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heinzpilsner · 7 months

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Okay, it's time for the next exciting part of the 'Overanalyzing beach Maiko' series!

In the previous episode, we finally left behind the jealous rampage scene thank god, and now we'll deal with the consequences! Yay!

I'm a bit too happy about it, am I?

Today I'm not in the mood for long procrastinating jokes I wonder why, so let's get right to the business of dissecting Maiko's heated break-up dialogue, shall we?

So, what do we have here?

Mai: "Zuko, what is wrong with you?"

A legitimate question.

Zuko: "What's wrong with me?"

Much less legitimate question. I mean, what exactly Zuko tried to accuse Mai of at this point? Her supposed infidelity? But what if she was in the process of telling "sorry, I have a boyfriend" at the moment of Zuko's attack? Or what - was she supposed to hiss like a cat and hit Ruon-Jian with a knife the moment he spoke to her or something?

(A sidenote: Zuko's reaction could mean one important thing: he was angry at Mai just for liking another boy.

Even ignoring the unfoudedness of Zuko's assumption, the problem is, people can't really control their feelings. Only their behavior - and even that to a certain extent (passion is a thing and all).

So, unless Mai flirted (which would hint on her desire to commit an act of infidelity) with Ruon-Jian or downright cheated on Zuko, resenting her wasn't rational and wouldn't improve the situation in a slightest.

But... Perhaps Zuko in his inadequate state just saw flirting where there was none of it.)

Anyway, boy, even if you don't realize it at the moment, you've just thoroughly screwed up. It's really not a good time for you to go into offense here!

Mai: "Your temper is out of control. You blow up over every little thing. You're so impatient and hotheaded and angry!"

Well, there are far more issues with Zuko's behavior than that, but I have to give Mai credit here - she was able to look beyond particulars of the moment and detect that there's something weird going on with her boyfriend.

... Well, either that, or she simply didn't notice all the other problems here, which could say a lot about Mai's life views.

But if it's the former, the fact that she decided to focus on this aspect in particular is... quite curious.

It actually could speak of her concern for Zuko (and she kinda sounded concerned with her "What's wrong with you" question)... were it not for the fact it heavily contradicts her recent actions.

Sorry, Maiko fans, but the "bring me food" thing is not something I can simply dismiss. It maybe seems small, but it shows way too clearly Mai's current attitude that is incompatible with true caring either for others in general, or for Zuko in particular. And it took place just a couple of minutes before the scene!

(Most likely the creators didn't realise it, but what can I say? I'm analysing the material, not intentions behind it.)

So, not that there is anything wrong with caring about yourself in the first place, but I'd say Mai during the break-up dialogue was concerned mostly/only about her own interests.

And of all the problematic things that were exaggerated or manifested by Zuko's psychological instability (including tendency towards physical aggression, irrational jealousy, lack of trust and respect towards his girlfriend and a long list of potentially harmful attitudes), the ones that bothered Mai the most were... his trademark personality flaws.

Huh.

Of course, Zuko's psychological state was the real issue here. But Mai didn't stop after just "your temper is out of control", did she?

The problem is, being hot-headed, impatient and prone to anger is not some anomaly of the day! It's a most typical manifestation of Zuko's temperament under stressful conditions, and it will never go way entirely even after all the wrong attitudes in his head will be fixed.

And when you choose yourself a life partner, you should be ready that it will not always be rainbows and awfully orange sunshine with them, you know.

(I'm not stating here what you shold tolerate any kind of shit from your partner. That's not the point. My point is... Ah, I'm a zutarian, draw your own conclusions here.)

In short, instead of focusing on real problems, Mai just scolded Zuko for being himself. Brilliant thinking!

Zuko: "Well, at least I feel something, as opposed to you. You have no passion for anything! You're just a big blah!"

... Oh-oh. Boy, it was a wrong answer. Like, a really really wrong answer.

As a zutarian, I fully approve of it though pffft

Basically, Zuko totally ignored "temper is out of control" part and said to a rightfully angry Mai who already thought he was too much of a trouble that her personality* sucks. If he was still hoping to save the relationship after this (why would he though?), his brain definitely short circuited.

(*Actually, lack of "passion for anything" can't be considered someone's personality - unless what we're really talking about is phlegmatic temperament, it's a big problem. But I'll elaborate on it in later parts if I ever manage to figure out what is "it" at all in the mess of Mai's character)

But I must say, Zuko's answer gives us a ridiculous amount of data to work with.

And one of the most notable details here is the ironic paradox of his accusation. Which is:

Zuko basically scolded Mai for not feeling anything and not having passion right after she yelled at him passionately.

... Lol.

I'd say something does not quite add up here, does it?

But like all paradoxes, the situation is actually not all that strange when you describe it more thoroughly.

And it has two possible explanations.

Either Zuko just responded to Mai's critique outside of the situational context...

(And thus admitted that he was frustrated with Mai's usual personality for quite some time. ... Even though before "The Beach" he didn't seem to mind her "lack of passion" all that much. Huh.)

...Or Mai's personality wasn't Zuko's real problem with her at the moment.

If you think about it, apart from unusual emotional outburst (and imaginary interest in another guy) there was nothing new about Mai this day - except for one little thing, of course.

Today she was expressing much less of affection towards Zuko than before.

You know what's the sad thing though?

Both of these hypotheses could be right simultaneously. That is, Zuko became frustrated with Mai's personality and her lack of love this day.

I'd speculate here that Zuko loves Mai mostly in response to her "love" for him. The guy doesn't really need all that much - just someone to love and be loved by (preferably with a pretty face and noble status, but I'm sure different options were possible). Mai just was the first girl around who laid her hands on him in a moment of vulnerability.

But when her affection is gone, it turns out he doesn't really like her all that much.

