 My name is Sambat Nin and I am the author of Malignant Silk Club, Narcissism Revisited. Is Donald Trump a Narcissist? Is Hillary Clinton a Narcissist? Eight years ago, in July 2008, I published an essay titled, Barack Obama, Narcissist or Merely Narcissistic? It was the first time ever that pathological narcissism has been linked to a prominent politician of national standing. He was not president yet, but he was campaigning to be one. The essay Court Fire was replicated on more than four million websites and trashed and rehashed my conservative talk radio and various print magazines. Since then, it has become standard practice to ask whether a leading politician is a Narcissist or not. Problem is, since 2008, there has been an avalanche of self-styled experts, wannabe gurus, life coaches of one type or another, and all kinds of alleged or ostensible scholars, whose bombast and media-hungry pursuits are dwarfed only by the level of their ignorance. Very, very few of them know what they are talking about. Actually, I've yet to come across one. And yet they make claims and statements nonsensical as they may be, which get replicated throughout the media all over the world. Consider, for example, some of these experts who claim that Hillary Clinton is a covert narcissist. Well, covert narcissists are shy. Actually, in literature, when covert narcissists have been described for the first time in the 80s by the likes of Akhtar and others, they have been labeled shy or fragile narcissists. They shun publicity. They avoid the limelight. They like to be behind the scenes and backstage. They are manipulative. They are sly. They are very envious. But they derive their narcissistic supply by teaming up with overt or classic narcissists or by simply stewing in their own frustration, desperation, envy, and other negative emotions. They are not, repeat, not Hillary Clinton. They do not seek publicity. They avoid it. So there has been a series of debates on several issues. First of all, can we remote diagnose a politician or any other person for that matter? Well, the answer is, of course, no. Proper diagnosis requires a set of tests, structured interviews, and face-to-face meetings where the diagnostician who is a very experienced mental health practitioner is able to observe presenting signs, body language, and other parameters and to administer a series of tests. And so in the absence of this, we cannot diagnose anyone. But there is a big difference between diagnosis and evaluation. We can and do evaluate politicians on a constant basis. The CIA has a department dedicated to remote diagnosing world leaders. The predecessor of the CIA, the OSS, constructed a wonderful psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, which is now available online. Saddam Hussein's psychological profile written by Dr. Post is also available online. And what is psychological profiling of serial killers if not remote evaluation? So we regularly remote evaluate people with public exposure. Actually, there is a thriving scholarly literature which tries to remote diagnose living and dead world leaders. So now the question is an issue of knowing the field, knowing what you're talking about. And as I said, very few scholars, self-styled scholars with self-inputed expertise, know what they're talking about. Consider, for example, the debate between various pundits and gurus and scholars and experts on whether Trump is a narcissist or a malignant narcissist, whether he's a productive, useful narcissist or whether he's a destructive narcissist. Some of these distinctions do not emanate from scholarly literature. They are not grounded in any knowledge, any studies, any research, anything ever seriously written about the disorder. First of all, we must make a distinction between personality, style and personality disorder. Theodore Millen suggested that some people have a narcissistic style. Others may have a narcissistic personality. In other words, they may have narcissistic traits. They may have narcissistic psychological defense mechanisms, defenses. And they may even have or display narcissistic behaviors. All these does not make them narcissists. They merely are have narcissistic personality. To qualify as a narcissist, to earn this badge of honor, one must meet diagnostic criteria which are described in the last two editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Edition 4 takes revision in the year 2000 and edition 5 which was published in 2013. These criteria are pretty clear, pretty clear cut. And so if you meet five of these nine criteria according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 4, you are a narcissist. And if you meet several of the dimensional descriptions in the DSM-5, you're also a narcissist. So narcissists, the label of the designation narcissist is a medical diagnosis. It's not a curse word. It's not a pejorative term. It's a medical diagnosis. Someone may be very vain, considered arrogant, delusional, have fantasies of grandeur, be megalomania and still not be a narcissist. We'll come to that later. He may simply have a narcissistic style or a narcissistic personality, but not the disorder. Now people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are the only ones which merit