Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, writes a long essay about what drives President Trump:
“Like many other Trump critics, I believed that he was driven by an insatiable narcissistic hunger to be loved, accepted, admired and praised. That remains prima facie true, but it deflects attention from what drives Trump more deeply: the need to dominate. His primary goal is to win at any cost and the end always justifies the means. Ultimately, he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks or feels. For Trump, the choice between dominating and being loved — saving himself or saving others — is no contest.”
“The catalyst for my shift came after a friend sent me a long paper written by Vince Greenwood, a Washington D.C. based psychologist. Greenwood makes a detailed clinical case that Trump is a psychopath… As I once did up close, we can observe every day which psychopathic traits Trump manifests in his behavior. The highly regarded Hare Psychopathy Checklist enumerates 20 of them. By my count Trump clearly demonstrates 16 of the traits and his overall score is far higher than the average prison inmate.”
“The trait that most distinguishes psychopaths is the utter absence of conscience — the capacity to lie, cheat, steal and inflict pain to achieve his ends without a scintilla of guilt or shame, as Trump so demonstrably does. What Trump’s words and behavior make clear is that he feels no more guilt about hurting others than a lion does about killing a giraffe.”
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