Brief: Trump’s Impending Ego Implosion (w/ Daniel Shaw)
Dems are laughing about Donny Dentures or #TrumpisDone, but the reality inside his head, and Mar a Lago, will be very grim, and there will be a lot of collateral damage.
Mental health titans like Robert Lifton have reached the consensus that Trump has been mentally ill for a long time. They’ve diagnosed him with “narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist,” and so on.
Such patients meet predictable ends when the wheels fall off. In the cult world (where Lifton has been so influential), there are bangs (Jim Jones) and there are whimpers (Keith Raniere). What might it look like for Trump?
No one is more qualified to discuss the possibilities with Matthew than Daniel Shaw, LCSW, a psychotherapist trained in psychoanalysis as well as in trauma-informed psychotherapies. He is in private practice in New York City and in Nyack, New York; and Faculty and Supervisor at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York. He is the author of Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation, published by Routledge in 2014, and nominated for the prestigious Gradiva Award. His book Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery: Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear was published in 2021. He is known for his work with cult trauma survivors and with clients who have experienced narcissistic abuse.
Show Notes
Daniel Shaw, LCSW
Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation
Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery: Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And today, I can add to that tagline that all cult leaders and authoritarians at some point fall apart.
And what that feels like for them, and for their inner circle, and what it looks like from the outside, these are all important things to understand as we watch the former President Trump collapse.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and Threads at Conspirituality Pod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
Now, about the downward spiral of Trump, there's no one I'd rather talk with than Daniel Shaw, who knows a lot about the fate of pathological narcissists from his extensive study of cultic dynamics.
Daniel is a psychotherapist trained in psychoanalysis as well as in trauma-informed psychotherapies.
He's in private practice in New York City and in Nyack, New York.
He's a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for Psychotherapies in New York.
And he's the author of Traumatic Narcissism, Relational Systems of Subjugation, published by Routledge in 2014 for the Relational Perspectives series and then nominated for the prestigious Gradiva Award.
It's been a very important book for my own understanding of these matters.
His book Traumatic Narcissism and Recovery, Leaving the Prison of Shame and Fear was published in 2021.
He's known for his work with trauma survivors who have recovered from their cult experiences and with clients who have experienced narcissistic abuse.
Welcome, Daniel.
Thanks so much for taking the time.
Thank you, Matthew.
It's great to be with you.
Thank you.
Let's take a listen to our subject for today.
This is from a few nights ago.
She said Kamala has one big advantage.
She's a very beautiful woman.
She's a beautiful woman.
So I decided to go back and re-read the clause.
I'm not saying he's not.
But I say that I am much better-looking than her.
I think I'm much better-looking.
Much better.
I'm a better-looking person than Kamala.
No, I couldn't believe it.
She said — you know, I had never heard that one.
They said, no, her biggest advantage is that she's a beautiful woman.
I'm going, huh.
I never thought of that.
So there he is.
Daniel, what's your first word here today?
Well, I actually prepared a little cognitive exam of five words to sum it up.
So if you can repeat these five words, you understand Donald Trump.
They would be delusional, racist, misogynist, Vicious and shtick.
Delusional, racist, misogynist.
Misogynist.
Vicious and shtick.
Vicious means to be deliberately cruel, and even in a ha-ha-ha facetious clip like the one you just ran, there is this deliberate cruelty, and it's always there in everything Trump does and says.
Now, we're breaking the Goldwater Rule today with Mr. Trump.
Are you okay with that, with all of your professional credentials, and why?
Right, well I am.
That's a rule that the American Psychiatric Association put in place back in the days of Barry Goldwater, and before I criticize it, I'll just say there is some legitimate concern that you don't, as a mental health professional, give somebody a psychiatric diagnosis that you haven't examined.
But that does not apply, in my opinion, to character analysis or character description.
Literary people, sociologists, historians, all of them develop character portraits of figures they don't know personally.
In addition, and by the way, I'm a licensed clinical social worker, not a psychiatrist, I don't consider myself interested in diagnoses, and I think like Robert Lifton and Judith Herman, who are psychiatrist heroes, who've come out to speak about Donald Trump's the danger of Donald Trump. I joined them in disregarding
the Goldwater rule in this instance, but I also am a tremendous fan of Eric Fromm, who in the 60s,
70s, 50s, 60s, 70s, well 40s, began writing a best-selling international book,
international bestseller called Escape from freedom about authoritarianism in Germany and about
Hitler.
