Trump, Musk and Blazes of Immaturity
The Anticipated Narcissistic Explosion Reveals Stark Immaturity (Vol. 5; Issue 23)
When two mature friends argue, they show sensitivity for one another’s perspective. They carefully empathize with the other’s point of view, listening carefully. They strive to fully understand it. Then, and crucial for achieving repair following disruption,* they engage in civilized dialogue. Of course, they may never fully agree with one another. But, they will have clearly understood their differences and their points of view.
In stark contrast, we global citizens recently witnessed the spectacular breakup of malignant narcissists** Elon Musk and Donald Trump. I wrote of the tension leading up to the divorce, and the dynamics surrounding it, in an earlier essay you can access here.
The dissolution in their arrangement—a more accurate term than friendship—involved infantile arguments mediated by press conferences and social media. One look at the list of escalated threats the two boys hurled at one another clearly reveals the emotionality of these two narcissists in battle.
On June 5th at 12:19pm, the battle of the egos broke into open hostility. Musk, denouncing Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” suggested via tweet that Trump:
Ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill.
Trump, perceiving the post as a narcissistic injury, reacted immediately. At a White House press conference, he said:
He [Musk] knew every aspect of this bill — better than almost anybody —and he never had a problem until right after he left. He said the most beautiful things about me. He hasn't said bad things about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. But I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot.
Notice Trump’s self-involvement absent self-reflection. By the second sentence, Trump cannot help but report that Musk said “beautiful things” about him. You hear his derision of Musk when Trump adds that he feels “very disappointed” in him.
At 12:25pm, Musk reacted as follows:
False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it!
The exchange devolves into hurling further attacks, even threats, at one another. Without even waiting for Trump to reply, Musk added at 12:46pm:
Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate….Such ingratitude.
That last phrase, citing “ingratitude,” illustrates the admiration narcissists expect, and the ire they feel when it goes lacking. Musk’s anger increased.
By 2”30pm, Musk proposed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill be renamed the Big Ugly Spending Bill.
At 2:37pm, Trump posts:
Elon was “wearing thin,” I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!
Within minutes, Musk tweets back:
Such an obvious lie. So sad.
Musk overtly threatens Trump at 3:10pm by tweeting:
Time to drop the really big bomb, Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!
Trump posts his reply at 4":06pm:
I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago. This is one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress… If this Bill doesn’t pass, there will be a 68% Tax Increase, and things far worse than that. I didn’t create this mess, I’m just here to FIX IT.
Notice the grandiosity and the denial of personal hurt as in, “I don’t mind Elon turning against me.” He absolutely minds. Next, Trump threatens to cancel the myriad government contracts bolstering Musk’s businesses.
At 4:09pm, Musk tweets:
In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately.
That spacecraft, by the way, is used to take personnel and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Yes, it’s true, the US’s own space program is on life support. Musk literally holds the fate of astronauts orbiting around the Earth.
Trump’s threats skim off of Musk’s Teflon psyche, eliciting a response along the lines of, “Oh, yeah, if you dare to bully me, I’ll bully you right back.”
You get the point.
In my prior essay predicting the breakup, I explain the concept of projective identification. It is a primitive, infantile defense mechanism characterized, as the name suggests, by an almost violent form of projection. Both men inject fear into one another, denying their own emotional vulnerability. Persons with these types of severe narcissistic personality styles cannot stand any personal vulnerability. Their fragile egos are encased within self-protecting, grandiose images. The public argument resembles a fight during recess between two elementary school boys slouching towards future delinquent-hood; the exchange reveals every feature of malignant narcissism.
These disturbed persons cannot tolerate any kind of real intimacy, and, thus, the disastrous interpersonal relationship history displayed by both men. Trump, in his third marriage, has a relationship involving little contact with Melania. Musk, who “fathers” 14 children named Nevada, Vivian, Griffin, Kai, Saxon, Damian, X Æ A-12, Exa, Strider, Azure, Techno, Arcadia, Seldon Lycurgus, and Romulus, is involved in high-conflict child custody battles with two of the mothers.
Not that an in-person conversation would have changed much, but the way Trump and Musk publicly interacted raises the separate, menacing problem of the prominence of social media. These vehicles of communication enable immaturity. How much thought can go into a 280-character message? How can the nuances of how people relate to one another, in person, be captured? They cannot. We witness the side effects of reliance on these media in diminishing social skills in young people. We can also see a lessening in “ordinary kindness.”
Malignant narcissists can change, but it is rare that they do. To them, the problem is always in the “other.” When they present in psychotherapists’ offices, it is usually because some other party—a wife, an employer, an adult child—insists they do so. They are particularly challenging as patients.
The scary problem here is the power both these men hold. Trump shockingly managed to weasel his way back into the White House where his influence is self-evident. Musk, one of the richest men on the globe with an estimated worth of $425 billion, can influence elections. His threats to senators and congresspeople are real.
The situation leaves us global citizens pondering how an allegedly representative government—the American experiment in democracy—enabled such immature persons to rise to power. It validates a fractured, if not failed, democratic experiment. If the media were not so able to manipulate the people, and if taxation policies prevented individuals from garnering more wealth than the GDP of many countries, we would not be in this predicament. Meanwhile, we anxiously await what the two toddlers,*** armed with capacities to ruin economies or start a nuclear war, will do next.
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*Disruption and repair are some of the most useful concepts to emerge from the psychoanalytic literature. It applies to the inorganic as well as the organic. Regarding humans-in-interaction, disruptions necessarily occur. We cannot help but hurt one another’s feelings. Repair occurs through mutual recognition, empathy, and dialogue, as noted above.
**Malignant narcissism is a term of art coined by psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg (1984). A variation of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), it is characterized by narcissistic traits combined with antisocial and sadistic ones. Individuals with malignant narcissism exhibit a strong sense of entitlement, grandiosity, and lack of empathy. They typically manipulate, exploit, and harm others to fulfill their own needs.
***Many first-term advisors to Trump likened him to a toddler (Drezner, 2020).
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References
Drezner, D.W. (2020). The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency. Chicago, Il.: University of Chicago Press.
Kernberg, O.F. (1984). Severe personality disorders: psychotherapeutic strategies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.