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There’s one headline about Donald Trump that has not been printed but makes the most sense of all, https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/there-s-one-headline-about-donald-trump-that-has-not-been-printed-but-makes-the-most-sense-of-all-20201008-p563b7.html By Ian Hughes and Alan D. Blotcky, October 11, 2020  For almost four years, there has hardly been a day that Donald Trump has not made front-page news. The unrelenting avalanche of lies and norm-shattering behaviour that Trump has unleashed has presented the mainstream media with an unprecedented challenge. It is a challenge that the media has struggled to meet, largely because of the ethical and practical difficulties that journalists face in dealing with Trump’s mental pathology.Even before his election, mental health professionals were warning that Trump’s psychopathology posed a threat to US democracy and to global stability. After his election, dozens of mental health experts collaborated on the book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump which became a New York Times bestseller. Over the past three or four months, the number of voices expressing alarm at Trump’s pathology has been growing.

The media, however, has largely continued to cover Trump’s actions one story at a time, without joining up the dots and accurately describing his pathology.

Of all the thousands of headlines, there is one headline that has not been printed but that makes the most sense of all: “Donald Trump suffers from a dangerous incurable narcissistic disorder which makes him incapable of empathy or reason. He is a grave danger to the US and the world.”

The failure of the media to emphasise this obvious fact is a lost opportunity to inform and educate the public so that Trump’s pathology is fully appreciated and understood. As mental health professionals know, Trump’s mental disorder manifests itself in a wide variety of behaviours and not in isolated or disconnected events. In these dangerous times, the challenge for the media, difficult though it is, should be to explain Trump’s pathology in all its complexities and ramifications for the public.

To illustrate this, consider three separate headlines from the past few days.

“The President’s taxes: Long-concealed records show Trump’s chronic losses and years of tax avoidance”, The New York Times, September 27, 2020.

Pathological narcissists have a “false self” that they try to maintain at all cost. Trump’s “false self” is that he is smarter and richer and stronger and better looking than anyone else. Anything that undermines or contradicts his “false self” is aggressively defended against. Donald Trump has actively refused to share his federal tax returns with the American people in order to defend this “false self”. He has not wanted to reveal his losses, his fraud, and, perhaps, even his underhanded connections to Russia. The projection of his “false self” is the ultimate lie of a narcissist. Trump’s thousands of lies all join up as a defence against the truth of his true persona as a business failure.

“Donald Trump ensures first presidential debate is national humiliation”, The Guardian, September 30, 2020.

Donald Trump’s narcissistic pathology did not allow him to engage in reasonable and rational debate with Joe Biden. He is incapable of rational, orderly, and thoughtful discourse, and is compelled and guided instead by his internal needs, wants, and desires. In addition, Trump is increasingly desperate because he knows his poll numbers are dropping. As a narcissist, his reflexive response when his grandiose self- image is threatened is to attack and to bully. Over the past few months, Trump’s pathological response to the threat of failure has been in plain view: wild accusations, lies, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, and gaslighting. His unpresidential debate performance was an extension of this pathological behaviour.