“What?” I hear all the Trump haters out there holler. “I’m nothing like Donald Trump! The man’s a moral abomination! How on earth could you possibly equate me with him?” 

Glad I have your attention. 

Donald Trump has three character traits that explain most of his behavior: 

1. He suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder

2. He believes all people are either winners or suckers

3. He’s a bully

First, Trump is a clinical narcissist. I’m not a psychologist, but in 2019, a group of over 350 mental health professionals chose to violate their professional protocol and publicly declare that, even though they hadn’t treated Trump in person, based purely on his public-facing behaviors they were confident he suffered from a mental illness, most likely narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). They felt it was warranted to violate protocol because of the damage that could result from someone with such a disorder gaining the powers of the United States presidency.

Of course, the MAGA movement could have cared less what a few pencil-necked psychologists thought about their guy, and Trump was catapulted into the biggest, most important job on planet Earth. Yet over his time in office, the psychologists’ warning was largely validated by many people from within Trump’s own administration, including Chief of Staff John Kelly and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. There are many stories of people around Trump refusing to comply with his nonsensical, dangerous impulses, be it firing missiles into Mexico, trying to have special counsel Robert Mueller fired, or driving to the Capitol while the riot he started was still in progress.

There is also considerable anecdotal evidence Trump is afflicted with NPD. His strange obsession with holding rallies and exaggerating the size of his crowds (and now falsely claiming the size of his opponent’s crowds are smaller than they really are). Putting his face on a fake Time magazine cover and displaying it at his golf courses and Mar a Lago. Skipping morning security briefings when he was President in favor of watching Fox News because of their fawning coverage of him. Insisting he’s a self-made billionaire when in reality his father gave him more than $400 million. 

But what really indicates someone has NPD is it causes them to behave in ways that are harmful to themselves as well those around them. This may seem like a hard case to make for Trump, because at the end of the day he became the President of the United States! However, I believe Trump’s electoral success in 2016 had more to do with external factors that overshadowed the impact his NPD had on his behavior. There was Russia’s disinformation campaign on Facebook and other social media. James Comey’s reopening of an FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server days before the election. The fact that Hilary Clinton was a woman in a stubbornly sexist country. The polarized political landscape in America that makes the votes in seven swing states the only votes that matter. Most of all, the distortion of popular will that is the Electoral College, with its janky math declaring Trump the winner despite his losing the popular vote by 3 million votes. Trump himself thought his repugnant, self-aggrandizing comments to Access Hollywood and his affair with Stormy Daniels might torpedo his chances of getting elected. But in the end, those other factors outweighed his self-defeating behaviors. 

Even now, he still can’t help himself. In my opinion, Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate is another example of his narcissism running rampant. Choosing Vance did nothing to broaden the appeal of the Trump ticket—he already had the sexist white male vote sewn up. Trump picked Vance because he wants to make an example of someone who used to be a political enemy but later kissed the Don’s ring. Swear allegiance to me, do what I say, and you will be rewarded, no matter your past transgressions was the signal Trump gave his other haters. In doing so, however, he diminished his chances of being re-elected. Had he picked, say, Nikki Haley, it would have gone a long way toward improving his appeal with women. But Haley resisted Trump for longer and never fully prostrated herself before him the way Vance did. In the end, Trump chose the person who appealed more to his narcissism than his political interests. 

Enough of making the case that Donald Trump is a clinical narcissist. Let’s move on to his belief there are two types of people in the world: winners and suckers. It’s important to understand specifically what Trump means by a ‘winner.’ For Trump, a winner is someone who scams the system and gets away with it. Those who aren’t successfully scamming the system are the ones getting scammed and therefore the ‘suckers.’

While I believe Trump’s narcissism is innate, I believe both traits 2 and 3 he learned from his father and his personal lawyer, Roy Cohn. Fred Trump was a notorious but financially successful New Jersey slumlord who Donald Trump’s own niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, believes was a “high functioning sociopath.” (As a side note, personality disorders are believed to have a genetic component and ASPD is in the same sub-group of personality disorders as NPD.) 

