As I near 80, I am painfully aware of my own deteriorating energy and abilities. I doubt if Donald Trump is any different – despite this weekend’s extraordinary birthday cage fight at the White House, for which he stayed up till the early hours.
Is he too old to be in office? As we enter old age many of us acquire irrefutable evidence on brain scans – as I have done, to my distress – that inside our heads our brains are scarred and shrinking, however tanned our skin and blonde our hair on the outside.
So it is tempting to medicalise Trump – to attribute his grotesque behaviour to narcissistic personality disorder or more recently to the early stages of fronto-temporal dementia. Both these conditions involve delusions of grandeur but Trump has, ironically, achieved grandeur by becoming US President, so in this respect at least they no longer apply.
He certainly fits the narcissistic profile very well – the lack of empathy, the sense of entitlement, the need for attention, the deep insecurity and so on. The diagnosis of fronto-temporal dementia applies less well. But it is surely more meaningful to see him as one of those troubling and unpleasant individuals who are utterly selfish and lie without compunction and who are so often highly successful, especially in politics. There is nothing new about political dishonesty, but Trump has carried it to new heights.
The true pathology here is social – that such liars can surround themselves with fawning cronies and spout the simplistic nonsense that appeals to people who naïvely and mistakenly believe in the myth of “great leaders” and simple answers to complex questions.
We all knowingly lie from time to time but our default assumption is that other people are mainly truthful. This makes us gullible and vulnerable to the Bernie Madoffs of this world, who are consistently dishonest.
It is hard to know whether Trump knows he is lying and simply doesn’t care, or whether he believes his own lies. The eminent evolutionary theorist Robert Travers has argued that self-deception – believing our own lies – is an evolved trait in the human brain. It makes us more convincing liars, and hence more successful, and this gives us a reproductive advantage.
As with all traits some people will have more of it than others. Like so many political leaders Trump surrounds himself with men and woman who will never dare to criticise him and refute his lies, and this must make it even easier for him to believe them.
This social pathology is also evident in the way that so many world leaders are old men. There are few, if any, professions other than in politics, where men in their late seventies or even in their eighties have highly responsible jobs. Brain surgeons? Pilots? Military generals? CEOs?
The problem here is not Trump’s deeply unpleasant personality and advanced age – it is the social system that has given him power, and the pusillanimous senior Republican politicians who have not dared to state in public what they must surely know: that he is utterly unsuited to high office. And the cost of this cowardice is measured in thousands of innocent lives.
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