The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”
Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:
His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.
At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,
the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under, and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.
Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:
Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.
This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:
A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.
Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:
If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.
In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal, less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
In 2020, Pew Research reported in “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe” that:
Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three in four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.
A recent editorial in The Economist carried the headline “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concluded:
would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.
Klaas of University College London concluded that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that should dominate all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:
The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.