Do American psychologists or psychiatrists currently comment on Trump’s behavior in the public sphere?

Yes, quite often. Beyond Steven Buser’s book Real and Present Danger, American psychologists and psychiatrists have addressed Trump’s behavior in several other works. For example, psychologist Dan P. McAdams offers a detailed psychological portrait in The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. Another example is Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump, which combines psychoanalytic perspectives with political psychology to explore what drives Trump’s behavior and his appeal. These books are part of a broader body of psychological commentary that regularly appears in both academic and public discourse.

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire for annexing Greenland, established a “Peace Council” to which he invited Vladimir Putin and several other totalitarian countries, and accepted a framed Nobel Peace Prize from its current laureate. As a Jungian Analyst, what is your reaction when you observe the statements and actions of the American president?

Psychologists and Jungians who study Trump have long pointed out that he exhibits pronounced narcissistic traits. In such a personality structure, the central life aim is the gratification of one’s own needs, and experience, relationships, and reality itself are organized around propping the ego.  Because he has reached this kind of “inflated position” as president of the United States, he is constantly confirming to himself what he can get away with and what his power allows him to do. And the more he tests it, the more distorted his sense of self becomes. The attempt to annex Greenland is, in my view, just another example of the enactment of the grandiose fantasy.

I perceive his main goal as consolidating the power of the United States globally, rewriting the map of power, and dominating the Western Hemisphere in order to attain a self-affirming ego position that confirms his sense of strength and grandiosity. It appears as if he and Putin have mentally divided the world into Western and Eastern empires, and this can be understood as one of Trump’s attempts to move closer to that vision. As a narcissist, he has no inner restraints, and once he realized that he can get away with almost anything, he will keep pushing the limits. He has essentially legitimized vulgarity and lies, and elevated his own feelings of disdain above the moral principles that people usually carry within themselves. This is no longer just narcissism, but something bordering on psychopathy, as we see an absence of fear, pronounced impulsiveness, objectification of others as tools, a lack of remorse and shame, and an inability to form any moral relationship to his decisions.

Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are usually reluctant to label public figures, since they have not had the opportunity to diagnose them directly and therefore speak rather about personality traits they observe. How reliably can Trump’s traits be assessed based on his public behavior?

Of course, it is not ethical to definitively diagnose someone without having met them personally in a clinical setting and without administering tests. In Trump’s case, however, we already have an enormous amount of material for analysis. We have books in which authors describe their individual encounters with him, we have his speeches, testimonies, correspondence, videos, and so on. I believe there is so much material that one can conclude with a high degree of certainty that Taken together, these features suggest that he could indeed fit what is often described as a malignant narcissistic personality structure. We observe pronounced traits such as rigidity, entitlement, tendency to control and manipulate, a persistent refusal to take responsibility, a striking incapacity for genuine empathy, an inability to apologize or acknowledge wrongdoing, and a pattern of rigid denial that remains unchanged regardless of presented evidence.

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