From these two men, Trump learned how to hack and grift the system. He paid someone to take the SAT for him and leveraged a family connection with one of the admissions officers to get into the Wharton School of Business. His dad got him out of serving in Vietnam with a doctored doctors excuse of having a bone spur in his foot. Trump often refused to pay the contractors who did work for him. He defrauded the financial system by wildly overvaluing his current properties as collateral to get much bigger loans than he otherwise would have been able to in order to buy additional properties. But at tax time, he told the IRS those same properties were worth far less than they really were, to avoid paying taxes. (This behavior is what Trump was found guilty of in the New York case for which he is now a convicted felon and awaiting sentencing in September).

He also exploited the bizarre tax laws around real estate holdings to get out of paying taxes at all. Perhaps most obvious of all, Trump gravitated to running casinos, places where suckers who know the odds are stacked against them still go to give you their money (although somehow he still screwed this up). Throughout his life, we see how Trump learned not the art of the deal, but the art of the steal. 

On to trait number 3, Trump is a bully. Actually, do I need to provide any more evidence of this, or can we all just agree this one’s obvious? Great, let’s move on. 

“Fine,” you say. “You’ve explained Donald Trump is a clinical narcissist and bully who scams the system. Care to explain how any of that applies to me?”

Glad you asked.

First off, like Donald Trump, we all selfishly want lots of things and don’t care about the consequences. I call these the “Modern Human Bill of Rights.” These include the right to:

Go anywhere you want at anytime and by whatever means of transportation you want.

• Buy whatever you want and have it delivered anywhere you want.

• Use natural resources like water, trees, coal, and oil however you want, whenever you want.

• Use synthetic resources like paper, electricity, and plastic however you want, whenever you want.

• Alter your environment however you want, including heating and air conditioning it as much as you want whenever you want.

• Use non-human animals however you want.

• Own as much stuff as you want.

• Accumulate as much money as you want and use it however you want.

The last one is the most important, because the main limitation to your ability to do the other things on the list is your ability to pay for them. For the most part, if you can afford it, you can do it. 

I’ll save the detailed explanation for how I believe we got to this mindset for another blog post, but I’ll give a quick summary now. First, the various nature-based belief systems humans had held since ancient times were pushed aside by the major religions and nation-states for the purpose of controlling people at scale. Then in Europe in the fifteenth century, out of the ashes of the Black Plague, the Enlightenment shifted humanity’s mindset from a focus on god to a focus on itself. The “nobility of man” became the new rallying cry, and humans began attending to themselves and what they could do. 

Over the years, as our knowledge and successful application of science, technology, engineering, and math grew, we became increasingly enamored with ourselves and our capabilities, and less concerned with what the church or god thought about it, or the impact it would have on native peoples, or other animals, or the environment. Because who needs God when you can be God, right?

While the incremental changes we made to our environment along the way perhaps make sense in and of themselves, collectively they have thrown us wildly out of alignment with the rest of the natural world. In fact, our behavior can now best be described not just as narcissistic, but parasitic. Consider the following: 

• At the start of human agriculture some 10,000 years ago, there were around four million people on Earth. By the start of the Industrial Revolution in 1760, the human population had grown to 800 million. But in the 260 years since, it has grown exponentially, to eight billion, and is projected to increase by 2 billion more in just the next 35 years. 

• In the past 800,000 years, global CO2 had only been as high as 300 ppm once. But since the Industrial revolution the global concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has suddenly jumped to 420 ppm.

• The global temperature has risen 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1850.

• Energy consumption (primarily coal, oil, and gas) has increased 23x since 1850.

• Arctic sea ice has decreased 12.2 percent annually since 1980, and the Arctic is warming twice as quickly as the global average due to Arctic amplification.

• One-third of the world’s forests have been clear cut for grazing and croplands since human agriculture started, with half of that loss occurring in just the past 100 years.

• Large rivers around the world are drying up.

• Coral reefs around the world are collapsing.

• The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) may collapse by 2050.

• More than 80 billion land animals and 120 million fish are slaughtered for human consumption every year.

Sounds like a parasitic species to me.

