Lies, Damn Lies, and Trump (Psychopathic) Lies

By Vince Greenwood, Ph.D., founder of DutyToInform.org

Donald Trump lies frequently. He is in a realm by himself with the quantity of his lies. No breaking news there. Trump lies casually and effortlessly. In the debate with Vice-President Harris, he emitted 33 falsehoods compared to her one. That is noteworthy since they divvy the time in a 90-minute debate with his opponent and the moderators. A falsehood every minute or two is his recent baseline — fact-checkers from his recent interviews and rallies clock in between 30 and 40 lies per public appearance.

If you can stand back from Trump’s ‘firehose of lies’ mode, it’s an impressive performance. He lies effortlessly and fluently. Patrick Mahomes, the NFL quarterback, can size up an opponent’s defense in a second or two at the snap of the ball and execute successful plays. Of course, Mahomes’ proficiency results from thousands of hours of study and hard work, while Trump’s prevarication skills appear innate. Nevertheless, it is fair to say he excels in the game of deceit.

And Trump’s lies are enormous. Some recent examples:

“[Migrants will] rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America. … They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”

“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,”

“The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money [for hurricane relief]. … They spent it all on illegal migrants. … They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”

This Third Reich-level agitprop dehumanizes immigrants and aims to elicit the more cruel impulses of our character. Trump utters these calumnies without a glimmer of shame. He could care less that this rhetoric harms others and triggers outrage in 50% of the country. Indeed, displays of cruelty are the point, a power move to signal he is the great alpha male.

However, the purpose of this article is not to heap more scorn on Trump’s pattern of lying. I don’t want to amplify your outrage. I want to trigger your fear.

I will try to accomplish that by explaining the disorder — clinical psychopathy — that generates his facile and limitless lying. Trump has a precisely defined psychiatric condition, defined by the presence of three clusters of traits that account for his lying behavior. Once you understand the underlying drivers of his behavior, you should feel mostly alarm rather than outrage. Alarm is the adaptive reaction once you realize you are in the sight lines of a formidable predator.

Donald Trump is not just a politician who lies a great deal. He is not just someone on the far end of the dishonesty spectrum. Rather, he is a different creature altogether. He is not like you or me (well, technically, not like 99% of us). His lying is of a different quality.

You question whether Donald Trump is, or, more precisely, his condition, makes him a different creature. Just ask yourself the following:

Could you continue to lie if you saw the whole world knew you were lying?

Could you tell scores of lies each day and feel free of strain about keeping all of them straight?

Could you keep lying if you saw the suffering it was causing others?

In the words of one of the pioneers of research on psychopathy, would you have “no difficulty at all looking anyone tranquilly in the eyes during your most solemn perjuries?”

I didn’t think so.

What makes the psychopath a ‘different creature’? Thanks mainly to a rigorous and reliable diagnostic process to measure clinical psychopathy, we have a wealth of studies on the condition (Google Scholar now cites some 83,000 studies associated with the condition) to address that question. When we subject the large data set associated with clinical psychopathy to factor analysis and other data reduction techniques that enable us to identify primary, underlying factors in the condition, we find that the psychopath is ruled by three distinct clusters of traits (known as the “three-factor model” of clinical psychopathy).

The three core governing traits of the psychopath are:

(1) Impulsivity — characterized by the inability to direct attention away from any issue that doesn’t serve the psychopath’s immediate, egocentric needs. The psychopath is a prisoner of an unrelenting “What’s in it for me?” and “How can I win the moment?” focus.

(2) Drive to dominate — characterized by a one-dimensional focus on “winning” in all relationships. Being on top is paramount for the psychopath. Lying and manipulation are his preternatural strategies to get there.

(3) Remorselessness — characterized by an utter lack of conscience, linked to an inability to experience states of guilt, shame, and fear that might curb deceitful behavior. Psychopaths just don’t care in the slightest about saying things that hurt others if it might be to their advantage.

Trump is at the mercy of these destructive traits. The key to understanding Trump’s psychopathic lying and the danger that poses to our Republic is to appreciate the quality of the psychopathology of these three core traits of the clinical psychopath. With the understanding of a psychopath’s (Trump’s) true nature, you should be afraid, very afraid.

Impulsivity

The impulsivity trait helps explain the casualness and frequency of psychopathic lying and explains how Trump can rattle off 30 to 40 lies in a typical rally. Psychopathic lying is often glib, “off the top of the head.” The psychopath is stuck in the gear of winning the moment, “getting by,” and, in the business vernacular, “always working on the closing .” The lying is often an embellishment meant to impress or gain an advantage, even if only slightly. The psychopath is at the mercy of blurting out whatever meets his selfish needs of the moment. The psychopath is a stuck needle responding only to the opportunities, provocations, or thwarted needs of the moment. The daily struggle 99% of us have between “I want” (impulses at the moment) and “I should” (weighed against deeper aims or values) just doesn’t take place with the psychopath. For him, it is an immediacy of reaction of a different order. The psychopath has a reflexive rejection of having any second thoughts, any hesitation, or any perceptions that don’t advance his self-interests. This innate antipathy to any inhibition undermines even rudimentary acts of reflection, reason, or judgment.

