There is a set of people with a special, personal perspective on Trump: those who have had, and survived, a relationship with a Narcissistic Personality Disorder… sufferer isn’t the right word, because they cause far more suffering than they ever feel.

I had a relationship with a NPD … perpetrator … in the early 2000s (the relationship began on September 11 2001, but that’s another story). There were some good things about that relationship as well as bad, but the one thing I can say emphatically in favor of it in hindsight, is that it gave me deep insights into Donald Trump.

The deepest insight that one gets about a Narcissist from knowing one intimately is that they neither lie, nor tell the truth. Instead, everything they say is a reconstruction of what has happened so that they are always in the right. “Truth” and “Lie” are concepts that require an internal frame of reference to an objective external reality. They don’t have that framework: instead, their frame of reference is themselves. Everything must start and end with them as the center of attention, and with them acting correctly throughout.

So, when reality doesn’t follow that narrative, as it inevitably does not, they reverse engineer reality until it fits that narrative.

I’ll give my favourite illustration of that from my relationship. I won’t use her real name (though anyone who’s known me personally or professionally for more than 15 years knows who I’m talking about): instead, I’ll call her Aida.

We were at a conference celebrating the life work of the great, and now sadly departed, Basil Moore, in Cape Town, South Africa. The food and wine at the restaurants in Cape Town, Stellenbosch and surrounds, was beyond excellent, and in overindulging, I developed pimples on my neck.

Aida had, as usual, made enemies of the other female attendees. In talking with two of them one morning, one quipped, in reference to the red welts on my neck, “Steve, it looks like you slept with a vampire last night”.

In an attempt to make light of that very clever snipe, I replied “Ah, but she isn’t a vampire, she’s a vamp”.

Before the other two women had a chance to react, Aida snarled at me “How dare you call me a slut in front of these women Steve!”

I replied “But Aida, vamp doesn’t mean slut!”. “Yes it does Steve, it means it in every language. I’m grossly offensed.” (English was not her first language).

Since this was easily the hundredth time she’d abused me in public, I replied “Well, be offensed then, just leave me alone!” and stormed off.

Round two.

Back at her home after the conference, I remembered her telling one of my sisters that, when she heard English, she first translated into French and then her own language before replying. Whether that was true or not, it left open the possibility that she had misinterpreted the word “vamp” as something derogatory. So, I asked her “Aida, when I said vamp, did you hear something like prostitute?”

“Yes, I did Steve!”, she replied, visibly overjoyed that I understood her.

“But that’s not what it means, Aida”.

“But that’s what I learnt that it meant. Look, I’ll show you”, and she went to her bookshelf to retrieve an ancient English dictionary.

As I say next to her so that we could both read the entry, she turned to the relevant page, and there was the definition of Vamp.

It was, and I quote, “sophisticated and irresistible woman“—precisely the meaning I meant to convey.

She went silent. No apology, no discussion.

Round three

By this time, I had already decided to leave her—the only questions were when, and how. So, when we went for dinner that night, I had just one thought on my mind: “before I leave, I’m going to get an apology out of this bitch if it kills me”. I thought I had the perfect chance with this event.

But, as I went to raise the issue, Aida snarled at me from across the table:

“Yes Steve, and the other women we were talking to weren’t attractive enough to be vamps, and I was offensed on their behalf.”

It didn’t matter that this was blatantly untrue. It didn’t matter that I was there, and knew it was untrue. All that mattered was that, in the light of new evidence (her dictionary), she now had a new narrative that put her, once more, in the right throughout.

So, everything that Trump has done, from the claim that his inauguration crowd was the biggest in history, to the claim he won the election against Biden, to—finally and rather pathetically– him consoling himself with the fact that he got more votes than any previous sitting President, made perfect sense to me. It was simply his NPD perspective on everything.

My worry now is what will he do for the next two months before, under the ludicrously complicated US political system, he finally ceases being President.

The best outcome, I think, would be that he falls into a deep depression—which is feasible, since his NPD mind won’t be able to cope with the fact that, whatever he believes, he will cease being President on January 20. That will mean inaction, rather than vengeance. He will do the odd thing to make himself feel better—like sack Fauci—but otherwise, it will be inaction and neglect.

But if he shifts to vengeance? While still in command of the most powerful nation on Earth? Then I just hope those who enabled his dysfunctional behavior for so long will finally have the courage, now that his term is limited, to invoke the 25th amendment and remove him from office.

More likely of course, he will recover from the funk and begin the “I was robbed!” narrative that will be his ultimate consolation, and the foundation of his attempt to establish his own Trump-wing TV network for his post-Presidential career.

So we’ll never be fully free of him, but at least we can breathe a sigh of relief that his days of getting his NPD centre-of-attention hit in the role of President are over. And we can relish the schadenfreude as we say to him:

Donald Trump, you’re fired!