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MY P.O.V. - She didn’t call it abuse at first.
She said things like he’s complicated, he’s under pressure, he didn’t mean it that way. She learned to anticipate mood shifts, translate volatility into strategy, keep receipts, stay quiet in public, and explain harm in ways that wouldn’t provoke retaliation. The danger was not constant, but it was ambient. And over time, that ambient danger rearranged her sense of reality.
This is how abuse works: not as a single rupture, but as a long erosion of trust—first in others, then in oneself.
It has become impossible to observe the behavior of our president over the past decade and not recognize the same structure playing out on a national scale.
In clinical terms, narcissism is more than vanity or arrogance. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, as defined in the DSM-5, describes a pattern of grandiosity, chronic need for admiration to stabilize fragile self-esteem, diminished capacity for empathy, and a tendency to exploit others to maintain control or image. Criticism is experienced as injury, often met with rage, blame, or retaliation. Relationships—personal, political, institutional—become transactional and unstable, organized around loyalty rather than truth. Not everyone who exhibits these traits meets the diagnostic threshold, and formal diagnosis belongs to trained clinicians. But patterns matter, especially when one individual holds the most powerful office in the world.
Viewed through this lens, the presidency becomes a case study in familiar abuse dynamics.
The compulsive lying is not about persuasion. The crowd sizes, the insistence that a lost election was “stolen,” the twisting of everyday facts into spectacles of personal grievance—these are gaslighting at scale. They are designed to make people doubt their own perception of reality.
The fixation on recognition follows the same logic. Obsession with the Nobel Peace Prize, framing foreign policy through personal slights, linking geopolitical maneuvering to wounded pride, these acts are less strategic than self-serving, ego-maintenance behaviors.
The attacks on anyone who threatens accountability, judges, inspectors general, journalists, career civil servants, are textbook isolation. Abusers must discredit the institutions that might reflect reality back to the public.
Even death does not escape the lens of self. When filmmaker Rob Reiner died, the response was not condolence but self-centered accusation: his “anger” blamed for his passing. Empathy, in narcissistic structures, is always subordinate to image.
And then there is the chaos- the constant crises, the overlapping scandals, the spectacle. Survivors know this terrain. Exhaustion is a control tactic. When people are constantly reacting, they stop organizing. They stop strategizing. Abuse thrives on fatigue.
For years, Americans responded the way people often do in abusive relationships: by trying harder. Explaining more clearly. Fact-checking more thoroughly. Hoping norms would hold. Hoping this time would be different.
But survivors know the hardest truth: you cannot reason someone out of abuse when abuse is functional for them.
So what actually works? The same strategies survivors have relied on for decades.
You set firm boundaries. Institutions refuse to normalize behavior that corrodes democracy. Courts block unlawful orders. States assert autonomy. Agencies maintain integrity even when challenged.
You stay connected. Abusers isolate; survivors build networks. Journalists, organizers, educators, mutual aid groups, and international allies form a social immune system that authoritarian narcissism seeks to destroy.
You document everything. Abuse depends on forgetting. Memory is resistance. Congressional records, court filings, investigative reporting—they preserve reality when lies proliferate.
You practice emotional discipline. Not every provocation deserves your nervous system. Not every spectacle deserves amplification. Calm, factual response starves manipulation of oxygen.
You plan for safety. You assume escalation is possible because history, and clinical experience, says it is. You protect the most vulnerable first. You prepare legal, civic, and electoral exits before crisis forces them.
You manage expectations. You stop waiting for transformation. Systems must be built to withstand bad-faith leadership, not depend on goodwill that will never arrive.
And sometimes, you go gray rock. Neutral tone. Minimal engagement. No free attention for narratives designed to drain collective energy.
Most of all, you remember this: leaving abuse is not weakness. It is clarity.
Domestic violence survivors do not survive by outshouting their abuser. They survive by trusting patterns, holding boundaries, and refusing to confuse cruelty with strength.
This is not a metaphor meant to shock. It is a framework meant to orient us.
Because when the behavioral profile of a narcissistic dynamic appears at the level of the presidency, the question is no longer whether this is normal politics.
The question is whether we will use the wisdom that survival has already taught, or continue to relearn it at national cost.
(George Cassidy Payne is a journalist and poet who works as a 988 Suicide Prevention Counselor and former domestic violence hotline case manager. For decades, he has supported people living under coercion, psychological manipulation, and chronic instability—helping them recognize abusive patterns, set boundaries, and reclaim agency.)