Of course, he tells her "sweet" things like "You're beautiful when you hate the world", but... Can we state with certainty that he wouldn't prefer something different to admire in a girl if he had a choice?

(Well, technically, he has a choice - but mostly in theory. Zuko leads a pretty isolated life, and there are simply no other interested girls around - except for crazy royalty fans apparently, but security holds them at bay alright. Besides, Mai is already here, and from Zuko's date with Jin we know that he was willing first to sacrifice his dignity, and then to risk his freedom/life(!) just because he couldn't stand to see a girl with him sad. So, as long as he believes he's loved, he'll try and make this relationship work despite everything.)

"It's over, Zuko. We're done."

Oh no! What a schocking surprise!

It was the best part of the episode if you ask me

The notable thing though is that Mai looked genuinely sad after she said it. I guess it was the writer's way to say once again: "Look, she actually cares!"

I can interpret this emotion on Mai's face in a thousands of different ways though:

"I had to drop a guy because he hated my deep personality. Again!"

"My prince suddenly turned into a badgerfrog. What a dissapointment."

"Aww, I really liked his butt though".

"Oh damn, I just lost my free source of fruit tarts. I didn't really think this through, did I?"

"Why, oh why I have to be such a tragic and misunderstood character? It's all my mother's fault. That bitch."

(You can add to this list if you like, it's hilarious.)

The point is, you can't really use this sad look as a full-fledged argument.

(Of course, it's my personal way of solving the psychological contradictions of the writing. But seriously, I don't make the rules here - the "bring me food" moment outweighs all the ambiguous sad looks altogether.)

Anyway, after this Zuko was disgracefully banished from the party for damaging property, so the pair will see each other next time only after some lonely walking and reflections.

But we'll save this material for the next mysterious part of the 'overanalyzing beach Maiko' series! Yay!

(The end of the episode is really heavy with polylogue and all the girls being suddenly possessed by a local ghost of amateur psychoanalytic, so I'll have to think about the best way to approach the analysis. Until then...)

Thanks for your attention.

I still ignore all notifications.

P. S.: While I was writing this, I realized another possible mechanism behind Zuko's irrational jealousy! So perhaps we'll actually make a little detour next time, hmm.

(Ugh, the more I analyze Maiko, the more I want to scream. I mean, to hell with zutara - I'd be satisfied with just those two people staying as far from each other as possible! Dfghkhafffg!)

#atla #zuko #mai atla #anti maiko

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invadernurse · 2 years

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Catching Flies (Revised) Ch. 7

Chapter 7: Look, a Filler Chapter Already

Overall rating: Teen

Summary: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. That’s what they say anyway.

Teacher!Reader makes the mistake of trying to help the two most troubled kids in your class. This leads to forming a science club, learning some childhood psychology, adopting an alien older than you, and somehow catching Professor Membrane’s interest.

Non-binary Reader;

The reader does have a last name: Nemo– which means no-name.

First Chapter | Previous Chapter

Now on Ao3!

Usually on Sunday mornings, Professor Membrane entered the kitchen to find two bleary eyed children poking their food with mild interest.This morning, he only found one child, who was eating her cereal in silence.

"Where's your brother?" He sighed, already turning to drag the boy out of bed when Gaz's words made him pause.

"In the garage with Zim," she grumbled between bites. "He never went to bed last night."

"What?" Professor Membrane paused, trying to remember last night. He had opened Dib's door enough to assure he hadn't been on his laptop, but hadn't checked to see if he was in bed. The house's surveillance system assured he was on the grounds, and usually if the boy wasn't watching TV or playing on his laptop, he was sleeping.

"Something about some stupid project, " Gaz answered. "I was hoping he was dissecting Zim or the other way around, but it's just that stupid machine they're working on."

The email he received late last night returned to the forefront of his mind. He could tell you were worried about stepping on toes, but yet still concerned enough to overcome your hesitancy. That alone impressed him; he knew his children were far from the typical child, and yet any communications with their teachers were usually concerned with the other students and not his own.

Usually he left his children to their own devices, after all it was scientifically proven that unstructured playtime was beneficial for developing minds. But perhaps checking in on them once in a while would be acceptable.

Especially if Dib and his friend had been playing together. Things tended to...explode when they were around each other for long periods of time. Granted, lately things had seemed to calm down in their rivalry.

Now only if Zim's little brother Gir would stop prank calling him….

Professor Membrane left Gaz to her own devices and hurried out to the garage. The door was open, and the supposed 'space ship' was sitting abandoned in the back. Both Dib and Zim were bent over one of their laptops, working on virtual blueprints. And not fighting.

Impressive indeed.

"I still think a fission fueled power cell would be better," Zim grumbled as Membrane walked in, apparently unaware of his arrival. The foreign boy's skin seemed even more sickly and paler than usual, his black hair askew and eyelids drooping.

"And those are kind of expensive and, you know, virtually unheard of," Dib yawned in response, rubbing a reddened eye. "Unless you happen to have an extra one just laying around, I think we'll have to come up with another power source."

"Let's stay away from nuclear power until you boys are older," Membrane agreed, peering at the schematics on the screen. It was a testament to how tired the boys were given they barely spooked, and instead flinched slightly and lifted their heads. "What are you two working on?"

"Tak's old ship," Dib answered, earning a half-hearted look that may have been a glare from Zim if the other boy hadn't been so exhausted. "Zim's finally helping me with it."

"I'm proud that you boys are working on this together," he said, putting a hand on Dib's shoulder. It wasn't quite the science he hoped his son would be interested in, but a look at the schematics convinced him this wasn't just two boys pretending to build a spaceship. Most of it looked feasible, if little more than theoretical for two twelve year old boys.

