trump babble when asked about the Iran nuclear deal, or watch a rant about clean air segue into a mention of the Miss Universe contest. (Manson’s speech examples in the YouTube seem more coherent than Trump’s.)[/li][/ul]
Manson and Trump don’t really compare that easily, at least on the surface. Perhaps at one time they might have?
But the Wikipedia article on Narcissistic Personality Disorder seems very Trump-specific from my point of view.
Trump to me seems more “plain evil” while Manson seems more “batshit crazy evil”. Trump is not batshit crazy with aliens talking to him and murdering random people with his own hands, just evil scum.
Trump does much more damage overall because he is able to mass-produce his evil and get people to “buy” (i.e. support) it.
The part at 1:33 was pretty clearly just Trump being playfully cocky. He knew that was a loaded question (as did the guy asking it), and so he gave a loaded answer. Loaded with an attempt at humor, in this case, though it also can be construed as arrogance.
I remember watching an interview with Bobby Fischer, the chess champion (who also had some issues of his own) - Dick Cavett asked him, “So, do you think that you’re the greatest chess player in the world”, or something like that, and Fischer, after a beat, said “yeah”, and the audience roared with laughter. Trump was trying to do the same thing, though something tells me he would get his ass handed to him hard on a chessboard.
I’d need a cite that Trump is a true sociopath. He is definitely a narcissist and a narcissist may have sociopathic traits but I don’t know that they are “pure” sociopaths in fact I really doubt it. I don’t think Trump could carve off someone’s face with a scalpel the way a sociopath might be able to…
I may be “reaching hard” here, but especially in the younger photos of Manson I see small, wide-spaced eyes and flattened bridge of the nose, sometimes markers of fetal alcohol syndrome.
Just like calling everything you don’t like Nazis, the various and sundry armchair diagnoses of Trump only cheapen and dilute the concept of mental illness…you could say it drives me insane how often people do it.
Manson was a product of the prison system. You might be able to argue that he had a Antisocial Personality Disorder. To be honest, I don’t believe half of the things I’ve heard about Manson. He ordered those murders to start a race war? The Beatles were prophets who were mentioned in the Bible? It all sounds ridiculous. If Manson had believed all that then he had some type of psychotic episode that made him lose a grasp of reality.
A prison official who worked with Manson for many years wrote that Charlie turned it on when only when he had an audience. I don’t think Manson had a personality disorder. In my opinion, his behavior was a result of not being able to function outside of prisons.
Every succesful politician has similarities with cult leaders. You could have produced the same list with Obama a couple years ago and had many people on the right agreeing with you.
The problem is that the process of selecting a president does a very good job of weeding out people who aren’t egomaniacs and then as soon as their elected people both for and against start assigning them God like powers.
Actually, no. Not if you restricted people to the facts, anyway. Obama is a power-hungry and opportunistic guy, probably with some traits of narcissism, but not a blatantly-obvious textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
And you don’t have to be a liberal to know this about Trump; just ask the numerous prominent Republican or conservative figures who have worked for Trump and who he has treated badly. Their reports on “What was it like?” will be pretty easy to match up with the descriptions in the DSM.