David McElroy

Why did Donald Trump steal secret documents when he left the White House? Why did he lie about it when the federal government demanded the documents back?

If you already hate Trump, you probably don’t care why. You just want him charged and convicted for something. And if you love Trump, you don’t believe he did anything wrong. Even if he violated federal law, it’s not a big deal, you think, because others have done worse.

But for reasonable people who just want to understand what happened, the question is why he took such a ridiculous risk that had no obvious benefit. What was his motive?

You are not going to understand Trump’s behavior related to the stolen documents until you see it through the lens of malignant narcissism.

Through a normal lens, everything about what he did is irrational and self-destructive. His actions just wouldn’t make sense. But through the lens of pathological narcissism, it’s typical behavior. Narcissists believe rules don’t apply to them. They pursue their own irrational urges even when doing so could destroy them, simply because they refuse to recognize limits placed on them by others.

Donald Trump is a sick man. He’s a malignant narcissist. And that has nothing to do with politics.

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I was a terribly naive child. I was out of touch with social reality.

As my family moved from city to city, I was never among the popular kids at any school. I told myself it was because I was always the new kid everywhere, but some part of me knew better. Some of my peers always had something that made others like them. I seemed to rub people the wrong way — and I never knew why.

Despite this, I expected to be a leader. I knew I was smart and I was able to do things that few of my classmates could do. I thought that would take me far in this world. My childhood goal — a very serious one — was to be elected president of the United States.

As a teen, I had leadership roles at school and at church, but it wasn’t because my peers liked me. It was simply because I knew how to get things done. And when push came to shove, I was handed power and leadership when things needed to get done. But it didn’t make me popular. And I knew that.

I’m decades beyond those confused early expectations, but a part of me has never escaped them. I thought when I became an adult, competence would matter. Nothing else. Sometimes it did, but I often still can rub people the wrong way. Even when I knew how to be popular, I didn’t want to be.

And now I realize that I’m doomed to failure in the media world if I rely on popularity that comes from social media. Whatever it is that social media wants from a man, I don’t have it. And that means I have to make some changes.

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When I was a little boy, I experienced a hunger for something that I could not name.

Since that hunger was never satisfied in any lasting way, I didn’t know what “normal” should feel like. I didn’t know what it would feel like to have my needs filled, so I couldn’t even name what was wrong. And for all the decades of my life, I’ve felt something missing.

The missing piece was love.

I was hungry for a kind of healthy love and acceptance that I’ve never known. And that missing piece at my core left me with the vague knowledge that something was wrong.

For many years, an angry voice inside my head has asked, “What is wrong with me?!”

It didn’t seem like a serious, rational question, but rather reflected the way I felt inside — about some horrible shame lurking at my core. I mostly haven’t been able to put words to the feelings. I’ve just sensed a horrible mixture of fear, shame, anger — and a tremendous terror that I could never be “good enough.”

At every stage of my life, I have tried to find things that could finally chase away those fears — something that could fill the void, that could make me feel loved and connected.

I felt as though I was the only one who felt this way. I felt as though nobody else had experienced the core wound I felt — and that nobody else had gone through the horrible and confusing patterns that I have put myself through.

But I finally understand that everything I’ve done — and everything I’ve felt — was common to people who had suffered childhood trauma. The psychological term for what I was living with was complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).

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