Actually, on further review of the schematics, he was impressed. Some of it looked to be on par with some of the prototypes he had seen others working on in Membrane Lab's Research and Development.

Maybe he had been a little too hasty to label his son's project as unscientific.

Dib smiled up at him, reminding him of that odd hallucination he had after being hit in the head. He had been trying to be more supportive since, the awe and happiness on Dib's face making it well worth the effort. He regretted it had taken such drastic lengths to realize the rift that had formed between him and his son.

But he could work on it. It wasn't too late.

"As thrilled as I am to see you two working on something this advanced, I think you both are in dire need of sleep."

"Psht," Zim slurred, his eyes barely open. "Sleep is for the weak."

"Yeah," Dib agreed, though a frown started to form on his face. "Wait, what time is it?"

"After eight…" he answered before adding, "In the morning."

Both pairs of eyes widened in surprise. "You're kidding, right?"

"No, I think both of you need to get some sleep. I'm sure I have some spare pillows and blankets if you want to stay, Zim. But do you need to tell your parents?"

Emotions rapidly crossed Zim's face: surprise, fear, suspicion even. "My parents...are aware that I've decided to help Dib-human. But perhaps I should return home And...squash any...worries."

A heavy feeling settled in Membrane's stomach as he studied his son's foreign friend. Now that he was focusing on his own parental role, he wondered about Zim's parents. The boy seemed to run as wild as Dib and Gaz, perhaps even more so.

Maybe they were along the same line of his own guidelines and beliefs. Or maybe they too were overwhelmed and focused on their work so much that their parenting duties fell to the wayside.

"You know, as Dib's friend you're always welcomed here, Zim." He finally said slowly. "No matter the time of day or the circumstances."

The boy blinked several times in surprise, his eyes darting between him and Dib, as if expecting a joke or something.

Was this why you were so concerned? Had you already noticed that something seemed….off? If so, how long had it been going on and he had been unaware? Not that he was responsible for Zim, but he was around the boy enough, and as a scientist his observation skills should be sharp.

The thought stayed in his mind as Zim left, and Dib dragged himself upstairs after Foodio made him a quick breakfast. Gaz had settled into the couch, already absorbed in her video game. She said nothing as her father sat beside her, but held out the second controller. "Dib was supposed to help me with this boss. You can't beat him and get the treasure without a second player."

Professor Membrane sighed as he accepted the controller, the second character appearing with a pop on screen. "You're not just using me as cannon fodder again, are you?"

The smile on Gaz's face made him think he may be right, even if she refused to answer.

--+--

From: Professor Membrane ([email protected]) To: Miss Nemo ([email protected]) Subject: Re: the boys project Mx Nemo; Thank you for your email. Despite your obvious worry, I don't find your emails a nuisance. It is reassuring to know you care so much for your students. Usually when I receive notes from my children's teachers they are less than positive. Rest assured, while the boys' project is rather unorthodox, it is relatively safe. It's a decent model spacecraft, though Dib claims it is originally from an alien invader. My boy has a very active imagination as I'm sure you are well aware. It can be challenging at times to remind him what is real and what is not. As for projects for them to work on, you are correct that both of them are quite advanced compared to their cohorts. Perhaps something geared towards engineering or such? They do seem to be quite skilled at their little 'spaceship' they're working on. Both seem fascinated with space as well. Hopefully that information helps, and I will make inquiries to our human resources and outreach program to see if they have any current projects going for their skill group. Thank you for your email, as I stated earlier. And thank you for your concern over your pupils outside of the classroom. In my opinion that marks you as an outstanding teacher. With regards Dr. Professor Membrane

--+--

He replied.

Professor Membrane actually replied to your email.

To be honest, you hadn't expected him to. Or if he had, you expected it to be far more formal, written by a secretary or a standard bot reply.

Not something so personal. So informal. So helpful.

So the two boys weren't up to anything particularly dangerous or untoward. Unorthodox, certainly. After all, a spaceship? That was the last thing you had expected. But then again, there was nothing conventional about Zim and Dib.

It at least gave you enough information and ideas to help with your search. So in between cleaning the mess Gir had left and finishing your grading, your searched online for possible ideas and projects.

What you found was like a sign from heaven and the stars above. Maybe things were finally looking up.

Attention teachers and parents of S.T.E.M. focused children! The local astronomy and SETI groups have decided to put on a competition for children to test their skills as future astronauts and engineers to see how they would go about exploring distant planets and galaxies! Please contact us at totallynotanalienplot@fmail for further details!

Next Chapter

#invader zim zadf #invader zim #professor membrane #enter the florpus #dib membrane #invaderzim #professor membrane x reader #catching flies fic #catching Flies

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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Trump just looked up to the sky and said “I am the chosen one.” A reminder that he’s completely insane, and unfit for office in every way. #25thAmendmentNow

When I heard Trump proclaim himself "The Chosen One" today my first thought was chosen by who, Putin?

Far-Right Dark Money Interests?

Evangelical Christians?

White Supremacists?

Fox News?

Because he defintely wasn't chosen by America...

#25thAmendmentNow

His Ego Bruised by Denmark, Trump Flashes God Complex: ‘I Am the Chosen One’

His dreams of Greenland conquest dashed, Trump re-imagines himself a messiah

By TIM DICKINSON | Published August 21, 2019 3:55 PM ET | RollingStone |

Posted August 22, 2019 12:29 PM ET |

To mangle Twain, it’s better to remain silent and be thought a malignant narcissist than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

“I am the chosen one,” Donald Trumpdeclared to reporters Wednesday on the White House lawn, looking toward the heavens.

The president was reflecting on his trade war with China, insisting that it should have been launched long ago to curb what he characterized as China’s theft of our wealth and intellectual property. “Somebody had to do it,” Trump insisted.