Like most psychopaths, Trump is trapped in his egocentric here and now. What is that world like? Let him tell you. “I love to have enemies,” he told Time magazine in 1989. “I fight my enemies. I like beating my enemies to the ground.” Dan McAdams, who wrote the discerning psychological profile The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump in 2020, noted Trump is “the episodic man who must fight to win from one moment to the next.” That’s what he does. That’s all he does. That’s all he can do.

Trump’s defamations about the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton are only the most recent example of a mindset confined to the “What’s in it for me?” and “How do I win the moment?” impulses. One might think that such misleading and cynical comments that are immediately fact-checked by local Republican officeholders and hurricane victims might hurt Trump politically, particularly in the battleground states of North Carolina and Georgia. Whether it hurt him politically or not, Trump had no control over his response. That is the take-home message. Whatever the situation in front of him, Trump robotically “fights like hell” with his reflexive move of lying to disparage his “enemies.”

Seeking stimulation is one of the sub-traits in the impulsivity cluster. It refers to the psychopath’s craving for extra thrills and risks. The psychopath cannot tolerate boredom. One well-known manifestation of this need for stimulation is “duper’s delight,” where the psychopath experiences a kind of sadistic glee, like a cat playing with a mouse, over deceiving someone.

Psychopaths gaslight others primarily to gain an advantage but also because it is an irresistable power move. His advisors’ efforts to make Trump appear more sober-minded have consistently failed. They scripted Trump’s acceptance speech for the Republican Convention to portray him as a more compassionate and reasonable man. They hoped Trump could conform to that message for 45 minutes. He was helpless to do so.

Trump’s impulsively-driven lying is dangerous because:

• He is tethered to his immediate egocentric concerns. He cannot engage the world beyond his selfish interests. His psyche is never complicated by deeper aims, accommodating other people’s interests, or worries about future consequences. The implications for such a compromised focus would be one thing for, say, a penny stock huckster or used car salesman. But for POTUS?
• He is incapable of restraint. He will say whatever helps him and hurts his legions of “enemies” without pause, doubt, or possibility of reflection. Many, but particularly vulnerable populations, seem to be in his crosshairs.
• Gaslighting has harmful consequences. If you don’t know you are being gaslighted, you experience powerlessness and disorientation. If you know you are being gaslighted, you suffer corrosive anger and a loss of trust in your fellow human beings.

Drive To Dominate

High energy, a singular focus, and cunning exploitation mark the drive to dominate cluster of traits. Psychopaths, most likely because of an inherited nuerodevelopmental deficit, are incapable of love. However, the psychopath is not a detached person. He is animated by an intense drive (“win at all costs”) to gain status. For the psychopath, all of life is a status game. For Trump, not only people but also the Presidency and the country are means, not ends in themselves. He will always look for actions that benefit him and disadvantage the other. With predation as an innate and singular motivation, exploitation prevails and relationships go downhill fast. What may start as mere selfishness and lack of reciprocity inevitably moves to cheating, lying, and cruelty. Those are the attributes he relies on to win the status game.

There are three basic strategies to try to gain status. Many attain status through hard-earned, discipline-driven achievement or displays of virtue that benefit and impress others. But the psychopath can only use the third strategy — ruthless dominance — which he does naturally through the traits of bullying and lying. “I have always loved to fight,” Trump disclosed to one biographer. That is his only way of being and defines his moment-to-moment consciousness.

And he fights dirty. One of the leading social scientists on lying, Bella DePaulo, has studied Trump’s lying behavior. She notes three types of lies: self-serving lies delivered to promote one’s self-interest, kind lies aimed to make someone feel better (“You look great today”), and cruel lies aimed to hurt or disparage others. In the general population between 1–2% of lies have been found to be cruel. However, for Trump, the percentage was a norm-shattering 50%. She noted in a Washington Post article: “I study liars. I’ve never seen one like Trump.”

In addition to deceitfulness, the talent to generate divisiveness and stoke grievances in others are components in this ‘drive to dominate’ cluster of traits.

Psychopaths are adept at tapping into resentment in others. Since they often feel aggrieved, they know how to elicit that feeling in others. They can spin shame into victimhood. They have exceptional skills in exploiting resentment with outlandish accusations, scapegoating, and hellscape narratives.

In her recent book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, Arlie Hockschild, through intensive interviews and incisive analysis, documents how Trump’s transgressive lies provide a cathartic hook for those whose status has been battered the past few decades. Over-the-top blaming and disparaging of the libs continue to have a receptive audience in our fraught times. Trump may be a lying bully, but he is prized because at least he is their bully.