Right.
And he's a psychoanalyst who never hesitated to jump in if it was anti-Vietnam War protests, if it was anti-nuclear proliferation, many other issues.
So I go by, my sense is that no matter who you are, if you're an informed citizen, you speak to that.
And I am a mental health professional and an informed citizen.
I'd like to think I am.
And I'd like to think all mental health professionals should be informed citizens.
So you're not a psychiatrist, you don't dispense diagnoses, but you've really made your mark on this literature with the concept of the traumatizing narcissist, which sounds like it could be a diagnosis, but I don't think it is.
But maybe we can start with you giving us a thumbnail, because I think it applies to how we're going to discuss the impending downfall of Trump.
Yes, well I will try to make it brief and it does get a little complicated so I made some notes.
Great.
And I'm gonna just go with three points about how I figured this out.
First of all, it came out of my own experience of Knowing and working for a cult leader extensively over a period of years, and then joining the mental health profession after I left that.
Right.
So I have been thinking about this for 30 years now.
So here we go.
The traumatizing narcissist is a person who's developed and needs to sustain a delusion of omnipotence.
They cling to this delusion And they believe out of this delusion that they are infinitely superior people.
And that infinite superiority entitles them infinitely.
The traumatizing narcissist believes that he's triumphed over any kind of neediness and dependence.
And for him, those are the most contemptible signs of weakness and impotence.
So the delusion of omnipotence is what defends him from that.
The second part of this theory is that this delusion is very unstable.
So you can think of it like a dam that's always getting cracks that need to be plugged.
Oh boy.
It's holding back, for the traumatizing narcissist, it's holding back the fear of what he would have to feel if that delusion were to Collapse, right?
Yeah.
And that is the fear of being impotent, small, weak, nothing.
Those feelings could be so shameful if they were to break loose that he could literally lose his mind and in some cases might even take his own life.
So the delusion really needs to be sustained.
And the third piece here is that for the traumatizing narcissist, anybody who isn't submitting to him is a threat to him.
And so he has to create relationships with people who fully and totally submit to him.
That could be an individual, a family member, a community, cult, a nation.
And those people have to join His delusion, and believe him to be omnipotent.
But again, because the delusion is unstable, he's gotta repeatedly prove to himself that he has the power that he thinks he has, and therefore he needs to know that he can seduce anybody, control anyone, exploit anyone, and destroy anyone if needed.
So, once he's succeeded in getting their submission, he has to keep them You know, if the follower who has committed themselves to submitting can now be kept ashamed and weak and afraid, the narcissist presents himself as the person who knows how to fix that.
Right.
And that's the basic profile.
To me, you know, I have a theater background.
That was my major in college.
My profession for a while.
So I think of myself as, you know, writing a description of a Shakespeare character, except not tragic, just malevolent, like Richard II, not so much like King Lear.
And so to me, it's not diagnostic.
And I also just want to make clear, Matthew, that I don't work with these narcissists as patients.
I work with the victims who often need a lot of help.
So we'll get to that in the final portion of our discussion today, but I just want to note that you're really describing somebody who's caught in a terrible, terrible paradox, because as you say, he delusionally believes that he is omnipotent and independent in that omnipotence, but he must control everyone around him to maintain that delusion.
How do you see this play out in Trump?
Let me start by talking about what happens in religious cults.
The leader knows how to fix your karma and purify your ego, right?
So the devil, the demons are in you and the leader knows how to get them out of you.
And of course, the price for that is your complete and total submission to the leader.
Now, in Trump's case, Instead of scaring you about your karma, he's scaring people about immigrants, about LGBTQ+, about liberals, women, abortions, and apparently about democracy because apparently democracies are not white Christian nationalist dictatorships and therefore we should be terrified.
You know, according to him, he alone can fix all of this.
And, you know, the world is a hellish, dangerous place full of depraved liberals.
It's interesting.
We have to be afraid of them.
If you're a MAGA, you have to be afraid of these liberals, but also you have to mock them because they're so stupid and incompetent.
It kind of doesn't really make sense.
Most of it doesn't.
So, to state the obvious, when Trump is describing—I think it's obvious—when Trump is describing this depraved, hideous world, I think he's just talking about himself without realizing it.
