The following is by my friend Siebolt Frieswyck.* He wrote it in reaction to the Washington Post opinion piece by Colbert I. King “I don’t care if Trump had an affair. I care about the hush money. ” Frieswyck explains why he does care about “Trump’s denigrating and coldly exploitive treatment of women.
This is the second story I published for Dr. Frieswyck. On Jan. 25, 2017 I published Guest Siebolt Frieswyk offers a profound frightening impression of Donald Trump (right) which bears a reread since it is now especially timely given that he wrote it in reaction to a HuffPost story about Kim Jung Un. Hal Brown
Excerpt:
I couldn’t care less whether in 2006 Donald Trump had a sexual affair with pornographic film actress Stephanie Clifford — known professionally as Stormy Daniels — only months after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron.
Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen says Trump has denied the affair. But even if it did occur, the relationship would have taken place years before the 2016 presidential election. Thus, it is a private matter between citizen Donald Trump and his wife and none of my business.
Why do we not underscore the abundant evidence of Trump’s denigrating and coldly exploitive treatment of women as the most powerful and relevant manifestation of his core identity that makes him completely untrustworthy and dangerously unsuited for the office of the presidency?
His misconduct in office seems to have made abundantly clear that he will sell out our Nation to the Russians for his personal gain. He is a traitor hiding in plain sight. His arrogance, grandiosity and cynically exploitive and predatory modes compounded by lying and deceit make him into a dangerous monster who imperils the world.
Hervey Kleckly and Otto Kernberg have both described this psychopathology quite well. See Pep Web for citations including Kernberg, O.F.(2007). The Almost Untreatable Narcissistic Patient. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 55(2):503-539. There Kernberg underscores his 1997 article that underlines the most problematic traits starting with self-centeredness now so obvious in Trump’s daily conduct. The comments to follow are criteria Kernberg enumerates for pathological narcissism but applied in my comments to Trump.
It is clear to many observers that Trump is overly dependent on admiration. He has prominent fantasies of success. His grandiosity is unlimited. Moreover, he avoids reality that contradicts his inflated self-appraisal. He displays intermittent self-doubt but is more clearly preoccupied with envy and greed. His predominant mode of relating with others is exploitation. He is driven by entitlement. He is deeply convinced that he deserves everything he wishes while he devalues others and steals from them all that he wishes. He has grave limits on his ability to trust and rely on his White House staff. He has no compassion for anyone other than himself. He cannot mourn the loss of those who have previously supported him but now have abandoned him. He demands concrete expressions of loyalty to him not to the office of the presidency and to the rule of law. His behavior is consistently antisocial. He is often overwhelmed with aggression and paranoia yet experiences endless feelings of boredom. He fills his mornings with Twittering. He needs that stimulation to feel alive as does his sexual promiscuity pursued to fill an endless insatiable internal void. His paranoid trends are prominently evident in his Tweets. There he sometimes loses his grasp of reality as he becomes swept up in his grandiosity.
Moreover, he appears to be incapable of real concern for the needs of All Americans. He is also unable to develop trusting and collaborative relationships with others as can be witnessed in the turnover and turmoil in the White House staff with its gross dysfunction and chaos. Trump can neither trust nor forge meaningful connections. He is thus incapable of building and sustaining collaborative participation with his staff and supporters in the interest of ALL of us, his fellow citizens. We and our beloved democracy are imperiled by a man who cares more about himself than any of us and our Nation.