What are demagogues? We need to know, because we’ve had them since the beginning of modern times and we’ve got one now.
Demagogues are political leaders— or would-be leaders— who prey on people’s worst fears. Demagogues appeal to the prejudices of the masses. Demagogues distort logic. Demagogues manipulate truth. Demagogues, as Psychology Today once put it, are brazen, belligerent, and bombastic. Demagogues generate hate.
That’s why we can easily call the evil likes of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin demagogues. In this century, we have Vladimir Putin, whose demagoguery prolongs the wicked war in Ukraine. In our nation we’ve had the likes of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator in the 1950s who stoked Americans’ anxieties about communists living among us and ruined many lives doing it.
The question is, if those men are demagogues, what does that make Donald Trump? He is brazen, belligerent, and bombastic. He appeals to people’s prejudices. He distorts logic, he manipulates truth, he generates hate, he stokes fear. Just last Friday night in South Dakota, he told a rally, “I don’t think there’s ever been a darkness around our nation like there is now,” and he put it all on his political adversaries, the Democrats.
So to answer the question, what does it all make Donald Trump? It makes him a demagogue.
Not a year into Trump’s tempestuous term in the White House, 37 psychiatrists and other mental health experts analyzed the president and published their findings in a book titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” They admitted that it wasn’t a clinical analysis— they hadn’t examined or questioned him firsthand. But they knew enough from what they saw in his patterns of behavior and rhetoric to conclude without reservation that the man is a narcissist.
That’s a different diagnosis, a different disorder, than demagoguery. A narcissist is someone who cannot prosper without praise and admiration, someone who believes others aren’t as smart, someone who has zero empathy for anyone else. Harvard psychiatry professor Leonard Glass, one of the book’s authors, applied the characteristics of narcissism to Trump. “Donald Trump never apologizes, acknowledges a mistake or appears to reflect on his role in the creation of his recurrent difficulties. He has to be right, never needs to learn from his mistakes, and must protect his inflated and fragile self-image above all else, including the nation’s security. He is always the victim, never having had a hand in the creation of his own dilemmas.”
And of course when he tells the faithful that “there’s a darkness around our nation,” he takes no responsibility for bringing on some of that darkness himself.
Is there anything in there that doesn’t paint a portentous portrait of the leading Republican candidate in next year’s presidential election?
Consider some of Trump’s ominous announcements at recent rallies, packed with his faithful followers. He has taken to telegraphing his intent if he’s sent back to the Oval Office, telling every crowd, “I am your retribution.” And, in the spirit of the Bible which tells Christians, “Jesus died for our sins,” another popular line in Trump’s latest repertoire is, “I was indicted for you.”
That is demagoguery and narcissism in a single perilous package, with a strong dose of martyrdom. But it’s even worse. By definition, Donald Trump also is a psychopath. As Merriam-Webster defines it, a psychopath is “an egocentric… personality marked by a lack of remorse for one's actions, an absence of empathy for others, and often criminal tendencies.” Another dictionary adds, “Psychopaths think that whatever they do is justified and have a total disregard for other people.” That fits. Just ask the January 6th rioters who he encouraged to go to the Capitol but who he has since abandoned.
A demagogue. A narcissist. A martyr. A psychopath. The portrait grows more graphic.
Unless we can’t believe our own lying eyes— to adulterate the sage observance by the 20th Century comedian Groucho Marx— we have seen behavior that also can be defined as deranged, immoral, and unambiguously dishonest. Those might not be classified as sicknesses, just as characteristics. But they are inescapable characteristics of Donald Trump.
And he’s vengeful. According to Forbes, the ex-president faces a maximum of 717 years behind bars if he’s convicted on all of the 91 criminal counts against him. So what does he do with that? When radio interviewer Glenn Beck asked him last week if he’ll lock people up if he gets back to the White House, his answer is, “You have no choice, because they’re doing it to us.” This is Nixon’s enemies list writ large.
It’s all scary, because if Donald Trump felt any restraints at all during his first term in office, he has made it clear that he will throw them off if he wins a second one. But Trump is just a single sick man. What’s scarier— and this is meant only as a narrow parallel— is that a sick man like mass murderer Charles Manson had a small if adoring following— what he called his “family”— but virtually every other citizen of the land was appalled by what he did. Trump, on the other hand, has a huge following, because one person’s demagogue is another person’s guiding light. According to the latest CNN poll, almost half of Republican voters say he’s their top choice for the presidency. Two-thirds say he’s one of their top two.
These tens of millions— the majority of one of our nation’s two main political parties— ignore his sickness. They ignore his demagoguery, his narcissism, his psychopathy, his martyrdom, his dishonesty, his vengefulness, his immorality. Even if Trump eventually goes to prison, they aren’t going anywhere. They will help shape American politics probably for a generation to come. When these people see the sickness but embolden it rather than condemn it, what do we make of that?
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Not many more dangerous than a cornered narcissist
Hi Greg,
You column today describes Donald Trump better than anything I have read since he entered the political arena. I am afraid we are stuck with him and his legacy long after he disappears from the world.
Steve Kaye