The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He's equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination.

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

Donald Trump both disbelieves and believes in falsehoods, so that when he did thrive on his longstanding - the claim that Obama was not born in the United States - he's crazy like a fox in manipulating it because it gave him his political entrée onto the national stage. In order to make your falsehoods powerful, you have to believe in them in some extent. And that's why we simplify things if we say that Trump either believes nothing in his falsehoods and is just manipulating us like a fox or he completely believes them.

The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He's equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination.

Yes, I've been very preoccupied with the survivor all through my work.

In early psychoanalytic thought, narcissism was - and still, of course, is - self-love. The early psychoanalysts used to talk of libido directed at the self. That now feels a little quaint, that kind of language. But it does include the most fierce and self-displaying form of one's individual self. And in this way, it can be dangerous. When you look at Donald Trump, you can really see someone who's destructive to any form of life enhancement in virtually every area. And if that's what Fromm means by malignant narcissism, then it definitely applies.

Donald Trump doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren't, and that's one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama's birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality.