Donald Trump, a successful real estate investor from New York City, was elected President of the United States in November and assumed office in January. A narcissistic personality, his behavior, both before and after assuming office, has been a subject of interest.

Behavior

Rather than labeling Trump as, for example, a liar or psychopath, this article describes problematic behavior he has engaged in with respect to cognition, emotiveness, interpersonal functioning, or impulse control or other perimeters of personality.

Birther activities

Despite having no relevant information regarding Barack Obama's birth and having no basis for doubting Obama's birth in Hawaii, Trump played an active roll in promoting misinformation regarding the citizenship of Barack Obama:^[1]

In March during an interview on Good Morning America, Donald Trump said he was seriously considering running for president, that he was a "little" skeptical of Obama's citizenship, and that someone who shares this view should not be so quickly dismissed as an "idiot" (as Trump considers the term "birther" to be "derogatory"^[2]). Trump added, "Growing up no one knew him",^[3] a claim ranked Pants-on-Fire by Politifact.^[4] Later, Trump appeared on The View repeating several times that "I want him [Obama] to show his birth certificate." He speculated that "there’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like", a comment which host Whoopi Goldberg described as "the biggest pile of dog mess I’ve heard in ages."^[5] On the March 30, edition of CNN Newsroom, anchor Suzanne Malveaux commented on Trump's statements, pointing out that she had made a documentary for which she had gone to Hawaii and spoken with people who knew Obama as a child.^[6][7] In an NBC TV interview broadcast on April 7, Trump said he would not let go of the issue, because he was not satisfied that Obama had proved his citizenship.^[8] After Trump began making his views public, he was contacted by Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, who was reportedly on the phone with Trump every day for a week, providing Trump with a "birther primer", answers to questions, and advice.^[9] After Obama released his long-form birth certificate on April 27, Trump said "I am really honored and I am really proud, that I was able to do something that nobody else could do."^[10] On October 24, Trump offered to donate five million dollars to the charity of Obama's choice in return for the publication of his college and passport applications before October 31.^[11]

On September 16, as the Republican Party presidential nominee, Trump stated "President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period." Trump took credit for putting the controversy to rest and also repeated a false claim that Hillary Clinton (his opponent in the U.S. presidential election and one of Obama's opponents in the Democractic presidential primaries) had started the controversy concerning Obama's place of birth.^[12]

Making stuff up

Or creating elaborate fabrications based on flimsy sources.

At a political rally in Birmingham, Alabama on November 21, Trump claimed:

"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down" "And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering."^[13]

This may have originated from a rumor regarding Muslim celebrations in Paterson, N.J. repeated by Howard Stern. Likewise, a cover photo in The National Enquirer alleging that an unidentified man standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald was Ted Cruz's father was cited in an interview on Fox News May 3.^[14]

Schoolyard tactics

Michael Scherer Washington Bureau Chief for Time Magazine has described Trump's habitual method of getting his way as "coloring outside the lines and bullying.^[15]

Taunting, repeated name calling, was used frequently in the presidential debates, "Lying Ted," "Crooked Hillary."

Effectiveness

In and again in psychologists Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey, UK, interviewed and gave personality tests to high-level British executives and compared their profiles with those of criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor Hospital in the UK. They found that three out of eleven personality disorders were actually more common in executives than in the disturbed criminals:

• Histrionic personality disorder: including superficial charm, insincerity, egocentricity and manipulation
• Narcissistic personality disorder: including grandiosity, self-focused lack of empathy for others, exploitativeness and independence.
• Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: including perfectionism, excessive devotion to work, rigidity, stubbornness and dictatorial tendencies.^[16]

According to leadership academic Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, it seems almost inevitable that some personality disorders will be present in a senior management team.^[17]

Notes and references

External links and further reading

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories#Donald Trump. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.