In another context, one might excuse the quip as mere puffery. But in the case of Trump, the president’s pathological narcissism appears to metastasizing into a messiah complex.

Earlier Wednesday morning the president tweeted out unhinged praise of his Middle East policies from the self-styled “conservative warrior” Wayne Allyn Root. Root, a Newsmax personality, dwells in the fever swamps, promoting birtherism and conspiracy theories around the death of Seth Rich. In the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas concert shooting he tweeted, without evidence, that the massacre was “clearly coordinated Muslim terror attack.”

In a Twitter thread, Trump quoted Root at length calling the him “the greatest President for the Jews” and even the “King of Israel.”

The president’s gusher of god-complex grandiosity has followed, predictably, in the wake of an ego-damaging exchange with the Prime Minister of Denmark — who laughed off Trump’s unhinged ambition for the United States to buy Greenland from the Scandinavian nation as “absurd.”

Mette Frederiksen, visiting Greenland this week, told reporters that “of course, Greenland is not for sale,” adding that “thankfully the time where you buy and sell other countries and populations and is over. Let’s leave it there.” Frederiksen added that “jokes aside,” Denmark would like a closer relationship with the United States.

Ever thin skinned, especially when it comes to criticism from powerful women, Trump responded petulantly Tuesday night by tweeting that he’d be cancelling a planned meeting with Frederiksen: SEE TWEET ON TRUMP TIME LINE

On Wednesday Trump made clear just how shaken he’d been by the dashing of his dream of Arctic conquest, calling Frederiksen “nasty” — a outburst of misogyny typically reserved for Hillary Clinton. “I thought it was a very not nice way of saying something,” Trump explained to reporters. “All they had to do is say, no, we’d rather not do that or we’d rather not talk about it.”

“She’s not talking to me, she’s talking to the United States of America,” he added, explaining his umbrage. “They can’t say ‘how absurd.’”

Watching Trump these past 24 hours, swinging between grievance and grandiosity, have been like a playing a game of DSM bingo for “narcissistic personality disorder,” the diagnosis of which requires a match of only five of the following nine character traits:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high status people (or institutions).

4. Requires excessive admiration.

5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

For more on the president’s dangerous self regard, read my colleague Alex Morris’ ever-timely feature on Trump’s preening and perilous mental health.

Trump’s Mental Health: Is Pathological Narcissism the Key to Trump’s Behavior?

Diagnosing the president was off-limits to experts – until a textbook case entered the White House

By ALEX MORRIS | Published April 5, 2017 12:30 PM ET | RollingStone | Posted August 22, 2019 12:35 PM ET|

At 6:35 a.m. on the morning of March 4th, President Donald Trump did what no U.S. president has ever done: He accused his predecessor of spying on him. He did so over Twitter, providing no evidence and – lest anyone miss the point – doubling down on his accusation in tweets at 6:49, 6:52 and 7:02, the last of which referred to Obama as a “Bad (or sick) guy!” Six weeks into his presidency, these unsubstantiated tweets were just one of many times the sitting president had rashly made claims that were (as we soon learned) categorically untrue, but it was the first time since his inauguration that he had so starkly drawn America’s integrity into the fray. And he had done it not behind closed doors with a swift call to the Department of Justice, but instead over social media in a frenzy of ire and grammatical errors. If one hadn’t been asking the question before, it was hard not to wonder: Is the president mentally ill?

It’s now abundantly clear that Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail was not just a “persona” he used to get elected – that he would not, in fact, turn out to be, as he put it, “the most presidential person ever, other than possibly the great Abe Lincoln, all right?” It took all of 24 hours to show us that the Trump we elected was the Trump we would get when, despite the fact that he was president, that he had won, he spent that first full day in office focused not on the problems facing our country but on the problems facing him: his lackluster inauguration attendance and his inability to win the popular vote.

Since Trump first announced his candidacy, his extreme disagreeableness, his loose relationship with the truth and his trigger-happy attacks on those who threatened his dominance were the worrisome qualities that launched a thousand op-eds calling him “unfit for office,” and led to ubiquitous armchair diagnoses of “crazy.” We had never seen a presidential candidate behave in such a way, and his behavior was so abnormal that one couldn’t help but try to fit it into some sort of rubric that would help us understand. “Crazy” kind of did the trick.

And yet, the one group that could weigh in on Trump’s sanity, or possible lack thereof, was sitting the debate out – for an ostensibly good reason. In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson had foreshadowed the 2016 presidential election by suggesting his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was too unstable to be in control of the nuclear codes, even running an ad to that effect that remains one of the most controversial in the history of American politics. In a survey for Fact magazine, more than 2,000 psychiatrists weighed in, many of them seeing pathology in Goldwater’s supposed potty-training woes, in his supposed latent homosexuality and in his Cold War paranoia. This was back in the Freudian days of psychiatry, when any odd-duck characteristic was fair game for psychiatric dissection, before the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders cleaned house and gave a clear set of criteria (none of which includes potty training, by the way) for a limited number of possible disorders. Goldwater lost the election, sued Fact and won his suit. The American Psychiatric Association was so embarrassed that  it instituted the so-called Goldwater Rule, stating that it is “un ethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination” of the person under question.

All the same, as Trump’s candidacy snowballed, many in the mental-health community, observing what they believed to be clear signs of pathology, bristled at the limitations of the Goldwater guidelines. “It seems to function as a gag rule,” says Claire Pouncey, a psychiatrist who co-authored a paper in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law, which argued that upholding Goldwater “inhibits potentially valuable educational efforts and psychiatric opinions about potentially dangerous public figures.” Many called on the organizations that traffic in the psychological well-being of Americans – like the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the National Association of Social Workers and the American Psychoanalytic Association – to sound an alarm. “A lot of us were working as hard as we could to try to get organizations to speak out during the campaign,” says Lance Dodes, a psychoanalyst and former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “I mean, there was certainly a sense that somebody had to speak up.” But none of the organizations wanted to violate the Goldwater Rule. And anyway, Dodes continues, “Most of the pollsters said he would not be elected. So even though there was a lot of worry, people reassured themselves that nothing would come of this.”

