Trump’s Psychopathology
„Liberation Day“, when Donald Trump declared reciprocal tariffs to the astonished world on April 4, was a turning point. It was not only the day the global economic order was shaken to its core. It was also the day when some liberal commentators changed course. So far, they had still been trying to explain his erratic, emotional and contradictory announcements with an underlying logic, be it shreds of a policy idea, remnants of economic theory or just a cheap gift to his MAGA base. But now they moved to explanations more personal: the guy was just mad and deranged. “Donald Trump’s Ego melts the Global Economy”, writes Susan Glasser in the “New Yorker” and laments our long-lasting “misunderstanding of Trump’s psychology”. And Derek Thompson analyses in “The Atlantic” an “all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality” and calls it “grandiosity as strategy”.
Given that many political analysts and economic experts got Trump 2.0 wrong, what would be more fitting than asking somebody who has interviewed Donald Trump more often about his psyche than others. Enter Marc Fisher, co-author of “Trump Revealed: The Definitive Biography of the 45th president” from 2017. A reporter and editor across various news sections of the “Washington Post” for 37 years, Marc is currently the paper’s columnist for Washington D.C. and its suburbs. We met at a Washington café.
To start with, Marc is not surprised about the general turn of events over the first 75 days of Trump’s second presidency. “The basic charade, the disrespect for victims, the hyperbole, the vengeance and the desire for chaos, all of this is consistent and has always been there”. But what is new this time, the biographer says, is that it is now being performed in “overdrive” to get everything done at once for fear of becoming a lame duck.
At the same time Trump is diminished because of his age which is only masked by Elon Musk’s energy. The perfect picture for this was the scene with Elon and his four-year old son upstaging him in the Oval Office. “The Donald Trump of 2017 would have never tolerated such a scene”, says Fisher, “he just sat there like being defeated.”
As a son Donald Trump watched his father’s cognitive impairment and his mother’s slow decline. As a father he saw his daughter Ivanka, “the only person he respects” leaving his side, and what she called “the dark world” of politics in 2022. And as a 78-year-old man he is now without supervision and with few or no friends left. When the biographers contacted the people Trump had described to them as his close friends, three out of four were surprised to be called that.
Today, Trump lives in the White House alone, without his wife Melania, tweeting through the night and maybe still watching the History Channel’s documentaries as he did in his 20s, and from where he seems to have picked up his fascination with the strongmen of the past. There have been no political rallies for him in 2025 where he could bask in adoration, just the weekly trip to his court at Mar-a-Lago from Thursday to Sunday where he reigns as part-time King of a once rebel nation.
So, there we have the 47. President of the United States with his increasing loneliness and long-festering anger about having never been accepted by the establishment, neither in New York nor in Washington. The perfect picture for that was his threatening visit to the Kennedy Center, the capital’s bastion of the cultural establishment, “the kind of people who have laughed at him all his life.”
This social rejection might also explain his adulation for the tech bros of Silicon Valley with whom he shares the narcissism, the total lack of empathy, and as Fisher says, “the child-like desires”. These men were the only figures of the establishment left who were fully prepared to go along with his designs – if only for their own gain and probably not for long.
What Elon Musk and the Tech Industry want from Donald Trump is clear: new contracts when the government services will be further cut and outsourced to their private companies. These company quarters are all lined up along the new Metro Line from Dulles Airport to downtown. And in the woods behind, Fisher says, you can spot the mansions of the Tech-Managers, built from the profits of the last round of privatisation. And you do not even want to know what happens once Elon Musk will be controlling the new computer systems for the government, this time running on his version of Artificial Intelligence.
But why did so many average Americans fall for Trump? “Because he has always been a good salesman with a binary pitch now perfect for social media”. Put this against how Democrats keep presenting themselves “as masters of nuance”. Of the last Democratic presidents, Fisher says, almost all have been lawyers, men inclined to follow rules. Unlike the Republicans who put up businessmen or a cowboy like Ronald Reagan for President. So, that’s where we are today. “It is civil rights versus the violation of law”, as Fisher describes the current competition between the two parties - and the ambivalence of American history. With Donald Trump the renegade element of that history has clearly won.
“Trump has a fabulous instinct for seeing the important behind the trivial”, says Marc about his appeal. Yet, what will he do with his political success? It is obvious that given his personality and family history, his overblown ego and growing loneliness, Donald Trump must somehow fear that this Presidency might be the last important act of his life. “And this undermining of his basic expectation of life”, wonders the biographer, “might become disturbing enough to freak him out.”
Is this, I wonder, what we are already seeing this week with Donald Trump escalating the tariff war?