The Lethal Pandemic of Trump Contagion
The Narcissistic Root Cause of Anti-Science Stances on Covid-19 and Abortion
Housekeeping/Check-In: I launched Concerning Narcissism a year ago this month and have published 41 pieces, an average of 3.4 posts a month. Many of these editorials have been magazine-length pieces.
My number of subscribers is average. Substacks with the most subscribers focus on practical information to help one's career. Views have been strong, though engagement is low.
If you have been enjoying my work, please engage by liking/hearting this piece, commenting, sharing this piece across your social media networks (including Substack Notes), and subscribing — free or paid. You may also provide a one-off payment at buy me a coffee.
I'm also in the market for any publishing opportunities and/or projects with other authors/content creators on narcissism and Cluster B psychopathology in a social psychology context. Please contact me with any such opportunities at gingercoy@substack.com or direct message (DM) me on Substack Chat.
This is a unique, niche, and somewhat pioneering endeavor to contextualize psychology in politics (and culture). The average lifespan of a blog is two years. Your support in all of its forms helps to provide me the fortitude to keep this project going.
Thank you for reading Concerning Narcissism.
-GC
It may be that the most egregious and virtually unreported scandal of the Trump Administration is that the worldwide pandemic lay at Trump's feet, having irresponsibly and cynically dismantled the U.S. World Health Pandemic Response program, namely by defunding the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite ample pandemic warnings leading up to the Covid-19 outbreak.
Americans were not protected by this ostensible paternal figure — just the opposite. Trump didn't have America’s back and most likely delighted in the ensuing chaos and melee, which centered the focus back on himself as “accountable” leader.
It is La-La Trump who suggested that by Easter, 2020, Covid-19 would be over and to drink bleach.
Trump insisted on holding daily briefings to control the narrative, promoting everything from injecting bleach into one’s veins and exposing the body to ultraviolet light, to antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and horse antiparasitic ivermectin. His suggestions caused accidental poisonings with disinfectants to double, and with one in twenty Americans trying hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, approximately 17,000 deaths have been linked to hydroxychloroquine alone (Eccles, 2024). He also packed his followers in crowded stadiums and made mask-wearing a “political statement,” while calling the pandemic a Democrats’ “hoax” and preventing widespread testing and isolating, so that the numbers would not look bad for him in an election year. —Psychiatrist/expert in violence, formerly with Yale and Harvard, Dr. Bandy X. Lee
Narcissists, such as Trump, are easily threatened by expertise, as their grandiosity (inflated sense of self-worth), which is a cognitive distortion, will not allow for the notion that someone else may have the answers. Delusional narcissists are, in their opinion, omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing). Delusions are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence.
Donald Trump became the source of almost half the world’s disinformation on Covid-19, at a time when public education was the most critical health intervention, in the absence of vaccines or a cure. Yet, when Trump fell ill with Covid-19, he used none of the “cures” he touted but only the most expensive, state-of-the-art proven treatments that may have saved his life but is not available to the average citizen. And even after vaccines became available, he and his family quietly received the vaccine, even as he sowed distrust in them with the public—and despite hoarding nearly 500 million excess doses, placing low-income countries at disproportionate risk, the U.S. became the last among eleven high-income countries to fully vaccinate at least 60 percent of its population (Shah et al., 2021). We will never know what might have happened, had Trump not disregarded the highly-lauded “pandemic playbook” his predecessor, Barack Obama, left for him, out of pathological envy; had he not defunded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), out of his contempt for science; and had he not forced out, months before the outbreak in China, the CDC’s onsite expert team, whose job it was to detect, prevent, or at least keep potential pandemics at epidemic level, as it had done for numerous other respiratory infectious diseases through all its history. As the World Health Organization (WHO) depends greatly on collaborations with the CDC, the WHO’s global efforts were hampered as well. But for one man’s mental deficits, more than a million American lives might have been saved, and for the global population, several million.—Psychiatrist/expert in violence, formerly with Yale and Harvard, Dr. Bandy X. Lee
Post-Roe Implications for Abortion
The anti-science and anti-medicine delusionality of narcissist Trump precipitated the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as well as the evangelical maneuvering that led to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. While it is difficult to pinpoint delusionality exclusively as he exhibits manifold psychopathic features, it is within the realm of possibility and even probability that his jaded and cynical “small government” ethos was the purported reasoning, if not justification, behind the dereliction of duty made manifest by lack of pandemic response readiness that resulted in over one million deaths in the United States.
Incongruently, invading women's uteruses in an anti-choice Crusade is the definition of big government overreach, revealing inconsistency in his capacity for faithfulness to small government ideology, which some strangely see as his strong suit, an every-man full of blunders and foibles, though in reality, this “stable genius” lacks an integrated core; nobody's home. The cruelty (and the chaos) is the point.
Apparently, according to the American Taliban of patriarchal evangelicals, the killing of a cluster of cells which may have a ~50% chance of becoming a man, takes precedence over protecting the life of a full-grown pregnant woman, never mind that each woman in America has made use of taxpayer-funded public infrastructure and institutions such as highways, roads, bridges, and public education, etc.
