Guilty Trump's Narcissistic Mortification
What Comes Next for the Convicted Felon and America
Facing four years in prison for falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment in 2016 to the adult film star Stormy Daniels for a likely affair with Trump in 2006, convicted felon Donald J. Trump will be sentenced to either probation or prison by Judge Merchan (NY) on July 11th, though Trump plans on appealing. If the state agrees to a retrial, the appeal process at the earliest could result in a second trial in New York as early as 2025, a year after the election.
In this interim, one thing is for certain: narcissist Trump is facing public humiliation, which means he is necessarily facing what's called narcissistic mortification. To be a loser is not on brand for Trump and to be effectively brought down by pornstar, Stormy Daniels, is mortifying, even for shameless Trump.
Narcissism expert Prof. Sam Vaknin defines narcissistic mortification as an extreme form of decompensation where the grandiose perception of the narcissist crumbles and collapses because the narcissist is challenged from the outside in a humiliating, shaming manner.
Prof. Vaknin states in his video presentation, Narcissist's Revenge: Signs YOU are in DANGER:
Stripped of his reified ideal ego (False Self), the narcissist is then reduced to an obnoxious, but terrified child, rendered a veritable zero from an imagined hero. He can no longer sustain his delusional view of himself as irresistible, a winner, or a genius. Instead, he comes face to face with his own weird creepiness, gaping inadequacies, and history of failures. He realizes he is a ghost, a long dead and unrequited apparition of a howling void.
Moreover, finally face to face with reality, he becomes aware that, ultimately, he has fooled no one and everyone sees right through his pathetic facade: abandonment — his overwhelming horror — is imminent.
The narcissist’s only way out of a narcissistic mortification is to forcefully re-establish his grandiosity and revive the False Self. He accomplishes this resurrection by reframing the mortifying events and by fleeing the scene.
At first, the narcissist constructs a narrative that absolves him of guilt and shame. He attributes his disgrace and downfall either to the envious malevolence of others — or to his own cunning and iron will (cognitive dissonance: “I actually wanted all this to happen”).
The narcissist then transitions to a borderline self-state under conditions of extreme duress, stress, tension, anxiety, humiliation, injury, and mortification. The borderline self-state is impulsive and destructive. That is the famous narcissistic rage attacks, the temper tantrums. They are actually in a borderline self-state, not a narcissistic self-state. Narcissistic rage would be more appropriately called borderline rage or dysregulated rage.
In the borderline self-state, he could become eruptive after a period of calm that is like the calm before the storm, or he could become escalatory and escalate preconditions for a fight where his misconduct would be legitimized by victims’ reactive so-called abuse.
And then most narcissists, not all, transition to the psychopathic self-state. This is where the danger lies.
In the psychopathic self-state, it looks as if the conflict is over, as if everything is back to normal, as if you have nothing to worry about, as if things have been resolved, a consensus has been restored, and peace, truce, and ceasefire have been declared.
But all this time, the narcissist is planning his revenge, his payback, and your destruction. He's a great actor, and he can deceive you into a kind of complacency.
The narcissist's alloplastic defenses (blaming other people for your own behavior) kick in, “They discriminated against me, they abused me, they attacked me. I'm the victim!”
The narcissist's alloplastic defenses justify the narcissist's aggression and even violence.
There is an external locus of control. He says, "You made me do it," which is like saying, "You controlled me." It's an external locus of control, and this aggravates the antisocial behaviors because the narcissist begins to perceive this whole thing as an issue of survival. So he must win.
And then, if he fails to win, he sinks into an extreme depressive or dysphoric mood, often accompanied by substance abuse and withdrawal or avoidance from reality. Routines, daily routines or professional routines, are impeded and disrupted, and so on and so forth.
The narcissist basically falls apart (decompensation), transitioning gradually into a pre-psychotic stage. Narcissists often use verbal and psychological abuse and violence against those closest to them. Intimacy breeds abuse and aggression in the narcissist because it's threatening. Narcissists dread intimacy.
Some narcissists move from abstract aggression — the emotion leading to violence and then permeate it to the physically concrete sphere of violence.
As they dehumanize and objectify even their nearest and dearest, the narcissist's aggression shifts from inanimate objects — throwing cups of coffee, breaking furniture, slashing your tires — to animate objects. Narcissists don't see any distinction between inanimate and animate objects. You are just an object in the narcissist's mind.
Many narcissists are also paranoid and vindictive. These are the really dangerous types. They aim to punish by tormenting. They aim to destroy the source of frustration and pain. They stalk and harass. This is the kind of narcissist who ends up murdering people or doing away with whole families.
There's a typology of revenge here — the need, the urge to seek revenge on wrongdoers and evildoers.
There's an argument to be made that deterrence and retaliation are necessary to restore a sense of justice. Justice is important. However, people attempt to address their grievances in three ways. And the narcissist gets the proportions wrong.
