Week signals: The madness in the method
Plus: watch points for the EU, India, Iran, Cyprus, the US, the UK, and China.
Hello,
In this edition of Week Signals:
IN REVIEW. TrumpWorld, lessons from history, and staying sane (and profitable) in the perpetual present.
UP AHEAD. Deals between East and West, with sabre-rattling in between. Markets await the Fed and MAG7. Cyprus talks.
And don’t forget to connect with me on LinkedIn.
Week Signals is the Saturday note for clients of Geopolitical Strategy, also available to GD Professional subscribers on Geopolitical Dispatch.
The Week in Review: The rule of man
The week began with US threats to take Greenland. It ended with threats to attack Iran (again). In between, Davos saw a landmark speech by Mark Carney, effectively declaring the end of the rules-based order, and Trump, in his inimitable style, managed to offend almost everyone in the room. A Board of Peace was declared for Gaza, and the world. NATO and the EU contorted themselves. China bided its time.
Our first week back has been busy. It’s hard to easily summarise the mix of events. But the connection, of course, is Trump, and that’s the issue most urgently needing to be understood by business and investors.
A landmark of sorts for ourselves, as professional analysts, was George Friedman’s confession that he could no longer explain the events now unfolding.
Friedman, alongside Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer and Oxford Analytica’s David Young, who recently passed away, essentially invented the modern geopolitical risk industry when he founded Stratfor. His method of analysis, using the impersonal forces of geography and demographics to explain national destiny, was mostly correct during and after the Cold War. His crystal ball, as it were, worked. Yet, per Canada’s prime minister, we no longer live in such a world. It is easy to see where Friedman got it wrong. It is personal forces now shaping the world. And indeed, there are only three forces that really matter: Trump, Xi Jinping, and – to a lesser extent – Vladimir Putin.
Unlike Friedman, we got our analytical start in diplomacy, and to us, the personal and personnel have always been policy. Advising politicians, how could you ignore egos and (assumed) agency? If you ever had the illusion of a hidden hand in history, it was quickly disabused when you experienced the chaos of your first leader meeting. Like Henry Kissinger, who began his career as something of a determinist, government service taught him that it really is great men and women who ultimately shape, if not direct, events. His last major book, Leadership, capped this journey.
We’ve written about such drivers before, but for now, let’s focus on Trump. As the last week showed, he’s not only dominating the news cycle but creating it in increasingly dramatic ways. Eventually, the impersonal forces of geography and demographics will catch up (he’s almost 80). Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower will go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. But for now, he’s still king of the hill. There’s a lot of damage one man can do.
Much has been written about The Donald. Probably too much. Future Trump Studies scholars will struggle to get through the primary sources, let alone the literature. But one source that my colleague Damien Bruckard has found useful when speaking to clients are the books, interviews and Substack of Trump’s niece, Dr Mary Lea Trump.
She has her biases, of course. She may have been the first person on earth to experience Trump Derangement Syndrome. But as a clinical psychologist and close relation, she has a claim to understand Trump better than anyone else. We’ve reviewed what she’s said and asked ourselves what the historical parallels are to such an individual, what the implications might be, and what will be on next for this reality TV show called the TrumpWorld.
The gospel of Mary Lea
According to Mary Lea, Donald’s psychology can’t be understood solely through politics. He’s a man without ideology – perhaps beyond bugbears like tariffs – and an instinctual creature who does what he does to get what he wants.
Trump grew up in a family dominated by his father, Fred Sr, a real estate tycoon who cared about nothing except his business empire. Fred was a sociopath who taught his children that his affection was entirely conditional.
One of the explicit conditions for approving of any Trump son was that he be a “killer.” Softness was unthinkable. Lying was acceptable. Admitting you were wrong or apologising showed weakness. Fred would grow furious when his eldest, Freddy Jr, apologised for errors. He trafficked constantly in hyperbole. Everything was “great,” “fantastic,” “perfect.” He fostered a permanent atmosphere of division in the family, which he used to maintain power.
