How I learned to cure my acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome

"No matter what Trump does, people find him repulsive. He could cure cancer and people would still condemn him."

After more than two decades of sitting in 12-step meetings, I’ve become familiar with a certain rhythm: the nods of recognition, the nervous admissions, the gentle laughter when someone manages self-deprecating humour. But every so often, something happens that throws the whole room off its axis. That’s what happened this morning at AA.

A newcomer was ‘sharing’.

Everyone was listening attentively: heads nodding encouragingly as he spoke about the weight of guilt, the lies he’d carried, the corrosive shame that comes with a life spent hiding a certain behaviour. But then he went deeper. He explained that he was a narcissist.

Upon hearing this confession, the mood in the room suddenly changed. Moments before, everyone was looking right at him, concerned for him as he described his traumatic childhood. But the mere mention of narcissism had a startling effect on the group. Everyone looked down, gazing at the floor, suddenly unable to look at him.

I’ve seen this before, but it has always puzzled me: what is it about owning up to narcissism that makes everyone so uncomfortable?

Are they simply judging the speaker for being a narcissist?

I mean, what makes it so different from any other disorder? No one asks to be a narcissist, any more than anyone asks to be Bi-Polar. No one in a meeting averts their gaze when someone admits to having schizophrenia. So why is it, I wondered, that society has, over the last few decades, decided to treat narcissists as pariahs?

Is it that we believe they are the ones doing the most damage in this world? Or is it something deeper, something about how we carry our own shame, our own secret narcissism, that triggers us when someone dares to name it out loud?

What happens in these moments is more than rejection. There’s an element of projection, a defence mechanism where we push our own unwanted traits onto someone else. The impulse to condemn the narcissist is triggered by something buried deep within the psyche. The very thing they can’t admit about themselves, privately or to the group, gets projected onto the brave soul, who has finally decided to break free of his ego.

Having witnessed this behaviour so many times, I can only conclude that it is a very human, very ordinary way of protecting ourselves from toxic shame. Toxic shame is the deep belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with you, something unfixable.

It can feel threatening when someone brings that truth to the surface by saying,

“This is who I am”. The reflex is to look away, to withdraw, and condemn the speaker. It’s as if the listeners are thinking: “I don’t want anything to do with you or this disorder, other than to be seen to condemn it.”

Why does this admission hit so much harder than talking about over-drinking, lying, or cheating?

I’ve seen women in meetings lean in seductively to bad-boys who have just admitted to being convicted rapists. People snigger at the admission that someone has stabbed a friend or shot dead someone who owed them money.

But narcissism?

That appears to be a bridge too far. A crossing too deep.

Admitting to narcissism doesn’t just say, “I did bad things”, it goes deeper. That’s dangerous territory for anyone in recovery, where so much of the work is about acceptance of the things we can’t change and the courage to change the things we can.

After all, we’re told that a narcissist cannot change.

There’s also an unspoken rule in many recovery circles: it’s okay to admit to external behaviours, but there are some things you just don’t say. Narcissism now seems to be at the top of that list, perhaps because, in the throes of our addictions, we were driven by ego and self-obsession.

So, we’d rather talk about “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now,” than the deeper primal survival strategies that drinking served to mask.

When this bloke named it, he broke that rule, and the group’s discomfort was palpable.

This kind of reaction is typical of people with ‘vulnerable’ narcissism, not the grandiose, loud kind, but a more hypersensitive, shame-prone version. People with vulnerable narcissism are especially sensitive to shame and exposure. They don’t want to be seen as quite this irredeemably socially flawed, and when someone exposes their own flaw, it can feel like a mirror held up to those who suffer the same personality defect.

But you don’t have to be a narcissist to use projection as a defence. Projection is universal.

People do it whenever they can’t face something in themselves. That’s what I saw in that room: a group of people flinching at their own reflection. The dude wasn’t the problem: he was the mirror.

This dynamic isn’t limited to AA meetings. You see it everywhere, in families, workplaces, friend groups, and even in politics. When a group fixates on someone they see as arrogant, egotistical, or narcissistic, it’s always worth asking: are they really reacting to that person, or to the parts of themselves they can’t accept? When someone becomes a lightning rod for hatred or scorn, often it’s because they embody something the group secretly fears or despises in themselves.

Could the psychological mechanisms at play in that AA meeting also explain why people react with intense, even irrational, animosity toward certain public figures?

No matter what Trump does, people find him repulsive. He could cure cancer, bring peace to the world, lift billions out of poverty, and yet people would continue to condemn him. There’s the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, for example, a label used to describe people who seem unable to admit that a controversial figure like Trump could ever do anything good.

Does this obsessive rejection say more about the haters than the person they’re hating?

Are people inadvertently revealing their own narcissism?

Since 2016, there has been a well-documented spike in narcissism worldwide. Many suggest it has to do with social media. It’s fascinating that this spike coincides exactly with the vilification and demonisation of Trump.

Perhaps he is a civilisational sacrificial scapegoat. I’m not suggesting that he’s not a narcissist. Quite the opposite. He’s the kind of narcissist other narcissists hate most: a grandiose narcissist. One that doesn’t hate or hide their narcissism, but rather loves and parades it.

What I’ve learned, through observing people in AA and following world affairs, is that most people are capable of facing their past misdeeds long before they can face their ego. The man who tells the complete truth about himself isn’t shamed because he’s worse than everyone else.

He’s shamed because he’s telling the secret everyone else is desperate to keep hidden.

In the end, whether in AA, in politics, or in life, the lesson is the same: what we hate most in others is often what we fear in ourselves. The bravest thing we can do is look in the mirror and not look away.

How ironic.