Two Short Essays on our Presidential Candidates

This posting includes two short essays on our Presidential candidates—one by Thomas Singer on Trump now being in megalomania and MAGAlomania heaven on earth and the other by my very old friend and colleague, Randall Paulsen, who writes on Biden, old age, loss and mourning.

Trump Is In Megalomania and MAGAlomania Heaven on Earth

I can’t get the word megalomania out of my mind when I think of Donald Trump. As a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst, I have considered lots of words to describe Donald Trump. They include grandiose, narcissistic, sociopathic. But for me, megalomania has taken precedence over all the others that attach themselves like Velcro to Trump.

Megalomania derives from two potent Greek words: megalo and mania. Megalo means “abnormally large or great.” Mania refers to a mental condition marked by periods of great excitement or euphoria, delusions, and over-activity.  When you put the two words together referring to Trump, megalomania comes to mean an obsession with power and wealth, and a passion for grand schemes.

On the eve of his coronation as the Republican Nominee for President in Milwaukee, Trump is currently on the biggest of the many megalomaniacal rolls of his life. At the center of the world’s attention, he is truly larger than life. Even when the attention is negative, he remains in the eye of the national and global storm. Trump's constant legal and political battles amplify his feeling “megalo.”  I use “heaven on earth” in the title of this essay because Trump currently actually has the power to be a singularly potent player on the world stage. And Trump and his followers now have the symbolic image that every “patriot” would die for—Trump as a bloodied but unbowed warrior, willingly sacrificing himself for the MAGA vision of America in an assassination attempt on his life. It makes an uncanny reference in linking Trump to one of the most iconic, heroic moments in the history of America—the US victory on the island of Iwo Jima in World War 2.

Let’s consider all the evidence for Trump’s current residence in megalomania heaven on earth.

1.        He is embroiled in multiple lawsuits in Federal and State courts that he is fighting quite successfully for the most part with the exception of a guilty verdict for 34 counts of falsification of business records in New York. It is safe to say that there are very few people in the entire world, if any, who can match Trump’s record of using the legal system to his advantage. Moreover, most of his legal expenses are apparently being financed with other people’s money. He runs a Presidential campaign based on the claim that he is the martyred victim of a “weaponized” legal system and he has turned his personal legal morass into a political assault weapon of his own. This is a stunning boost to his megalomania.

2.       He has launched his own social media company, Truth Social, that has already generated multiple lawsuits and been given a highly inflated economic valuation. But, once again, Trump is capitalizing on being the megalomaniac center of attention.

3.       For an ex-President, he plays an oversized role in U.S. domestic and foreign policy in two of the most crucial arenas of political conflict in the United States and the world:  the funding and conduct of the war in Ukraine and the immigration battle on our southern border.

4.       He has taken complete control of the Republican party and is leading in the polling for the Presidential election in November 2024.

5.       He has demonstrated an unsurpassed brilliance at manipulating the fears, hatreds, and yearnings of a substantial portion of Americans. His unique ability to speak to the id of the national psyche stokes destructive rage, deep uncertainty, and the fear of annihilation. He has devoted a lifetime to learning how to capture attention through a media that he proclaims to hate but that has in fact been the source of his outsized standing in the world arena and which has simultaneously amplified exponentially his megalomania. He is a reality show star for whom playing the role of a big, powerful man is everything.

6.       Trump’s finely tuned ability to project his megalomania onto the world stage has produced a reciprocal “MAGAlomania” in a significant portion of the U.S. population who have identified with his imagined larger-than-life abilities and have, like Trump himself, a seemingly endless blindness to his many human failings? Trump’s creation of MAGA (Make America Great Again) is both an ideological expression and extension of his personal megalomania. The red cap and other physical expressions of MAGA are totems -- symbolic vestures that allow followers to pledge allegiance to his messianic vision and feel a sense of cult unity when gathered together at his rallies.

7.       And now Trump can claim bon fide martyrdom to his earlier claims of being a martyr of the Democratically weaponized judicial system. He has offered his body and blood for the MAGA cause.