In effect, risking women's lives by overlooking modern medicine in favor of ideological anti-choice fervor, which reduces women's lives to objectified political footballs, wastes taxpayer dollars and is thus fiscally irresponsible, a hypocritical conflict of interest for quote-unquote fiscally responsible Republicans. The impact to America's bottom line GDP based on this harebrained, draconian and anachronistic scheme to turn the clock back with delusional ideology trumping medicine is bound to scale up with devastating economic consequences due to, in aggregate, mothers’ senseless loss of life.
Like domino's falling, the notion of “state’s rights” belies the ultimate intention for a national abortion ban and from there or concurrently, further fascistic infringements on women's rights including the rights to the abortion pill, IVF, contraception, same-sex marriage, and the right to pursue abortion across state lines free of bounty hunters and “papers, please” military checkpoints, characteristic of dictatorships. It's only been since 1974 that an American woman has had the right to hold a credit card in her name. The latest atrocious proposed bill, advocated by “Aunt Lydia” Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) is to collect data on pregnant women in a federal database. Can we say Handmaid's Tale??
Floating somewhere on a continuum between delusionality and outright antisocial lying to score political points, Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis have claimed that babies are executed upon birth under the banner of abortion, an assertion that is ludicrous, obscene, and frankly, insane.
Anti-Science Delusionality Around Covid-19
The charitable defense granted Trump of cost-cutting in terms of slashing the pandemic response program is laughable in the face of the outrageous and unprecedented debt to the tune of $8.4 trillion that Trump racked up during his four years in office. Trump had long decried that America is a debtors’ nation, while being hell-bent to make it determinedly so.
True to form for a narcissist, Trump silenced and denigrated a robust pandemic response program as part of the conspiratorial “deep state.” Trump's paranoid distrust of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) was substantiated by his call for outsized budget cuts during the height of the pandemic. In 2020, the year the pandemic broke, Trump proposed a $693 million budget cut to the CDC.
The narcissist's childhood has gone so arrantly wrong, that the child mounts a fantasy defense to insulate himself from the trauma of his upbringing. By ignoring, denying and minimizing Covid-19, Trump encouraged his acolytes to also indulge the pernicious drug that is fantasy. However, just like with any drug addiction, the gravitational comedown to reality is ineluctable and in this case, straight-up deadly.
To my knowledge, only one public health professional, psychiatrist and expert in violence formerly with Yale University, Dr. Bandy X. Lee has routinely reminded Americans effectively that “Donald Trump did this” when it came to the pandemic. That this manifest “on the nose” symptom of the Trump Contagion, Dr. Lee's phrase for the Trump-induced psychic epidemic, is not entrenched and commonplace knowledge is a worrisome sign of the disconnect from reality that post-pandemic America has failed to acknowledge and integrate.
It may be that this shocking fact that if it weren't for Trump, the United States may have successfully contained the worldwide pandemic, is too much for the average citizen to bear. Trump's running for office again, especially with such rabid support is wildly unconscionable and alarming on the face of it, and indicates just how many Americans remain infected by his pervasive gross pathology. Trump amnesia encompasses Covid-19 amnesia.
A substantial swath of Trump supporters are in denial that the pandemic even existed or minimize its effects with a conspiracy theory — “it was the plandemic!” they cry out against the alleged shadowy cabal of elites using the virus and vaccine to profit and gain power — never mind for the fact that if it weren't for largely Democrats taking the vaccine, MAGA Republicans, many of whom are anti-vaxxers, would not be fraternizing openly, mask-free, the way that they are today. This noxious entitlement is grating.
Anti-vaxxers: Mentally Ill Victimhood Conspiracists— 54,321 views, Aug 29, 2021
The same entitled MAGA-ts are unable to ferret out chicken and egg scenarios to be able to discern when so-called government “overreach” is to their benefit as in mobilizing an effective pandemic response program or when lockdown measures are overreaching— a lockdown which wouldn't have been necessary if it weren't for “correcting” for a pandemic response of so-called deep state “overreach.”
MAGA are upset about lockdown when the focus for blame ought to be the lack of readiness. If the United States had been prepared, lockdown would not have been necessary, but preparation is predicated on mentally competent leadership.
First Trump blamed China — “the China virus,” then he blamed Obama, and then he blamed the states rather than taking any accountability himself. Alloplastic defenses, blaming others, rather than taking any accountability, is a signature of narcissism.
Arguably, grotesque pathological narcissism is the root cause for the mangling and mismanagement of Covid-19 not only in America but across the world.
From notably 2020 until the present day, America's current stint in mass psychosis includes all manner of delusionality: the Trump administration expounding in 2020 that the virus is “totally under control”; American exceptionalism, entitled and grandiose thinking that infectious respiratory diseases would never affect America necessitating masks, only Asian countries (think MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-1) or thinking that a dictatorship could never happen in America; Roe vs. Wade would never be overturned; current Trump amnesia, dissociating the daily traumatizing assaults on reality under Trump, while minimizing, denying, and rewriting history.
“This American Carnage stops right here and right now,” Trump infamously declared in his inauguration speech. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Spreading the Trump Contagion is a deadly proposition. Whether with Covid-19 or abortion, voting for Trump is a vote cast for a death spiral and a death cult.
Resources:
American Pathogen
Our Delusional Lives: Where Psychologists Fear to Tread
The Newsletter of Dr. Bandy X. Lee Substack by Dr. Bandy X. Lee, featuring periodic drops of chapters from her new book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind.
Abortion, Every Day Substack by Jessica Valenti, a comprehensive daily newsletter dedicated to abortion rights.