The notion of having to control everyone around him to maintain his delusions really plays out in, I think, mainstream political left-leaning discourse around why does he choose somebody like J.D.
Vance to run as his running mate?
And, you know, the sort of conventional wisdom is, well, this is the toady that's going to maintain that submissive position.
Do you think that's fair?
Oh, yeah, I do.
And it's already obviously clear.
And Vance is the perfect victim here.
Nothing that I think of him as a victim, but he's, you know, he's a perfect choice in that he's already shown that he's for sale, completely for sale.
Right.
And that's Trump's, you know, that's the currency of Trump world.
Who can I buy?
You mentioned in your first, that three-part structure that you gave that I think was really succinct, that When the traumatizing narcissist is in the position of feeling those cracks in the damn crack that they might go as far as to lose their own minds or to take their own lives.
So, the understanding that I get from that is that the thing that they just cannot do is to admit to any vulnerability.
Exactly.
They would have to feel it.
It would be catastrophic.
So, in general, What happens when the walls are closing in?
I mean, you've given this sort of fork in the road, losing of the mind, possibility of self-harm, but what are some sort of potential outcomes if they cannot feel and accept reality as it is?
Well, I'd say first, the first line of defense is double down and then triple down and then quadruple down on the delusion.
That comes first.
And then a few different things can happen depending on to what extent the traumatizing narcissist is exposed and exposed to ridicule and humiliation.
You know, um, The weird meme right now.
And, uh, it's great.
But again, we're, we're not just talking about weird, we're talking about vicious and I think that's important.
So, but weird is humiliating.
It's a good, it's a good, uh, way into the exposure and humiliation of the narcissist.
You know, one, when they're in this situation, they will seek more adoration and, um, You know, they'll get even more paranoid, more enraged, more self-righteous.
They'll identify more malicious enemies who are envious and evil, and they'll demand more tightly that anyone close to them Join them in their vendetta against the enemy.
So that becomes a big part of most cults at some point or other, if the cult is being exposed.
On a smaller scale, like if it's a family and one of the partners is going no contact with a friend or a family member or even one of their own children, You're either with that family member or you're against them, right?
So you have to join the narcissist's vendettas.
And let's say another situation, a patriarch who's Drinking and terrorizing his family and estranging the wife and children.
If they leave, he'll engage in a vicious divorce.
He may not actually succeed, but he'll try to punish the person who leaves to the maximum.
So, these are all different possibilities for what can happen.
On a larger scale, we've seen cult leaders invent crises or exploit existing crises.
And certainly, you know, Trump is trying to exploit the price of food right now.
He may or may not have somehow fabricated an assassination attempt.
I don't know.
I find it questionable what happened exactly.
Well, certainly the lack of medical follow-up has raised some questions.
I can say that.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't want to engage in a conspiracy theory about it.
I don't have one.
Right.
But, you know, he's certainly going to exploit that, although it's interesting that he hasn't exploited it to the extent that he might, which also is somewhat suspicious in my mind.
The psychotherapy cult that was very big in New York in the 60s, 70s, 80s, the Sullivanians.
There's a good book out now about the Sullivanians.
And when Three Mile Island happened, the nuclear incident, Saul Newton, the leader, went out of his mind.
He made everybody move to Florida.
And then that died down.
And then he went out of his mind about AIDS.
And, you know, at that point, the group was Starting to have critics and people were defecting and there was media exposure.
So the paranoia increases and the rage increases and the control, all of that increases.
And that can come from responses to, like, natural weather events or things that the person could obviously have no control over or that obviously aren't directed at them.
Exactly, exactly.
Right.
Well, and on a bigger scale, finally, with Trump, he lost the election, so he got about 2,500 people to try to burn down the Capitol and murder Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence.
That is a classic act of a deteriorating, traumatizing narcissist, or really a malignant narcissist, okay?
You know, and now he's got all these people who are going to throw the election to him and vote counting jobs and so on, at least he thinks they will.
Which, by the way, means that he assumes he won't win the popular vote, and he's probably right, right now.
But he'll try to get the protesters And my question at this point is, are they really going to heed the call this time?
I suspect that Trump is, people are tired of supporting him and defending him and making themselves vulnerable to incarceration for him.