But of course, something did come of it, and so on February 13th, Dodes and 34 other psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers published a letter in The New York Times stating that “Mr. Trump’s speech and actions make him incapable of safely serving as president.” As Dodes tells me, “This is not a policy matter at all. It is continuous behavior that the whole country can see that indicates specific kinds of limitations, or problems in his mind. So to say that those people who are most expert in human psychology can’t comment on it is nonsensical.” In their letter, the mental health experts did not go so far as to proffer a diagnosis, but the affliction that has gotten the most play in the days since is a form of narcissism so extreme that it affects a person’s ability to function: narcissistic personality disorder.

The most current iteration of the DSM classifies narcissistic personality disorder as: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts.” A diagnosis would also require five or more of the following traits:

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., “Nobody builds walls better than me”; “There’s nobody that respects women more than I do”; “There’s nobody who’s done so much for equality as I have”).

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love (“I alone can fix it”; “It’s very hard for them to attack me on looks, because I’m so good-looking”).

3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions (“Part of the beauty of me is that I’m very rich”).

4. Requires excessive admiration (“They said it was the biggest standing ovation since Peyton Manning had won the Super Bowl”).

5. Has a sense of entitlement (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy”).

6. Is interpersonally exploitative (see above).

7. Lacks empathy, is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others (“He’s not a war hero . . . he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured”).

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her (“I’m the president, and you’re not”).

9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes (“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters”).

NPD was first introduced as a personality disorder by the DSM in 1980 and affects up to six percent of the U.S. population. It is not a mood state but rather an ingrained set of traits, a programming of the brain that is thought to arise in childhood as a result of parenting that either puts a child on a pedestal and superficially inflates the ego or, conversely, withholds approval and requires the child to single-handedly build up his or her own ego to survive. Either way, this impedes the development of a realistic sense of self and instead fosters a “false self,” a grandiose narrative of one’s own importance that needs constant support and affirmation – or “narcissistic supply” – to ward off an otherwise prevailing sense of emptiness. Of all personality disorders, NPD is among the least responsive to treatment for the obvious reason that narcissists typically do not, or cannot, admit that they are flawed.

Trump’s childhood seems to suggest a history of “pedestal” parenting. “You are a king,” Fred  Trump told his middle child, while  also teaching him that the world  was an unforgiving place and that  it was important to “be a killer.” Trump apparently got the message: He reportedly threw rocks  at a neighbor’s baby and bragged  about punching a music teacher in  the face. Other kids from his well- heeled Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates were forbidden from playing with him, and in school  he got detention so often that it  was nicknamed “DT,” for “Donny Trump.” When his father found  his collection of switchblades, he  sent Donald upstate to New York Military Academy, where he could be controlled while also remaining aggressively alpha male. “I think his father would have fit the category [of narcissistic],” says Michael D’Antonio, author of The Truth About Trump. “I think his mother probably would have. And I even think his paternal grandfather did as well. These are very driven, very ambitious people.”

Viewed through the lens of pathology, Trump’s behavior – from military-school reports that he was too competitive to have close friends to his recent impromptu press conference, where he seemed to revel in the hour and a half he spent center stage, spouting paranoia and insults – can be seen as a constant quest for narcissistic supply. Certainly few have gone after fame (a veritable conveyor belt of narcissistic supply) with such single-mindedness as Trump, constantly upping the ante to gain more exposure. Not content with being the heir apparent of his father’s vast outer-borough fortune, he spent his twenties moving the Trump Organization into the spotlight of Manhattan, where his buildings needed to be the biggest, the grandest, the tallest (in the pursuit of which he skipped floors in the numbering to make them seem higher). Not content to inflict the city with a succession of eyesores bearing his name in outsize letters, he had to buy up more Atlantic City casinos than anyone else, as well as a fleet of 727s (which he also slapped with his name) and the world’s third-biggest yacht (despite professing to not like boats). Meanwhile, to make sure that none of this escaped notice, he sometimes pretended to be his own publicist, peppering the press with unsolicited information about his business conquests and his sexual prowess. “The most florid demonstration of [his narcissism] was around the sex scandal that ended his first marriage,” says D’Antonio. “He just did so many things to call more attention to it that it was hard to not recognize that there’s something very strange going on.” (The White House declined to comment for this article.)

Based on the “Big Five” traits that psychologists consider to be the building blocks of personality – extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism – the stamp of a narcissist is someone who scores extremely high in extroversion but extremely low in agreeableness. From his business entanglements to his preference for the rally format, Trump’s way of putting himself out in the world is not meant to make friends; it’s meant to assert his dominance. The reported fear and trembling among his White House staff aligns well with his long-standing habit of hiring two people for the same job and letting them battle it out for his favor. His tendency to hire women was spun as a sign of enlightenment on the campaign trail, but those who’ve worked with him sensed that it had more to do with finding women less threatening than men (a reason that’s also been posited as to why Ivanka is his favorite child). Trump has a lengthy record of stiffing his workers and dodging his creditors. And nothing could be more disagreeable than the way he’s dealt with detractors over the years, filing hundreds of frivolous lawsuits, sending scathing letters (like the one he sent to New York Times columnist Gail Collins with her photo covered by the words “The face of a dog!”), and, once it was invented, using Twitter as an instrument of malice that could provide immediate narcissistic supply via comments and retweets. In fact, while studies have found that Twitter and other social-media outlets do not actually foster narcissism, they have turned much of the Internet into a narcissist’s playground, providing immediate gratification for someone who needs a public and instantaneous way to build up their false self.

