Say what you want about Trump, but he’s done wonders for narcissism-awareness. We all see the pattern now.
I’d like to hear stories on real narcissists you’ve known well and long. Your bosses, co-workers, relatives. I especially want to know how they ended up. Did people at work get fed up with them? Or did your Trumpian boss get promoted away to a higher position where he became the problem of a lot of other people?
Did their spouse divorce them? Or did they stay in the marriage, increasingly Stockholm-syndromed?
Did their children cut ties with them? Or do they make it work somehow? My mom: no-one stayed, but she always finds new victims My mom is a narcissist, and getting worse with age. She was not well liked by her co-workers, but was never fired. After she and my father divorced, she never remarried, but she has always been able to attract new friends and ( I assume) romantic friends. All her brothers and sisters have cut ties with her after my grandmother died. So did my father. My brother tries to help her, occasionally, but I always think it is no accident that he moved abroad. I see her twice a year at most. Her female friends have also broken up with her, except one or two who are very sweet, docile and ( IMO) co-dependent. My mom has enough charm to always find new people to be her friend or to help her.
Bob the co-worker: everyone hates him, he will retire in the belief he’s done splendidly. A co-worker who’s about to retire is a narcissist. Let’s call him Bob. All people who have worked with Bob, under him hate him and make fun of him. He’s vain, lazy, and does not seem to realize how little he actually contributes. But his self-confidence that he should be in charge, and his seniority, plus that he looks the part, makes sure that he keeps being put in charge by people who don’t know him.
I used to work with him on a complicated project where he was team coordinator. His idea of coordinating was to forward all mails directed to him, to his three team members simultaneously, with the added line: “take care of this”. :smack: Oh, and he spent a month coming up with a name for our group.
One by one, his team members went to the manager above him and said they did not want to work with Bob anymore. Bob or management never dealt explicitly with the situation that there now was a project with no coordination and three working members who were so fed up with the project they wanted to have as little as possible to do with it, or with each other. The project tanked, but how badly became only clear much later. That seems to be a common problem with narcissists: they just get transferred around because no-one quite can put into words how subtly toxic they are, and they themselves see no problem at all and when asked sublty by management, they deflect everything. So Bob is hated by all who have worked with him, but he was never fired, and will retire on a good pension, genuinely believing he contributed.
All the Billionaires I’m friends with are doing great. They got their hot wives and yachts and go on vacation all the time. I’m super jealous of them because I am only a hundredaire but sometimes I get invited to go on the yachts and that is always fun.
An ex-boss of mine was not quite Trump-level, but he was up there. He was ambitious, but did not have the abilities that he thought he did.
Years after I left that law firm and tracking people down on Google had become common, I looked him up. I found that he had left the firm to become partners with his biggest client. His biggest client was a shady, dubious real estate mogul, and they teamed up to found a real estate trust and holding company. At first they made oodles of money and even started to be traded publicly.
Then it all imploded due to the aforementioned partner’s dodgy business practices, the company went bankrupt, and my former boss is now no longer listed as practicing in any law firm.
Am I just unusually lucky? I have never met anyone even remotely like Trump. Oh, there are people who have contributed less than they might have, but I don’t think they were under any illusion. All the dept. chairs I have dealt with have been reasonable people. I might have disagreements with them, but I got on with them, while maneuvering to avoid becoming chair myself.
I guess there was one blowhard when I was in grad school. He talked and acted as if was God’s gift to mathematics. He had me fooled for a while. But in the end, you have to prove interesting theorems to be recognized. He didn’t and I have no idea what happened to him but he is not a known mathematician.
I have never known anyone like Donald Trump, and I doubt most people have.
There’s a rather significant difference between a garden-variety narcissist and one who happens to have been born into a wealthy real estate family and has Trump’s other… personality traits, if you will. Not all narcissists are egomaniacs, liars, experts at leveraging debt, have an deep aversion to alcohol because their brother drank himself to death, or are good at persistent negotiation.
God. Claims to made the entire universe in six days, solo. Got pissed off one day and kicked that nice couple out their home. Got pissed off again and wiped out the entire earth, except for one family and a few animals. Demands absolute fealty or he’ll cast you into a lake of fire for all eternity. Once, on a bet, visited all kinds of personal disasters on some poor schmuck, just to prove the guy’s unquestioning loyalty. Don’t even ask how he treated his own son.
I know of several. The ex-wives and children remain under their psychological control and are still trying to get over irthe trauma. They leave a trail of severely damaged victims.
They are called sociopaths. Those that are not in prison are free only because they are so smart, they know exactly what the limit is to what they can get away with lawfully, and manipulative enough to fool the authorities and their acquaintances.
Destroying vulnerable people’s lives is their central focus, and they are completely immune to remorse.
