So He's a Narcissist? So What?
Let's consider it

ELIZABETH GEORGE
Feb 5, 2026

I wager that all of us have had experience with people who are tediously and tiresomely self-important. You know who they are. They’re the people who, when they are with you, talk only about themselves, their problems, their issues, their children, their jobs, their parents, their interior design plans, their landscape plans, their…whatever. You might be having lunch with them. You might be having drinks or dinner with them. You might be on a committee with them. They could be colleagues at your place of employment, fellow students in a class you’re taking, relatives you see only occasionally, members of your church or your softball team or your golfing foursome. But no matter where or how you meet them, they all have an interesting quirk in common: they never ask about you. It simply does not occur to them to do so.

It would be quite easy to label these people narcissists. But to do that denies the reality of narcissism as a personality disorder, which is what it actually is: a mental health condition in which people have—in the words of the Mayo Clinic—“an unreasonably high sense of their own importance.” Individuals suffering from this personality disorder long for attention and are possessed by a desire that other people not only see them but also admire them. They look supremely confident about their general wonderfulness. But that air of confidence is a thin veneer covering what lies within them, which is a marked lack of certainty about their individual self-worth. Because of this, they cannot abide criticism, and they become impatient or angry when they do not receive special recognition or special treatment. If a group photo is being taken, they position themselves at the front of the group, going so far as to shove other people aside if they stand in the way. If an award is being given, they expect to be the recipient. Without achieving anything of note, they still expect to be recognized by others as a superior being. If they do achieve something, they exaggerate or amplify the achievement, sometimes beyond what is reasonable.
This personality disorder robs them of the ability to recognize the needs and the feelings of others. Indeed, it does not occur to them—unless forced upon them—that others have needs or feelings at all. Their belief in their own superiority is firm, and no evidence to the contrary gets through to them. They look down upon people as inherently less than they are, and they employ words and phrases like “low IQ individual” or “loser” or “incompetent” when speaking about them.

Their waking hours are eaten up by their needs and by the conscious and unconscious pursuit of satisfying those needs. Because this is the one reliable constant within them—like a hunger for food when there is an insufficiency of it—rage comes easily to them. It slides easily into open contempt which evidences itself in the manner in which they belittle people. The belittling takes a number of forms and is done in public or in private. For example, they can choose to humiliate someone in public by referring to him through the use of a derisive nickname like “teeny hands Jones” , they can insult someone by using a loaded word with multiple meanings while addressing that person like “What did you say, Fatty?”, they can compare someone’s real achievements to their own overblown accomplishments. They can insist upon their identities being associated with objects—buildings, fountains, memorials, museums—that heretofore have been associated with the lives and achievements of others.
But the problem remains, and there is simply no satiety for the hunger that dominates their existence. Those who try to fill what is actually an abyss of exigent need will find themselves incapable of alleviating what are in reality, the narcissist’s masked feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation, and fear.

Malignant narcissism is, as the saying goes, a horse of a different color. Or perhaps better said, it is a dangerous aberration in which the elements of narcissistic personality disorder are pathologically magnified. Thus, the inability to recognize the feelings of other people becomes a lack of empathy to another’s actual suffering and a marked indifference to others’ experiences, needs, or emotions. The longing for attention in the narcissist—that pushing to be at the front of the group picture—becomes disregard or actual hostility toward the rights of others. Open contempt alters to aggression, violence, and a lack of remorse for harming others. The exaggeration of accomplishments becomes outright lies. The belief in their own superiority morphs into breaking the law, which is itself accompanied by the refusal to take or admit to responsibility for having done so. The need to have their identities attached to something significant leads to impulsive behaviors without regard for who is hurt, betrayed, abused, or reduced by those behaviors. Impulsive behaviors exist in a realm by themselves with no permission needed or granted for those behaviors. If the malignant narcissist wants something destroyed, it is destroyed without compunction. If the malignant narcissist requires his identity—through name or photograph or painting or signature—affixed to something, it is done. Should objections be raised, punishments are meted out in any one of the fashions described above.

What I find interesting about narcissists and malignant narcissist is their inability to hide what they truly are over an extended period of time. They might be charming, but the charm is ephemeral. They might be fascinating raconteurs, but their stories do not bear examination and they themselves cannot abide questions. They might wear the guise of intelligence, but it exists on the surface only. Most telling of all, they appear to have no friends. They have associates; they have people they use. There is no one who says “I’ve known him all my life” in a positive way because those people do not exist unless they are the children of the narcissist and have no choice in the matter.

The narcissist loves through a mirror image and someone can—and frequently does—stand beside him and is reflected in that mirror for a period of time. The malignant narcissist, however, stands reflected in the mirror alone.

We are in the midst of a national tragedy because the individual voted into power suffers from a personality disorder. Individuals with various personality disorders have, of course, been elected to national leadership before. You can find them in history books: from Caligula through Herod, coursing through the lives of Ivan the Terrible, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler. What they all have in common with each other is destruction, indifference, the promotion of fear in others, and death. They sought to glorify themselves at the expense of others, no matter the cost.

The questions we must ask ourselves as well as answer is this: How far along the road to destruction and death do we in the United States wish to travel, and if we believe we’ve traveled quite far enough, what do we intend to do to call a halt to the journey?

© 2026 Elizabeth George
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104