That Americans weren’t put off by this disagreeableness may have come as a surprise, but in a country that has turned its political process into a glorified celebrity marketing campaign, it probably shouldn’t have. America was founded on the principles of individualism and independence, and studies have shown that the most individualistic nations are, predictably, the most narcissistic. But studies have also shown that America has been getting more narcissistic since the Seventies, which saw the publication of Tom Wolfe’s seminal “Me Decade” article and Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. In 2008, the National Institutes of Health released the most comprehensive study of NPD to date and found that almost one out of 10 Americans in their twenties had displayed behaviors consistent with NPD, versus only one in 30 of those over 65. Another study found narcissistic traits to be rising as quickly as obesity, while yet another showed that almost one-third of high school students in America in 2005 said that they expected to eventually become famous. “If there were no Kardashians, there would be no President Donald Trump,” says Keith Campbell, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia who co-authored the book The Narcissism Epidemic. “And Trump decided to do it Kardashian-style, with no filter. When Trump and Kanye had that meeting in Trump Tower, I was like, ‘I should just quit. My work here is done.'” 

Still, Campbell would not label Trump with NPD. A final DSM criterion for the disease is that it must cause “significant” distress or impairment, which has been a sticking point for many mental-health professionals. “He’s a billionaire who’s president of the United States,” points out Campbell. “He’s functioning pretty highly.”

Others maintain that making diagnoses without a formal interview is not just unethical, but impossible – that the public actions of a public persona may not align with who that person is when they’re alone at home. After Dodes’ op-ed appeared in the Times, Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who wrote the NPD criteria for the DSMIV, followed up with a letter to the editor the very next day, arguing that it was unfair and insulting to the mentally ill to lump them with someone like Trump, and that doing so would give the president a pass he doesn’t deserve. “No one is denying that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter,” Frances tells me. “But we tend to equate bad behavior with mental illness, and that makes us less able to deal with the bad behavior on its own terms.”

Others have been less circumspect, implying that if the DSM wouldn’t diagnose someone like Trump with NPD, then maybe it’s the DSM that’s wrong. “It’s just that one pesky impairment thing,” says Josh Miller, Campbell’s colleague and a professor and director of the clinical training program at the University of Georgia who specializes in psychopathy and narcissism. “Maybe the DSM isn’t thinking about this in exactly the right way by ignoring when something causes such widespread problems to those around them.” More specifically, Miller believes that Trump’s wealth could have shielded him from impairment that would otherwise be more pronounced. “He gets to present himself as an incredible businessman despite multiple bankruptcies, despite lots of signs that he is not as astute or as successful as he might be otherwise,” Miller says. “We might know more about his relational functioning if his ex-wives didn’t sign the sort of thing where getting a nice sum of money from a divorce is contingent upon not discussing the person’s behavior. He’s able to keep sycophants around him because of his money. If he was your average politician, it might be that the impairment would be much, much more apparent.”

At the very least, the growing debate over Trump’s mental health raises the question of what having an NPD president would mean. “I hated President Bush, but it never occurred to me or any of my colleagues that he was mentally ill,” says John Gartner, a psychologist who taught in the department of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years and who has been one of the most vocal critics of upholding the Goldwater Rule in this case, going so far as to say that Trump suffers from “malignant narcissism,” a term for the triumvirate of narcissistic, paranoid and antisocial personality disorders (with a little sadism thrown in for good measure) that was invented to describe what was wrong with Hitler. “Even though I disagree with everything he believes in, I would be immensely relieved to have a President Pence,” Gartner says. “Because he’s conservative. Not crazy.”

Of course, having a mental illness, in and of itself, wouldn’t necessarily make Trump unqualified for the presidency. A 2006 study published in the Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease found that 18 of the first 37 presidents met criteria for having a psychiatric disorder, from depression (24 percent) and anxiety (eight percent) to alcoholism (eight percent) and bipolar disorder (eight percent). Ten of them exhibited symptoms while in office, and one of those 10 was arguably our best president, Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from deep depression (though, considering the death of his son and the state of the nation, who could blame him?).

The problem is that, when it comes to leadership, all pathologies are not created equal. Some, like depression, though debilitating, do not typically lead to psychosis or risky decision-making and are mainly unpleasant only for the person suffering them, as well as perhaps for their close friends and family. Others, like alcoholism, can be more dicey: In 1969, Nixon got so sloshed that he ordered a nuclear attack against North Korea (in anticipation of just such an event, his defense secretary had supposedly warned the military not to act on White House orders without approval from either himself or the secretary of state).

When it comes to presidents, and perhaps all politicians, some level of narcissism is par for the course. Based on a 2013 study of U.S. presidents from Washington to George W. Bush, many of our chief executives with narcissistic traits shared what is called “emergent leadership,” or a keen ability to get elected. They can be charming and charismatic. They dominate. They entertain. They project strength and confidence. They’re good at convincing people, at least initially, that they actually are as awesome as they think they are. (Despite what a narcissist might believe, research shows they are usually no better-looking, more intelligent or talented than the average person – though when they are, their narcissism is better tolerated.) In fact, a narcissist’s brash leadership has been shown to be particularly attractive in times of perceived upheaval, which means that it benefits a narcissist to promote ideas of chaos and to identify a common enemy, or, if need be, create one. “They’re going to want attention, and they’re going to get attention by making big public changes and having bold leadership,” says Campbell. “So if things are going well, a narcissistic leader’s probably not what you want. If things aren’t going well, you’re like, ‘Eh, let’s roll the dice. Let’s get this person out there to just make some big changes and shake things up.’ And then we pray to God it works.”