I think that he's not so sure of himself as he once was right now and we'll see how that goes.
But according to the psychological profile, there has to be a split there.
He has to maintain some kind of self-certainty while he also is, you know, has one eye on the polls.
He doesn't entirely believe that, you know, the New York Times is lying all the time about where he stands against Harris.
He has to sort of believe two things at the same time according to this model, right?
Yes.
The delusion is very good, however, at telling him what I believe is the truth and what I don't believe is not the truth.
And that may seem to many people to be deliberate and conscious.
I honestly, after thinking about this for 30 years, talking about it, looking at it, I would have to say that I don't think it's entirely conscious.
I think there's a profound kind of dissociative Instinctual, on the level of how long does it take for you to get up from whatever struck you on that podium with blood on your ear and create the most incredible tableau in modern political history, right?
Like, that is fine.
Talk about stagecraft.
We've spoken about that a lot on the podcast.
Like, that is the instinct for hitting your mark, right?
So I want to pull out one thing that you mentioned about the tagging of weird that I have expressed some reservations about precisely because I do have some concerns around accelerating or exacerbating humiliation.
Are you concerned that Walls is even, you know, as homespun and as Midwest frank and wholesome as it sounds.
Are you concerned that focusing in on the weirdness of Trump and Vance actually accelerates or intensifies this breakdown?
Yeah, I'm afraid, you know, right now it's selling like hotcakes, so there's going to be more of it.
Yeah.
But I also think that there's a... I'm hoping that the more serious criticism will have to do, well, with policy, you know, and I hope that we're really going to hear what is in Project 2025, why It is anathema to anything to do with democracy, certainly with constitutional American democracy.
You know, I'm hoping that the substance will prevail over the mockery.
And I'm guessing that mockery isn't going to be the number one part of the platform here.
At least I'm hopeful.
I'm gonna ask you about your client experience to round this up, but on the way to that, can you paint a picture for us of what things feel like in Mar-a-Lago during this collapse sequence for family members and inner circle members?
Yeah, that's a great question.
You know, there's a hell of a lot of denial there, but these people aren't...
Stupid, you know?
It's not that they're unintelligent.
They may be dishonest or sociopathic, but they have to see the writing on the wall.
At least for their own skins, too.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
How they're reacting remains to be seen.
Some people have defected and will defect.
Some of the rats will jump off of the sinking ship.
Others will remain fully loyal, and I think their best hope is to disappear someplace where they can say and do whatever they want without actually being criminally liable.
I was thinking about this question in terms of the last days of Keith Raniere of NXIVM.
You know, the whistleblowers are getting everybody to leave, the whole thing's falling apart.
It's getting exposed.
Communities all in full crisis.
They're starting to fight with each other, the loyalists versus the apostates.
And meanwhile, Renier is hiding in a closet in a follower's home in Mexico.
Right.
He's about to have the three women with him do what he calls an empowerment exercise by having them perform a fellatio on him all at once.
And just then the doorbell rings and there's a knock and it's the police.
And what does Ranieri do?
He goes and hides in the closet and sends the women out to try to get the police to go away.
And then what you see later when he's in the courtroom, there is no Acknowledgement at any moment of any cowardice, any impotence, any weakness of any kind.
It couldn't be more clearly who he is when push comes to shove.
But the denial, the delusion just doesn't get softer, it gets stronger.
And that's what happens when you don't go insane the way Shoko Asahara did.
When the Japanese nerve gas grew.
Yeah.
When he was exposed, he did become psychotic.
And of course, Hitler shot himself.
So, you know, there's different ways of how this goes, obviously.
That moment where Ranieri, for all appearances, does not go psychotic, but he returns to a kind of baseline...
Confidence.
That really kind of proves the impossibility of admitting or feeling the thing that's actually happened.
You weren't actually found in the closet cowering while sending your minions out.
That didn't actually happen.
You're not going to feel that that happened.
Even if they tell you that that's what happened in the middle of the courtroom, you're not going to show that you feel it.
Maybe you can't.
It's the power of this delusion.
It's the most important thing that this person has, without which they simply cannot function.
So Trump has left, and he's going to leave a lot of collateral damage in his wake.
Millions of people can feel it on both sides of the political aisle.
Yep.
When you are sitting with a client who is recovering from being subjugated by someone like this, what do they need most?