Many public figures become large, and even mythical, in their careers, but they are not necessarily megalomaniacal. It is worth considering that among the traits that most distinguish honorable men and women is that many of them know when it is time to let go of their ambitions and positions of power. They learn to suffer their losses—due to a change in fortune, whether it be political or physical— with grace and dignity. Indeed, such a momentous decision now faces President Joe Biden who must decide whether it is time to step aside to protect our democracy. This would be consistent with his lifetime of dedicated service to our country. Another example of losing gracefully comes to mind. Senator Bill Bradley’s recent one-man show Rolling Along offers a stark contrast to Trump’s trumped up career of larger than life self-promotion and refusal to acknowledge loss. Bradley’s real-life accomplishments include being a Rhodes scholar, an NBA world champion, and a distinguished three-term US Senator. In Rolling Along Bradley narrates that after he ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination to the US Presidency in 2000, he had a big dream that brought his Paul Bunyan-like heroic achievements down to a human scale. In the dream, Bradley is a giant striding across the Amazon, the biggest river in the world—certainly megalo, but not maniacal. In spite of his enormous size, piranhas eat away at the flesh of his legs. A magical creature appears in the sky and sprinkles dust on him which allows him to shrink down to human size and safely cross the Amazon in a small boat. 

Bradley is a man of real stature—heroic in his achievements, while remaining fundamentally human in his being.  An important part of being human is learning to accept loss. Trump cannot accept loss and hates losers.  As long as he dwells in megalomania heaven on earth, he is protected from what for him must be the insufferable pain of loss. In megalaomania and MAGAlomania heaven on earth Trump remains big and powerful, the opposite of which is small and weak.

Tom Singer MD is a contributor to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the co-editor of Mind of State:  Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring U.S. Politics and Society and editor of Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America.

From “Finish the Job” to “The Job is Never Finished”

I have watched the Trump/Biden presidential debate, the Stephanopoulos interview, the NATO welcome speech and the following press interview.  And today, there are the images of Trump’s narrow escape. These have led me to write a brief letter to the country and to President Joe Biden.

We are all thinking, feeling and talking about this American moment. I have had some thoughts about this for a while, but it no longer makes sense not to say them. It is time for America to grow up. We need to stop acting like a country of angry, delinquent teenagers and assume the responsibility and balance that growing up requires. By saying good-bye to the office of President, Joe Biden could show that essential quality that grownups know:  tolerating the mourning that saying good-bye entails is how we grow. Mourning allows us to stay connected to our loved ones, and also to our achievements. Mourning is the gateway to really feeling our connections. We feel them internally and do not need constant, child-like reassurance.  We experience not only connection but also independence via mourning.

The power that currently resides in the office of President is hard to give up; it clouds even the wiser heads among us.  George Washington set an example from our beginnings.  Walking away, when it comes time, is the grown-up thing to do.  Showing faith in, and making room for the younger generation is a grown-up responsibility.  We could see your achievements more clearly, Joe Biden, if you could walk away gracefully, knowing you have done the country a tremendous service.  Gratitude would sweep the country if you could stand aside, and not block our view.

Mourning is also the antithesis to angrily trashing others as Trump does in his stigmatizing comments about “Black jobs”, “Hispanic jobs”, “losers”.  If you keep up the drumbeat of creating enemies, you keep at bay the emotional work of mourning.  Creating an Iwo Jima moment out of a sad assassination attempt is a vainglorious bid for another embattled iconic image. The grown-up response would be to finally tackle gun reform and background checks.

Now, more than ever, we need leadership to show an appreciation for the struggles at all levels of a society. We have unleashed the voracious appetites of “the greed/profit motive” and allowed them to govern us. This trend began with Reagan’s “government is the problem” and has led to the current “reactionary” Supreme Court. As Thomas Hobbes wrote in the 17th century:  without governance, “life is nasty, brutish and short.”  Grown-ups govern themselves from within, but also recognize that society needs safety (respect for laws, balanced enforcement), prosperity and opportunity.

The list of adolescent, two-dimensional, entertainment-requiring forces (performances) go on and on in our American social landscape. Trump is right when he decries the bleakness of American community life. He just clearly cannot see that his leadership is based on increasing that bleak, blaming, “I won’t grow up” mentality. He helps create that (bleakness) which he then derides.

So, come to your senses, Joe Biden. Change your slogan from “Finish the Job” to “The Job is Never Finished”. Realize what a permanently invaluable thing you could do for this country. Help us to grow up as a nation by making room for our future and saying a graceful goodbye to the Oval Office.  

Randall H Paulsen, MD, is a 78-year-old psychoanalyst. Retired assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Consulting Analyst at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Guest Faculty at the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.