It doesn’t always. Ironically, for a man who ran on the platform to ”Make America Great Again,” narcissists may have a better chance of getting elected when things are going poorly, but they actually appear to perform better when things are going well – and they can take the credit. One of the questions on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, which is used to assess narcissistic personality traits, asks respondents to choose between two statements: (1) The thought of ruling the world frightens the hell out of me, and (2) If I ruled the world, it would be a better place. Narcissists obviously tend to pick the latter, but that overconfidence actually works against them: One of the highest predictors of success is conscientiousness, but if you think you’re already the best, then why would you bother to take the time to get better? It’s easier, instead, to point fingers. “Narcissistic people externalize blame,” says Miller. “I mean, Trump’s going to fire [Sean] Spicer, and then it’s going to be the Cabinet. When is he going to say, ‘I should have read that more carefully. I should have taken more time to know what this treaty was’? That is not part of a narcissistic individual’s makeup, to assume responsibility for their own missteps.”

Despite the obvious risks, having a narcissistic president doesn’t always end in disaster. “Democracy’s always based in trying to work through conflict,” says Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton and contributor to Rolling Stone. “And a person who has a dominant personality sometimes can actually be very effective.” LBJ, who scored the highest in that study that ranked the narcissistic tendencies of U.S. presidents, had the aggressiveness necessary to push through the Civil Rights Act, but he also didn’t (or wouldn’t) do an about-face to get the country out of Vietnam. When a group of reporters pressed him for an explanation of this, he reportedly unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis and declared, “This is why.”

Likewise, Andrew Jackson, who ranked third, was considered the nation’s first demagogue – a rabble-rouser who fought at least a dozen duels throughout his life, who contemporaries thought would trash the White House with his unruly mob, and whose “jackass” tendencies were the inspiration for the symbol of the Democratic Party – but he paid off the national debt and pushed the nation’s expansion westward (though his Indian Removal Act led to the deaths of tens of thousands along the Trail of Tears).

“Narcissistic leaders are really good and bad, meaning that they often get a lot done, but they’re also viewed as ethically challenged,” says Campbell. Meanwhile, “nice guy” presidents like Jimmy Carter are well-liked, but they aren’t viewed as particularly potent.

So how might Trump measure up? According to the 2013 study, while run-of-the-mill narcissism conveyed some benefits, NPD traits usually did not, and were furthermore “related to numerous indicators of negative performance: having impeachment resolutions brought up in Congress, facing impeachment proceedings, placing political success over effective policy, and behaving unethically.” Nixon, probably our most unethical president, was ranked second in the study, but even he knew to conduct attacks covertly. His form of narcissism was more adaptive, more Machiavellian. In fact, many narcissists see the world as a chess game in which they must think ahead in order to maintain the advantage they feel they deserve. For this reason, impulsivity is not considered a classic trait of narcissism. Trump’s obvious rashness, then, allows for an unfortunate combination of traits. “The impulsivity and the lack of deliberate forethought about things,” warns Miller, “paired with the overconfidence, are the most troubling parts for me.”

Another problem for narcissists on the more extreme end of the spectrum is that the skills needed to get elected are not, and have never been, identical to the skills needed to govern. “Just because you get a big job doesn’t mean that you can’t have a psychiatric disability that interferes with your ability to confidently perform it,” points out Gartner. Individuals with NPD are notoriously bad at regulating their behavior or tailoring it to the situation at hand. “Every situation feels like a competition to win,” explains Aaron Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State who researches pathological narcissism. “Every situation feels like a stage in which to show people that ‘I’m superior, better, and they’re going to admire me for it.'” As former Democratic Congressman Barney Frank describes his impression of Trump, “I have never seen anybody in public life so focused exclusively on the trivial aspects of his own persona. I certainly have never seen anything like it in a person with a lot of responsibility.”

This makes narcissists particularly vulnerable to sycophants, or at least those who feed their narcissistic supply by telling them what they want to hear. Whether Steve Bannon actually is the evil mastermind he’s been made out to be doesn’t change the fact that even Republicans seem wary of Trump’s susceptibility to him. Unelected officials gaining power through a destabilizing characteristic of a mental disorder is the sort of thing our political system was set up to combat. “It’s a sign, actually, of how severely we need functioning parties,” Wilentz says. “Because when they work, they are in fact a check on the emergence of this kind of character. You can’t get where Trump is now in a functioning party system. It took this particular political crisis, which was a political crisis, to produce a president who has this trait. Normally, we can weed them out.”

For many in the mental-health field, the most troubling aspect of Trump’s personality is his loose grasp of fact and fiction. When narcissism veers into NPD, it can lead to delusions, an alternate reality where the narcissist remains on top despite clear evidence to the contrary. “He’s extremely quick, like nanoseconds quick, to discern anything that could conceivably threaten his dominance,” says biographer Gwenda Blair, who wrote The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President. “He’s on it. Anything that he senses – and he has very sharp senses – that could suggest that he is anything except 200 percent total winner, he’s got to stomp it out immediately. So having those reports, for example, that he did not win the popular vote? He can’t take that in. There has to be another explanation. It has to have been stolen. It has to have been some illegal voters. It can’t be the case that he lost. That’s not thinkable.”

But having verifiable facts be “unthinkable” is, Dodes explains, “a serious impairment of what we call ‘reality  testing,’ so it creates an obvious risk for somebody whose job it is to gather information and  make decisions. It creates an inability to know  where you have gone wrong because you can’t let yourself self-correct by hearing contrary evidence.” This is particularly true when the information is viewed as an ego blow, which goes a long way toward explaining Trump’s first day in office, his blustering assertions of superiority, the speed with which he turns on former allies, and his selection of a wealthy and inexperienced Cabinet – a so-called narcissistic bubble from which anyone or anything that questions his dominance is ejected.