Trump’s drive-to-dominate lies are dangerous because:

• They will foment divisiveness. False accusations about Democrats, immigrants, media professionals, and other groups have contributed mightily to our cold civil war.
• They demand fealty from others.
• He will say whatever it takes to avoid a loss of status. He will frantically distort reality when his status is threatened (“It was my best debate ever. The polls show I won”).
• The assault on truth leaves societies vulnerable to totalitarian rule.
• They will never end. For Trump, life is a series of battles, moment-to-moment, that he must win by any means necessary. That is his north star. That is his only star.

Remorselessness

Remorselessness is the key plank in Trump’s psychological platform that accounts for his incontinent and dangerous lying. Psychopaths are simply unable to experience the emotions of guilt or shame. They are utterly insensitive to the threat of punishment. These deficits, based on a kind of psychological and neurological emptiness, are what separates the clinical psychopath from the human pack. They feel no remorse for their deceit or the harm they may cause others. We cannot overestimate the danger associated with this condition: a psychopath (Trump) has no sense of limits on their behavior.

If you have no conscience to rein in your “win at all costs” behavior, you will say anything at all. Trump lies with impunity, not because he has failed to live up to a moral code, but because he is neurologically and psychologically incapable of having one. “Anything at all” captures Trump’s modus operandi, from childhood to the present moment. The breadth and depth of his lying seems herculean, and, from our perspective, it is. But it is as easy and effortless for Trump as taking a ride in a golf cart on one of his courses. Check it out: take a journey to the Wikipedia page titled False or Misleading Statements by Donald Trump, but be sure to pack for the week.

Unfortunately, his “anything at all” mode connects with a large audience. In Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right, Hochschild presents her findings that many, especially from small-town and rural America, are vulnerable to a charismatic leader who speaks, however mendaciously, in a language that offers a full-throated defiance of shame. That shame is borne by the perception that others, especially those with a higher education and who live in cities, are doing better. The shame reflects a real-world loss of status, at least in economic terms. Their pride in the struggle to realize the American Dream has been stolen from them, Trump proclaims, by entitled educated elites, women, and brown-skinned usurpers. With pride diminished, shame shows up, banging on the door.

Hochschild has pinpointed the critical dynamic that Trump employs to exploit these feelings. She calls it the “shame shield,” which has four steps, as follows: (1) Say something wildly untrue and transgressive (“They’re eating your pets!”), (2) Get shamed by the punditry (“Outrageous! You can’t say that!”). (3) Portray yourself as the victim of shaming (“See what they are doing to me…to us!”), and (4) Roar back. Bully them (“They’re the cheaters…I am your vengeance!”).

The shame shield works as evidenced by the strength of MAGA in those parts of the country hit hardest by globalization, where people feel ignored and left behind. The shame shield works not because Trump’s followers are psychopaths but because they are vulnerable to the ‘malignant charms’ of a psychopath. Trump’s outrageous accusations about “elites” and disparaging narratives about immigrants provide a kind of emotional balm for the shame felt by so many. Grievance and anger are less painful than shame and loss.

Trump has been a master facilitator of our (so far) cold civil war. No one has owned the libs like Trump or more colorfully depicts America as a hell-hole. But let’s not give him too much credit. Trump’s ability to to inject heated exaggerations, scapegoating, black/white characterizations, and even blunt appeals to racism into the news of the day is easy, reflexive, and natural. The clinical psychopath is a wired, cold-blooded machine designed to lie, dominate, and act without remorse.

Trump may believe he is a puppeteer manipulating Red America on strings. And he may be in a narrow, 24-hour news cycle sense or in his blustering, bleating performance at rallies. Still, fundamentally, he is the puppet on strings, three strings, to be precise. The puppeteer is his Psychopathic Personality Disorder condition, which orchestrates his performance through the trifecta of his impulsivity, drive to dominate, and remorselessness traits.

Trump’s remorseless lying is dangerous because:

• It blithely ignores constitutional norms.
• It is impervious to appeals from anyone to rein in his reckless and deceitful behavior
• It defects all blame for any damage he may inflict
• It means there is no guardrail since he has no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of others

Please, Red America, take heed. To lifelong Republicans who are thinking of holding their nose and voting for him but also staunch supporters: he may be your bully, and yes, he will wreak vengeance on the educated elites and the brown-skinned usurpers you fear are destroying the American dream. But if he claws his way back to the Oval Office, if it is to his advantage, he won’t hesitate to eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. That’s who he is. He shows us every day who he is.

Please note: This article is not financed by or related to any political campaign and may not be considered political advertising or action on behalf of any political candidate. All statements and opinions are those of the author alone, including any political endorsements made. The information published in this article is for information only and is not intended to provide psychological therapy or diagnostic advice and/or recommendations to any persons aside from its subject, Donald J. Trump, public figure. The content of this article is intended to provide informational, scientific, and educational material based on psychological science. The content of this article solely reflects the views and perspectives of its author and does not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the American Psychological Association, medium.com, or any other person and/or entity not otherwise listed as an author.