Worked under him for a couple of agonizing years before I got transferred out. He prided himself on being a “true cowboy”, would always call of the women in the office “pretty little things”, tell them how pretty they were, how beautiful their hair was, etc in a really creepy smarmy way. He was a ‘leaner’ with women, always leaning over their shoulders at their desks, hand resting on shoulder, leaning against their back. He would frequently brag about how controlled and submissive that he’d ‘trained’ his wife, to essentially be a geisha-type providing every menial service possible to him. Ick.
He was a ‘can do no wrong’ type always projecting confidently to management, and like the OPs example, just shifting work to others with no coordination. He once had me written up by management for asking too many questions and challenging his (blatantly wrong) assumptions, saying that I needed to be “put in my place to respect authority”.
He always slipped away from harassment punishment or getting fired, last I’d heard he slowly kept getting ‘down-promoted’ to less and less important projects and further away from the white-collar office environment. I’m sure he still thinks he’s the greatest gift ever to women and the world.
His family hates him, and so does his wife’s family. He can’t hold down a job, he will start having problems getting along with coworkers and will eventually have to quit because of the problems with getting along with people.
Every job is the same. This person will start having trouble getting along with their coworkers and will either be let go or quit. They never learn they are the problem.
Superficially he is very charming, but people closest to him (friends and family) know not to let their guard down.
His kids seem like they resent him. I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut him off when they grow up.
Sigh… Promoted, over and over again, to positions of authority, so she can be abusive to more people. Monstrous toxic hell-hound of a boss. She was so bad, I took to drinking. When she got promoted out of reach of me, I was able to stop. Single worst human being I’ve ever met…and she’s very well-paid, a corporate Vice President, has a beautiful house right on the golf course…
There’s obviously no justice in this world. Maybe there’s karma, and she’ll come back as a stink-bug.
He beat the shit out of his wife and kids, stopped attending work to fuck whores all day and still drew a paycheck from Mom and Dad, divorced his wife after telling her he had a ‘‘sex addiction’’ ergo it was really not his fault, and is now engaged to be married to his ex-wife’s childhood best friend. He’s filthy rich despite massive financial incompetence.
Former manager. The guy who called me into a room on his very last day to tell me a story about how the entire purpose of his team is to make him look like a hero. :smack:
Had the superman logo up on his cube wall, had it painted on the front of his 5th wheel camper.
Tried to do it all, worked 100 hours a week. Had a stroke, took a couple of months to recover and get back to being able to read a computer screen, wanted to come back but his doctor told him he could either retire or he could die. (Other managers told me that if he hadn’t needed to retire, he’d have been retired as most of our management was shuffled around.)
We got an email from him at the one year mark. He told us how incredibly bored he was and wished he could come back.
Oh Hell No.
Otherwise I don’t tend to associate with people like this.
I’ve told the story on here about the boss who left me with PTSD even though I only worked there 4 months; here it is for those of you who haven’t previously seen it. I was hoping to last 6 months so I could transfer to another department, but she found an excuse to fire me 4 months into my probationary period, and did.
Several years later, I was at a local pharmacy association meeting, and the moderator told us that she was in the hospital, having had a near-fatal car accident. People who knew her laughed, and literally nobody signed the get-well card he got for her. (My guess is that he hadn’t known her personally.) Later, she contacted local reporters to do big, sappy TV and newspaper stories about her, and I heard later that in both cases, the reporters’ e-mail boxes crashed due to the volume of feedback they got from people who wanted to let the reporters know what kind of person she really was.
Last I heard, she had retired, probably on disability, and moved to another state. Don’t know if she’s still married (see footnote) but I do remember that when I worked with her, her two adult children lived in distant states and had very little to do with her, and she did have two teenagers but she hardly ever talked about them, and didn’t have any family pictures on her desk. Some of the people in the neighboring department didn’t even know she had kids in he first place!
Footnote: She and her husband were both 19 when they got married and had known each other for about a month. :eek: She had her first child a couple years later, when they were both still in college, and we all surmised that he realized he’d made a horrible mistake and wanted a divorce, and she oopsed him. :mad:
The hospital bigshots all thought she was da bomb, mainly because she was bringing so much money into the facility. I have reason to believe that some Medicare fraud was going on, but never had enough evidence to go to the authorities.
This was almost 20 years ago and it still affects me.
Had a Manager who was the ultimate sadistic bully. Rose in the company and eventually crashed and spent his last years in a position that had no power.
His last day, no one would go to his retirement dinner. They combed the halls asking if anybody wanted a free meal and booze.
Former civil service boss. Over 6’6"" and he liked to stand and walk round in meetings. More than once he stood over me and expressed his outrage at my ‘stupid’ ideas, mainly because he didn’t ever wait to find out the end of anyone else’s statements, and I was far from alone. Eventually he was sent to some anger management training then retired out to do some well paid contract work for the same office. He was a dick, everybody knew it and everybody was happier the higher he went because he moved further away from us useless peons.