It's astonishing to consider how much environmental destruction humans have caused in just the past 200 years, when the modern Industrial Revolution got going. We continue to do it, however, because of our Enlightenment-descended mindset that human beings are special. We now view each and every individual human life as critically important and worth making almost any sacrifice for. As an example, while I love both the book and the movie The Martian, the idea that it would be worth multiple billions of dollars to make a long-shot attempt to rescue one astronaut stranded on Mars typifies our illogical thinking in this regard. 

We often use this perspective as justification for pursuing a line of technological development, particularly in the field of biotechnology. For example, despite the possible risks involved in manipulating the human genome with techniques such as CRISPR or bridge editing, there is always the potential to ‘correct’ some obscure disease that affects a relative handful of people worldwide. (Please note I do not discount the severity of the impact on those afflicted with rare conditions. I was born with a cleft lip and cleft palate, so I have personal experience in this regard.) But even potential downstream risks such as germline editing that have the possibility of affecting all humanity for all time never seem to carry much weight compared to the holy war fervor for applying whatever cutting-edge tech we have available to try to save one more person from death for just a little while longer. 

In fact, not just death but human suffering or discomfort in any form has come to be viewed as unacceptable and a valid justification for the application of technology to alleviate or eliminate it. “Glamping,” once a pejorative term, is now used by many people to describe their minimalist attempts to reconnect with nature. But instead of sleeping on the ground in tents out in fields or in forests, now we drive gas-guzzling RVs to “campsites” with electrical and plumbing hookups that make the experience hardly any different than it is back home. To live “primitively,” even for a weekend, is now seen as a thing to be avoided at all costs, rather than as a reconnection with our roots. 

A couple of years ago I read a book called Sandtalk by Tyson Yunkaporta, a mixed-race Australian Aboriginal, that turned everything I thought I knew about the lifestyles of primitive peoples upside down. Far from being a less desirable state of living, Yunkaporta reveals the deep connection aboriginal people have to the Earth. Even objects we would consider inanimate, like stones, he speaks of as possessing memories, like living things. He talks about such memories running back thousands of years, whether in people, other animals, or objects, into what he calls “deep time.” In my younger years, I would have regarded such ideas as laughable, but now I find them taking root in my psyche. I find myself wondering, is it not this lack of connection, this severance from the ecosystem we evolved to be a part of, the primary cause of our modern anxiety, of feeling isolated and lonely, living lives that seem to lack true purpose, creating safe but monotonous existences? 

Try to suppress your 21st century mindset for just a moment, which will immediately cause you to think, “Those poor people. What a miserable way to live.” Instead, really consider that was the way of life for everyone for millennia. As in tens of thousands of years. Quite a few human societies lived in such ways well into the twentieth century. In fact, some, such as the Sentinel Islanders, the Awa in Brazil, and the Hadza in Tanzania still do live that way. The truth is, that way of living is not an anomaly. The way we live now is an anomaly, no matter how normal it may seem to us. 

Most importantly, in all that time, how much of the 120 ppm and counting excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere did the people living in those ways contribute?

That’s right. Zero.

Believe me, I don’t relish the idea of living without the technology I’ve been accustomed to all my life. It may sound crazy to suggest returning to living more like we did hundreds, perhaps in some ways even thousands of years ago. I don’t know what such a life might look like (that’s part of what I’ll be exploring in my third novel), but I know it wouldn’t be exactly like it did before, because, for better or worse, we know some things about the world that our ancestors did not. But what’s really crazy is simply continuing to do what we've been doing the last 200 years when we know it has put us on the brink of several cataclysmic planetary tipping points.

The most interesting part of Sandtalk for me was in the beginning, when Mr. Yunkaporta talked about how aboriginals deal with narcissists. Essentially, it is understood that everyone goes off their rocker from time to time and thinks they are the center of the universe. The community responds by taking various actions to bring those people back into the fold. They don’t let people’s madness persist, in no small part because in a community that has to work every day just to make it to the next, allowing such thinking to persist could put the whole community at risk. Contrast that with today, where much of our mass media, be it Fox News or Facebook, streaming TV or blockbuster movies, actually encourages outrageous, unsustainable behavior for financial gain. 