The first way to obtain revenge or to restore justice is punitive and moralistic. This type of vengeance aims to restore justice, and it makes the victim's view of the world orderly, predictable, structured, and causal.
This kind of revenge has to do with a victim, not with a perpetrator. The victim just wants to feel at home in the world again. The victim wants to feel that she will not become the arbitrary, random, capricious target of someone. Perpetrators should be punished. Victims should be soothed and elevated. And society should publicly acknowledge who is whom and mete out opprobrium and succor and punishment, respectively.
This is the punitive, moralistic attitude. This kind of revenge is healthy, but like everything else in psychology, it has a malignant variant. It tends to devolve in mentally ill people. It tends to devolve into an obsession. It becomes intrusive, and unfortunate thoughts take over.
Then it becomes a compulsion, an irresistible urge to behave in a way that is sometimes criminal or inconsistent with one's values or even inconsistent with one's true wishes, incommensurate with one's skills, needs, long-term interests, capabilities, and so forth.
It becomes, in short, a revenge fantasy. So this kind of revenge, the punitive, moralistic revenge, if it is not checked by society, could become a crusade of vengeance, an individual's crusade of vengeance, and ruin the mental health of the victim as she becomes gradually a perpetrator of her own abuse and even crimes.
This kind of vengeance is unhealthy and in the long term counterproductive as it taxes the victim's time and resources, especially mental resources. It adversely affects her other relationships. It renders her dysfunctional, and ultimately, it consumes her, and she becomes insane. Period.
The second type of revenge is narcissistic revenge. This is the narcissist's way to restore his self-imputed grandiosity and to recuperate from a narcissistic injury. This is especially true in narcissistic mortification, and it is known as the external solution.
Having fallen prey to malfeasance or to crime or to mistreatment or even to mere confrontation or disagreement or criticism, having come across someone who is boundaried and independent and refuses to become an element in a shared fantasy, an internal object, the narcissist regards himself as having been victimized.
He begins to self-chastise because inside the narcissist there is a bad object. Inside the narcissist, there is a coalition of voices that keeps telling him, keeps informing him how inadequate he is, how gullible, how stupid, how unworthy, how ignorant, how helpless, and so on and so forth. And he needs to silence these voices.
The only way to silence these voices is to prove them wrong by demonstrating omnipotence. God-like quality. You are wrong. I am God. I am going to prove to you that I am God because I am going to punish my abusers. I am going to punish the people who have victimized me.
This experience starts with humiliation. The circumstances of victimhood contrast sharply with the narcissist's inflated view of himself as omnipotent, omniscient, brilliant, shrewd, perfect, invincible, and so on and so forth.
By bringing the allegiance of the perceived perpetrator or culprit to utter ruin, the narcissist regains his grandiose, inflated, fantastic sense of self or actually regains or reactivates his False Self.
In short, when the narcissist punishes someone whom he perceives as a perpetrator, when he punishes someone who refused to comply with his demands, refused to be submissive to him, obedient, when he punishes someone like that, someone who has humiliated him in public or in private, injured him, mortified him, when he punishes the source of this frustration and pain, he reconstitutes and regains the cognitive distortion of grandiosity.
He is again God-like. He restores his divinity.
So whenever you, by the way, engage in some kind of revenge fantasy or even actions of vengeance and revenge, ask yourself, is it your bruised ego? Is it your grandiosity? Is your narcissism the main reason for your indignation and spite?
And if it is, try to separate the elements of your conduct that have to do with your justified grievance and the elements of your conduct that revolve around your unhealthy narcissism.
Avoid the latter and pursue the former.
Whenever you have a grievance, whenever you want to restore a sense of justice, whenever you want to punish justly a perpetrator, ask yourself, what's the extent of my revenge fantasy? What's the extent of my retribution? My pursuit of the perpetrator. Have I gone over the line? Have I myself become a narcissist and a psychopath? Is it about restoring justice and protecting others? Or is it about my own narcissistic, sadistic, psychopathic gratification?
You'll be surprised. Very often, it's the latter case.
And finally, the pragmatic, restorative revenge.
With this type of revenge, the victim merely wishes to restore her fortunes and reassert her rise—in other words, to revert the world to its erstwhile state by acting decisively and assertively against her perpetrator or violator. The victim says, “I just want the world to be back as it used to be. I just want to restore everything the way it used to be.”
This is essentially a healthy, functional, and just way of coping with the pain and damage wrought by other people's malicious and premeditated misbehavior. Reparations, for example, compensation, victim compensation, all these are forms of pragmatic, restorative revenge.
A pragmatic, restorative revenge is another name for justice. It's the only healthy type.
The narcissist engages in the first two types, punitive, moralistic and narcissistic, and almost never engages with the third type, pragmatic, restorative.