They're going to need a lot of time to heal.
They're going to have to be unraveling themselves from the delusion that they joined.
They're going to have to grieve the loss of A person they thought they loved more than they'd ever loved, or a person they thought loved them more than they'd ever been loved.
So they're going to be helped slowly to recognize the dissociation.
And this is quite challenging for some, because the pull to believe that maybe it was all my fault, and maybe the bad things weren't so bad, is very, very powerful.
So a person who really wants to recover is gonna need a patient guide and helper to just work through that, get to the grief, which is very, feels unbearable.
And then slowly begin to figure out how to rebuild a sense of self that feels like one's own because you have been Living in a world where you were defined by the traumatizing narcissist, you have to come up with your own definition of who you are.
This is often very challenging because there's so much self-loathing, self-blame, self-shame, and all of that has to get worked through.
It's a lot.
That's a lot.
I want to also say that with cult survivors, Matthew, sometimes they can come together and corroborate each other's experiences.
They can help each other expose more information or verify more information.
That certainly happened when I left Siddhi Yoga.
We were able to get online and support each other and verify our experiences.
It's useful to be able to connect to others.
Sometimes when a family has a narcissist and everything blows up, the siblings don't support each other.
Yeah, right.
They've been set against each other too badly, and that's very sad, you know.
So, there are a lot of different outcomes here.
People do better, some do better, some not so much.
The main thing is to Redefine yourself in a more self-compassionate way.
And that, believe it or not, sounds easy to do, and it's really very, very hard to do.
I can attest that it's really hard from my own experience, but I'm also hearing you referring to two possible sort of levels of therapeutic contact.
Like, not everybody's going to be able to travel to NIAC and do appointments with you or see you on Zoom or things like that.
You're going to be pretty booked up anyway.
And then secondly, yeah, there's going to be, there always is, you know.
the assembly of Facebook groups that come together and begin to discuss things in a kind of retrospective way,
like what now, what happened to us, what did we do.
A lot of that's gonna be helpful.
But there's gonna be a lot of people in the aftermath of the Trump era
who don't really have any access at all to therapeutic support or even to, you know,
community conversations.
And it seems to me that for those people, the ways in which Democrats specifically going forward, and maybe even more particularly people like you and I going forward, speak into the public sphere about what that was like.
That becomes really important.
Like, are we going to continue to shame people?
Are we going to continue to sort of... Like, at what point will it be enough to finish with the disaster of Trump without forgetting it so
that, you know, he doesn't come back?
That is a very important question and I was thinking about it very recently.
You know, in Germany, every school child, starting in the lower grades all the way through university,
learns about Hitler and the Nazis and the Holocaust.
Yeah.
It's part of the educational system.
In this country, how much do we really learn about slavery or about Native American indigenous peoples?
We don't learn that much about our own history.
This would be an opportunity, especially one that the Democrats could possibly use to their advantage, to the benefit of everyone, to educate the public about the difference between a democracy and a fascist dictatorship, for example.
And I agree that shaming the people who will be disappointed by Trump is not the way forward.
It will not accomplish The constructive kind of reparation that we need to see in the wake of this.
The main concern I have about this is, can people be helped to understand why fascist dictatorships are not successful and why they are harmful To them, personally.
Right.
And why democracy supports a better way of trying to help citizens have, you know, more or less healthy, better lives.
That's a real opportunity I hope doesn't get lost.
Well, you know, if you happen to find yourself on an advisory committee, I suppose that one thing you might say to Harris Walz, should they get in, and maybe Walz being a high school teacher would actually be, like, really receptive to this, is, you know, whoever has the, you know, education portfolio going forward has a special task here because, you know, repairing, you know, our institutional trust in this country is a big job and it's really gonna start with becoming honest about what we do.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I don't usually get invited to advice meetings.
But I have a sister-in-law who is a public policy professor who does actually, so I'll have to talk to her about that.
Yeah, put a bug in her ear.
Daniel, thank you so much for your time.
I'm really grateful for all of your work in the world, and I'm glad you're out there taking care of clients.
Matthew, your work in the world has been amazing, and I'm equally grateful.
I'm astonished by the level of your scholarship, the breadth of your knowledge, and, you know, your colleagues as well.
This is a major podcast that really offers a really meaningful service, and keep it up.