the badge or the label narcissist. And now let's move on to the next question. Narcissists, are they all malignant or are some of them productive and useful? Let's dispense with the nonsense first. There are no productive or useful narcissists, none. All the so-called experts and scholars who claim otherwise are looking for media attention and in all likelihood, they themselves are narcissists. Narcissists are self-destructive and destructive to others, all of them without a single exception. They may construct empires, they may embark on projects, they may build buildings, but at the very end, they implode. And when they implode, they take everything and everyone down with them. They construct and destruct. It's an inevitable cycle and an integral part of narcissism. So no useful narcissists, no productive narcissists. It's utter, unsubstantiated trash. Now let's talk about the issue of malignant versus non-malignant narcissists. It is true that not all narcissists are sadistic. Actually a very small percentage of narcissists are sadistic in the classical sense. Enjoy inflicting pain and humiliation on others. A very small percentage of narcissists are sadistic. A very small percentage of narcissists are, for example, antisocial. A very small percentage end up being criminals. A very small percentage regards society itself as the enemy. Something to be attacked, something to be terrorized. Well, terrorists, for example, are usually antisocial narcissists. And these are psychopathic narcissists. And they are a small minority of the entire tribe of narcissists. A bigger portion of narcissists are contumacious. Contumacious means that they defy authority. They don't abide by social rules and conventions. They are a law unto themselves. They hold in contempt anyone who tells them what to do or tries to. They are very bad team players and so on. So they are consummations. Malignant narcissists are sadistic, consummations and also antisocial. Therefore, only a minority of narcissists are also malignant narcissists. What happens to narcissists who are not malignant narcissists? Well, they function somehow in society. They climb the corporate ladder. They have families. They function more or less normally. The only thing is that they are overbearing, overwinning, domineering, grandiose, megalomania, and so on and so forth. But it doesn't slide into antisocial, criminalized, consummations or sadistic behavior. So small percentage are malignant. And now we come to the question of whether there is anything, any series of traits and behaviors that are common to all narcissists. Malignant and non-malignant. The answer is of course yes. All narcissists, malignant and non-malignant lack full-fledged, fully developed empathy. They have something that I call called empathy. It's the ability to read other people, to discern their weaknesses, their failings, their chinks in their armor, and to leverage this information for the benefit of the narcissist and to further his go. So this is called empathy. An X-ray vision which allows the narcissist to realize how he can penetrate and how he can prey upon his victims. But they lack emotional empathy. They lack fully developed full-fledged empathy which allows them to put themselves in other people's shoes to experience however vicariously what other people feel and fear and want and wish and dream. So narcissists, all narcissists lack empathy. Malignant and non-malignant alike. All narcissists are exploitative. They all exploit other people. Exploitation is often abusive. So they all abuse other people. Malignant and non-malignant abuse other people. They are all in some ways self-destructive. Malignant narcissists would be self-destructive in a much bigger way because they usually tend to drag many other people with them. They are also driven much more. They are much more ambitious. So they are alpha males, so to speak. So they construct empires, business empires, political empires, and so on. When they fall down, everything falls with them. Family, community, nation. Non-malignant narcissists also self-destruct, but their self-destruction is more confined, or limited, and usually it is confined and limited to themselves and their immediate circle, nearest, dearest, a few friends, neighborhood, maybe. So it's a matter of scale. But self-destruction is a feature of both malignant and non-malignant narcissists. They are all narcissists malignant and non-malignant. They are grandiose. All of them have grandiose fantasies. All of them have a very poor perception of who they really are. Their strong points, shortcomings, limitations, and abilities. They all have a skewed, prejudiced and biased view of their place in society, in the world, and in interaction with other people. Coupled with the lack of empathy, it makes them cognitively deficient. So all narcissists have cognitive deficiencies, which make it very difficult for them to perceive reality properly. They fail the reality test. So they are, in other words, delusion. They're grandiose fantasies bordered on delusion. So here's another feature, which is common, essentially, to all narcissists. All narcissists are compulsive attention seekers. They need and crave narcissistic supply. Without narcissistic supply, they