A clinical psychologist claims that Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner in the U.S. presidential race, is “following the playbook” of past dictators.
Ben Michaelis, the psychologist, appeared on The Blaze, the media entity run by Glenn Beck, a conservative commentator who is opposed to Trump.
“You would compare Donald Trump to somebody like Mussolini, Hitler — would you put him in those categories?” Beck asked on The Glenn Beck Program.
“What I can say is that he is following the playbook from those past campaigns,” Michaelis responded. “There are so many parallels, which are quite disturbing.”
Michaelis noted that he believes the same reason lies behind Hitler’s rise and Trump’s current widespread support--both campaigns are “appealing to the economically downtrodden.”
He also said that there’s evidence that Trump suffers from “narcissistic personality disorder.”
“All of the evidence — again, observing him — is of someone who has an inflated, possibly delusional, sense of self esteem, … very little remorse and empathy for others,” Michaelis said. “And a streak that is very common to narcissists when they are questioned or attacked in any way is that they attack with complete, single-minded vitriol, and Mr. Trump exhibits all of these things.”
Either Trump is narcissistic, believing what he says, the psychologist added, “or he doesn’t believe a lot of the things that he’s saying, which puts him in a very different category of someone that may be, sort of, on the psychotic spectrum.”