Freddy, Mary Lea’s father, was found wanting. He became an alcoholic and died around age 42. Donald, seven years younger, had time to learn from watching Fred humiliate Freddy. The lesson was simple: don’t be like Freddy. Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald.
Donald and Freddy’s mother, Mary Anne, was unstable and needy. She used her children to comfort herself rather than to comfort them. Mary Anne’s de facto abandonment and Fred’s failure to make his children feel safe or loved meant Donald developed powerful but primitive defences: callousness, hostility, narcissism, bullying, and grandiosity. From a young age, Donald was shameless, used reckless hyperbole, and displayed unearned confidence, which were all masks for pathological weaknesses and insecurities.
At 24, Donald was made president of the real estate empire. The family culture was deeply misogynistic. Donald’s transgressions became an audition for Fred’s favour, as if to say, “See Dad, I’m the tough one. I’m the killer.”
Fred ended his life with mild senile dementia, then Alzheimer’s. Such conditions aren’t necessarily hereditary, but Donald is very much a chip off the old block. Even as an old man, Fred dyed his hair a ridiculous colour.
If Donald were the patient of a clinical psychologist, chances are he would come back with a diagnosis of Antisocial and Narcissistic Personality Disorder, with a great deal of comorbidity. Sociopathy itself is not a diagnostic category, but exists on a continuum of personality disorders. At one end are people comfortable breaking rules, lying, and shoplifting (i.e., those who know right from wrong but believe the rules don’t apply to them). Yet as you move down the continuum, things grow darker. At the extreme end lies psychopathy.
Donald exists in this dark space between the fear of indifference and the fear of failure.
Mary Lea maintains that he meets all nine criteria for narcissism. She says he also exhibits Dependent Personality Disorder, as well as learning disabilities that interfere with his ability to process information. His pathologies are so complex that arm’s-length diagnoses fail by not going far enough.
Donald is incapable of evolving, has never changed, and is the same in every situation. He has always been a bully, always needing to win. Donald has always been an arsehole. Nobody is terrible all the time, and there was a time when there was a spark and an impulse to be kind, but it has long been eradicated.
Exhibiting all the traits of a narcissist, including grandiosity, entitlement, and a constant need for reinforcement, Donald’s ego is extraordinarily fragile and must be continuously bolstered because he knows, deep down, that he is nothing of what he claims. He is trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. He always speaks in hyperbole. He is terrified of being found out, or of having people understand that everything about him is a projected myth.
And that fear is Donald’s point of weakness. If his adversaries and rivals understand that insecurity and fear are what drive him, they know where to attack. Yet Donald is now more powerful and protected than ever. He has a phalanx of sycophants and enablers who protect him from reality, whether bad polls, policy failures, or ridicule, because he so desperately needs protection from the truth. In many ways, the opportunity to confront him directly has been lost.
We can laugh at him or speculate about cognitive decline. But Donald continues to have power. There is no one in his party willing to stop him. They are afraid, or want power themselves. They have bought into a project to weaken American institutions and democracy and replace them with an authoritarian structure that preserves their control. Donald did not create this project, but he is its logical conclusion.
There is no reason to believe anything Donald says. His run for office wasn’t about service, but about staying out of prison. It is hard to imagine him willingly ceding power. To Mary Lea, it is more plausible that he would simply declare himself president for life and dare others to challenge him. “You and what army?”
Donald has said he wants to be a dictator. Sometimes we should take him at his word. As a fraud and a bully, nothing is ever enough.
To Mary Lea, Donald is ultimately a clown with no principles, formed by a father who destroyed his capacity to experience the full range of human emotion, and raised in a world where cruelty was rewarded, softness punished, and love conditional. What remains is a man driven not by belief, but fear of failure, indifference, and being exposed.
The parallels
Mary Lea’s personal-professional diagnosis is chilling, even in the above summarisation. If we can take even 50% of it as accurate, then the world truly has a problem. Economic integration and globalisation (yes, it still exists) mean that seldom has one man mattered so much to world order, but history is littered with narcissistic politicians, and there are lessons to be learned from them too.