Inside the Brain of a Dictator: Why Trump Will Ultimately Use the Nuclear Codes

People who suffer from addiction are sometimes mistakenly seen as the most mentally unbalanced members of society. But while they may be highly self-destructive, they are rarely of any threat to other people. Many of them are in fact functional, productive individuals who often manage to joggle their addiction with holding down a job and providing an important service to society. I have worked with quite a few of them in the past and even had an alcoholic boss at one point. She wasn’t the best boss, but she was super nice and had earned respect by others in senior positions. Addiction is extremely common in society, but we tend to focus on, and stigmatise, chemical addictions when virtually all of us are addicted to something: products, games, food, or social media.

While self-destruction is a common psychological coping mechanism both for humans and civilisation as a whole, there is something far worse, which is a toxic combination of self-destruction and destruction. We encounter this rare, toxic combination in a special class of psychopaths: dictators. By contrast to those who suffer from a specific chemical or behavioural dependency, dictators are all-round mental basket-cases who ring every alarm and tick every box in the psychopathology rulebook: for them, the destruction of others is hard wired into their brain’s neurotransmitter reward system.

On a psychological level, both self-destruction and destruction are reward systems for the brain: they are effective stress-alleviation responses that have one thing in common: they function as instruments of distraction from deep, unprocessed personal pain. Those with the most disturbed mental health, that is, the most psychological damage, are drawn to both destruction and self-destruction at the same time, because they need access to as many coping mechanisms as they can get. The reason why autocratic leaders are so dangerous is that the noise from the amount of self-hate, unprocessed trauma and inner turmoil they suffer from can only be quieted down by the ultimate distraction: making others miserable by inflicting on them the same unprocessed trauma, in multiples of ten.

Everyone knows what a disturbing childhood the Orange Blob had. At the age of 79 he is still seeking the validation he never had as a child by begging for a Nobel Prize, then throwing a tantrum. His emotional intelligence never managed to mature past childhood, when an individual begins to distinguish between drawing validation from themselves, and drawing validation from others. The Blob never crossed the maturation threshold and that’s why it hates itself. Although he has become a formidable dictator, he is an incredibly emotionally vulnerable personality, something that, sadly, none of his adversaries have exploited. The reason why Trump is destroying America is because destruction is a high-strength analgesic: inflicting pain on others is the only way he knows how to calm his internal turmoil.

The reason why Trump alternates between wanting to be seen as a peacemaker and a brutal dictator is because, to him, both of these roles are essentially the same: they both provide validation, and he will seek this validation either as a saint, a villain, or both. Dictators are such incredibly damaged personalities that, in their desperate quest for attention they don’t care whether this comes from a Nobel Prize or a genocide. This is something that a normal person cannot understand, because it only makes sense to a sick mind.

Dictators are portrayed as sadists, but this is not the whole story: for them both destruction and self-destruction serve the same psychological reward, to the point where they truly do not distinguish between the two. This is why autocracies tend to make no sense: they embody the extreme, unhinged, explosive elements of the tyrant in charge. Trump is so desperate for attention that, the nuclear codes are the rosary he clutches on to. If all else fails, he can always use the nuclear option and catapult himself straight to the top of the hall of fame.