This reminds me, I need to briefly explain how we all share the second Trump trait, belief in 'winners' and 'suckers' where 'winners' are people not defined by special abilities, but by a craven willingness to grift the system. This occurred to me when I mentioned Fox News and Facebook because both of those companies excel at this, stirring up outrage in their viewership for the purpose of keeping them on the platform longer to sell more ads and make more money, without regard for the long-term consequences to society. Similarly, we engage in activities that necessitate climate-killing mechanical and chemical processes, but we continue to do them anyway because it benefits us in the short term. We cheat the system—nature and the future generations of humans (not to mention other animals and potentially even our future selves), thinking, “That’s okay. It’ll be great for me. It’s the suckers who come after me who’ll have to deal with the fallout.” 

Now to connect the third trait: being a bully. Well, there’s the obvious one of European colonialists wiping out or driving out native peoples and animals all over the world so they could live in those places instead. Nowadays the bullying continues with the wealthiest, most “developed” nations, which account for almost all the ecosystem-killing carbon dioxide and methane being pumped into the atmosphere, while it’s the lower-lying, hotter, poorer nations that will be affected first and worst by climate change. And we are way beyond bullies to other animals. Whether it’s keeping hundreds of billions of them prisoners in factory farms their whole lives for milk or slaughter, experimenting on them for medical research or to develop cosmetics, or simply continuing to drive them farther and farther out of their natural habitats, human beings are a nightmare beyond reckoning for other sentient beings we used to share this planet with. 

Just as Donald Trump will never stop regarding himself as superior to other people, scamming the system for power and profit and bullying anyone who tries to get in his way, we technology-addled humans will never stop imagining ourselves to be superior to the rest of nature, never stop hacking it for our continued convenience, and never stop destroying anything that gets in our way. 

The primary solution to global warming is straightforward: Stop doing everything that requires burning fossil fuels. Without a doubt, doing so would be cataclysmic in its own right—hundreds of millions of people would probably die in the transition. But the alternative is everyone dies.

Yet we won’t put one toe in the cold water of life without fossil fuel consumption because we're addicted to living this way. We refuse to recognize the Great Lie we’ve been telling ourselves for generations that we can burn fossil fuels to power this way of life and get away with it. We won’t surrender any of our technological conveniences, even though the same scientific method that gave them to us is now telling us that doing so is going to annihilate all life on Earth in a matter of decades. Instead, we close our eyes and cross our fingers that the scientists and engineers will figure out how to transition our power grids to renewable energy, transform our manufacturing and transportation processes to be non-polluting, and most absurd of all, use geoengineering to mitigate the future damage to the ecosystem that will be caused by our refusal to stop doing things that damage the ecosystem. 

Our narcissism has long-since been codified into the operational rules of our corporations and nations, and there is little to no chance these can be altered enough to matter in the limited time in which we have to change things. What politician or CEO is going to advocate for the sort of  austerity that would make what Greece went through a decade ago look like an ancient Roman orgy in comparison? They’d be immediately thrown out of office, because the people aren’t going to consider abandoning the sweet life they now enjoy just to avoid creating an apocalyptic future. I’m certainly not seeing most people, myself included, taking all the smaller actions that are well within our power to take now, like skipping vacations and not eating fast food. 

After reading Sandtalk and other books like How to Read Nature, Braiding Sweetgrass, and Sacred Instructions, what makes the Great Lie we’ve told ourselves even sadder to me is our severance from nature is now so complete we no longer understand all that we’ve lost in our pursuit of safety and satiety. Nowadays, we might still feel a brief tingle of wonderment and the sense that we’re part of something much bigger and more awe-inspiring than just ourselves when we look at a beautiful sunset or see the stars on a particularly dark night. But then it’s back to our hermetically sealed homes and workplaces with air-conditioning and refrigerated foods in plastic containers and voraciously using and consuming whatever we want. Come what may, we’re not going to stop living the way we do.

Because—let’s be honest—we’re all Donald Trump.