“When it comes to negative information about themselves, narcissists devalue it and they denigrate it and they don’t accept it,” says Pincus. “They’ll push it away, they’ll distort it, they’ll blame it on somebody else, they’ll lie about it, because they need to see that superior, ideal image of themselves, and they can’t tolerate the idea that they have any flaws or imperfections or somebody else might be better than them at something.” This not only means that Trump has no qualms about lying (a PolitiFact tally of candidates’ statements during the 2016 campaign found that only 2.5 percent of the claims made by Trump were wholly true and that 78 percent were mostly false, false or “pants on fire”), but it also means that he will continue to cater to his minority base, which, Pincus continues, “happen to have his ear and tell him he’s great. Then he’s shocked when courts and states have a different opinion, and he has to denigrate the courts and the states rather than question his own position.” It means that he will continually recast negative events in his favor: “All four corporate bankruptcies, were they a sign of failure for him during the debates?” asks Blair. “No, they were a sign he was smart.” And he will continue to double-down on delusions, like having been wiretapped by Obama, despite all evidence to the contrary.

That’s what concerns Wilentz. “We’ve had some very troubled presidents in our past, but their troubles are things like alcoholism, paranoia, you know, sort of garden-variety psychological maladies,” he tells me. “This is different. This shows a dissociation from reality. We just haven’t seen anything like this before.” Gartner’s take is even more pointed: “He’s acting crazy, and he’s mad that other people aren’t seeing and believing what he’s making up in his own head.”

This dissociation from reality, paired with Trump’s knee-jerk need to assert his dominance, has led many mental-health professionals to feel that, no matter what the specific diagnosis, the traits themselves are enough to render Trump unfit for office, and that a shrink’s “duty to warn” overrides the Goldwater Rule in this instance. “Psychiatrically, this is the worst-case scenario,” says Gartner. “If Trump were one step sicker, no one would listen to him. If he were wearing a tinfoil hat, if he were that grotesquely ill, he wouldn’t be a threat. But instead, he’s the most severe and toxic form of mental illness that can actually still function. I mean, in his first week in office, he threatened to invade Mexico, Iran and Chicago. And thank God someone finally stood up to Australia, you know? Glad someone had the balls to put them in their place.”

Indeed, it was Gartner’s fear that “Trump is truly someone who can start a war over Twitter” that led him to start a petition on January 26th that called on mental-health professionals to “Declare Trump Is Mentally Ill and Must Be Removed,” invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president should be replaced if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Gartner’s petition currently has 40,947 signatures. Congresswoman Karen Bass’ petition, #DiagnoseTrump, has 36,743.

Not that any of these petitions are likely to make a difference. In order for Section 4 to be invoked, Congress or the vice president along with a majority of Trump’s handpicked Cabinet would have to call for his removal, which has never happened under any presidency. And even if Trump did something that warranted impeachment, 25 Republicans in the House would have to break ranks to pass the resolution on to the Senate, where two-thirds of that body would have to condemn him, meaning that no fewer than 19 Senate Republicans would need to vote in favor of an ouster. Many of those Republicans come from districts where #MAGA is practically gospel, meaning that these numbers are not just daunting, they’re all but unthinkable.

On June 29th, 1999, Trump gave a eulogy at his father’s funeral at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Others spoke of their memories of Fred Trump and his legacy as a man who had built solid, middle-class homes for thousands of New Yorkers. But his middle son, according to most accounts, used the time to talk about his own accomplishments and to make it clear that, in his mind, his father’s best achievement was producing him, Donald.

Presidents unite nations under narratives of what they stand for, whether true or false. But a president with NPD would stand for nothing but himself, offering no narrative other than the “false self” he created. An NPD president would expect Americans to go along with his rhetoric and ignore that behind the self-aggrandizing, the unyielding drive for more and more confirmation of the myth of his own greatness, he may only have his own emptiness to offer. “‘We’re going to do this thing, it’s going to be fantastic, amazing,'” Pincus paraphrases. “But there’s no substance to what he says. How are you going to do that? How is that going to be achieved?”

The answer is we don’t know. The White House leaks portray an angry man who wanted to become president, but never really wanted to be president. Trump may have stormed into the Oval Office poised to make sweeping changes, but unlike LBJ or Jackson or even Nixon, he doesn’t have the political expertise or historical perspective to see the long game. The rumblings in Congress suggest widespread fears that Trump will view policy through the prism of pathology rather than in any rational, methodological, bipartisan way. So far, as Barney Frank points out, even with a Republican House and Senate, “Trump hasn’t done very much.” His immigration bans have been blocked, his budget has been ridiculed, and his rage against the GOP to repeal and replace Obamacare, or else (and with a plan that would take health care away from millions of Americans while making it more expensive for most of the rest of us), turned into nothing more than a game of chicken – which he lost – with House Republicans. “Trump’s time horizon with regard to things that affect him appears to be about 13 minutes,” Frank says. “There is an inverse relationship between people who are more focused on how things affect them personally than on public policy and their effectiveness in Congress. You can’t work with those people.”

If Trump does have NPD, and the setbacks to his agenda keep coming, his magical thinking about the limitlessness of his power will only continue to clash with reality, and many in the mental-health field believe that would only exacerbate the problem. “I think we’re actually looking at a deteriorating situation,” says Gartner. “I think he’s going more crazy.” As Dodes’ letter to The New York Times states, Trump’s attacks against “facts and those who convey them … are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed.” Still, no matter how monumentally he fails in the next four years, says biographer Gwenda Blair, “there’s no doubt he’s going to think he’s done a great job. That isn’t even open to question.”

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