fall apart. They need other people to support and mattress their delusions. They need other people to tell them that they are brilliant, perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, et cetera, et cetera. When people don't do that, they try to force people to do that. When people disagree with them or criticize them, they become very defensive. They become hyper-vigilant. They scan the field for insults and injuries, real or imaginary. They are on their toes, on their guard, and in a way, paranoid. All narcissists, malignant and non-malignant, are like that. Another feature, which is common to all narcissists, is that they lie. All of them have a false self. A false self is a concoction, a narrative, a piece of fiction, a storyline that the narcissist adopts about himself, and it includes a lot of falsities, non-facts. Simply put, lies. Narcissists are pathological liars. They lie all the time. They don't not only embellish or embroider or confabulate which all of us do from time to time, but they constantly, blatantly, bold, facitely lie. And all of them do it. Malignant and non-malignant. So the question whether Donald Trump is a malignant or non-malignant narcissist, in my view, is absolutely irrelevant. The traits and features and behaviors which are common to all narcissists, malignant or not, are sufficient to disqualify them as president of the United States. And if Hillary Clinton is a narcissist, sufficient to disqualify her as well. But wait a minute, you see. Aren't all politicians narcissists? Aren't narcissists attracted to politics? Don't they gravitate to politics in order to control the faiths and destinies of other people? Doesn't it make them feel good to be in the limelight, to be famous, to be celebrities, to wield power? Aren't all politicians, therefore, to some extent narcissists? Well, yes, they are. But the critical phrase is to some extent. Remember how we started this conversation? Personality style. So many politicians have a narcissistic style. Many of them even have narcissistic personalities, but extremely few have a personality disorder. Donald Trump, in my view, having watched hundreds of hours of video over the last five years, in my view, would satisfy most of the criteria, including the modern dimensional treatment of narcissism, would satisfy most of the criteria for a personality disorder. But that's, of course, just an opinion, a view. I'm not able to diagnose him, and he hasn't been exposed to any proper qualified diagnostician, which I'm not. So we can only evaluate. As we have evaluated Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein or others, we can only evaluate Donald Trump. So he seems to have a personality disorder as opposed to a personality style and so on. Hillary Clinton is a more complex case, but it would seem that she also qualified. But that's not the main topic of this discussion. The main topic is how the field of pathological narcissism is replete with hundreds of charlatans, many of them with academic degrees who don't know what the hell they're talking about. And they apply their ignorance with a lot of aplomb and a lot of certitude and implied authority. And they spew nonsense and trash, misleading their readers and listeners and viewers into unnecessary and unimportant debates about distinctions that don't exist at all in the proper scholarly literature, between subtypes of narcissists that are totally invented. I will conclude by giving an example. The Dark Triad. It sounds like the title of a Hong Kong action movie. The Dark Triad is allegedly the confluence of three traits, Machiavellianism, whatever that means, probably means coming. Narcissism and psychopathy. Well, the Dark Triad is a fancy, media-hyped, media-attention-catching name for malignant narcissists. It's exactly the malignant narcissists. Malignant narcissists is skinning, is antisocial, is psychopathic in a way. He is, of course, narcissistic. So why come up with the Dark Triad? Why rename this perfectly excellent label proposed by Otto Kernberg more than 40 years ago? Why do we need that? The Dark Triad was invented to attract the media's attention. The field of psychology and psychiatry and therapy is flooded with narcissists. Believe you me, I've been interacting with them for 20 years. A lot of them, many of them, are outright narcissists, narcissistic style, personality, and many of them suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. They crave attention. They crave celebrity. They crave fame. They need it. They're addicted to it. They are junkies, like all narcissists. And so they come up with this concocted, idiotic labels, titles, distinctions, and suggestions. Extreme narcissists, Dark Triads, and I don't know what other types of other unsubstantiated, invalidated, unvalid narcissists. So be vigilant. Be on your guard. Don't swallow everything you have had. Go to multiple sources. Try to limit yourself to reading more scholarly, more substantiated literature, which has reasonable bibliographies and draws on knowledge that has accumulated over decades. Don't listen to instant celebrities who have discovered that there's a lot of money in narcissism and declare themselves a minute later as extras. Vote for the right candidate.