Healthy people engage in pragmatic, restorative retribution or punishment, and almost never with narcissistic or moralizing punitive kinds of revenge.
This is the distinction between narcissists and healthy people.
When dealing with a narcissist interpersonally, one gets habituated to anticipating and predicting the narcissist's next move in an attempt to avoid, brace oneself, and blunt the pain of abuse. Leading up to this consequential election in November, it is America’s turn to anticipate, get out in front of, and dodge any frontal assault emanating from Trump.
America is in a narcissistically abusive relationship with Trump. America is being abused even if you're not in the MAGA cult. All Americans are suffering the consequences of this cult. And the spillover effects are not limited to the United States of America. This MAGA epidemic afflicting America has global consequences and pandemic reach — think next pandemic lack of readiness and nuclear war, for a start. The world is already on tenterhooks, what with wars blazing in Ukraine and the Middle East.
And the attacks keep coming. In view of Trump's conviction, Republicans are attacking the Judicial branch of the United States government as weaponized and corrupt. Republicans are willing to throw our Judiciary, one of our three branches (pillars) of government, under the bus and show their hand as the autocrats that they are.
Decrying Trump's guilty verdict, not only do Republicans put party above country, but they put a convicted felon above our constitution while having the audacity to claim themselves as the party of Law and Order. At this point, the GOP is suffering from identity confusion/disturbance/diffusion and is whipsawing between a Libertarian fantasy of cowboy anarchy with no government where the narcissistic gun-toting American “rugged” individual reigns supreme and the opposite, autocracy — authoritarian government.
What would you expect from a Trumpian party that has chaos — wildly pendulating between anti-“deep state” no/small government (deregulation and deconstruction of the administrative state) and government overreach (anti-choice, Christian Nationalism, etc.) — as its governing charter, consistent with the chaos generated by the epidemic of narcissism in America? True to form, narcissistic Republicans have a reputation for being selfish. And in this case, they want their cake, and they want to eat it too; they are childlike (the trial was unfair to Trump!) and authoritarian (we seek punitive, moralistic, and narcissistic revenge!).
As if it wasn't enough that America’s election in 2020 with the January 6th insurrection was attacked, now the justice system is being attacked. Will America have another “stand back and stand by” moment where Trump sics his militias on us à la January 6th? What kind of retribution should Americans expect from the grievance factory that is Trump? A lot could go down between now and his sentencing date of July 11th. Will Judge Merchan live long enough to see this sentencing date, or will meting out justice result in his own demise?
Even before May 30th’s humiliating conviction, if Trump were to be re-elected this year, he's made it clear that he's gunning for the Department of Justice and will weaponize the Justice Department to face down his political enemies per his own declarations of intent as outlined in Christo-fascist Project 2025 and Agenda 47.
Suggestive of pathological merger/fusion with the narcissist, Trump intoned, “If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” as he kicked off his remarks at Trump Tower the day after his conviction. “These are bad people. These are, in many cases, I believe, sick people.” As usual, Trump is projecting as he is the sick one. He's even gone so far as to say that this verdict is fascistic — also projection.
Exhaustingly, Trump went on to air a litany of grievances against central figures in the case, including Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his former attorney Michael Cohen, and portrayed himself as a political martyr, a theme that has been central to his 2024 campaign.
“In a way, I'm honored,” he said. "It's not that it's pleasant. It's very bad for family, it's very bad for friends and businesses, but I'm honored to be involved in it because somebody has to do it, and I might as well keep going and be the one.”
In response to Trump's remarks slamming the verdict, President Joe Biden's campaign spokesperson, Michael Tyler, said in a statement, May 31st, that Trump “cannot be president of the United States.”
“America just witnessed a confused, desperate, and defeated Donald Trump ramble about his own personal grievances and lie about the American justice system, leaving anyone watching with one obvious conclusion: This man cannot be president of the United States,” he said.
“Unhinged by his 2020 election loss and spiraling from his criminal convictions, Trump is consumed by his own thirst for revenge and retribution. He thinks this election is about him. But it’s not. It’s about the American people: lowering their costs, protecting their freedoms, defending their democracy,” Tyler continued. He also said Trump “is sowing chaos, attacking the rule of law, and fighting for the only thing in the world he gives a damn about: Donald Trump.”
Thanks for this. Interesting to hear you describe a break down of (more stable) narcissism sometimes into more borderline states of desperate instability and emotional dysregulation. One possibile outcome that is even harder to contemplate, is suicide. Borderline attacks are mainly on the self. For Adolf Hitler, this is where the breakdown of his pretend version of reality ultimately took him. It is not hard to imagine the distorted theories that would follow such an event amongst Trump’s followers. They are now trained in constructing these pretend narratives. But hopefuly as you say, Trump has many strategies left to play before becoming so desperate.