We've normalized Trump's messiah complex — and what it means for America

President Donald Trump’s conflation of himself with Jesus Christ is consistent with mental disorders involving delusions of grandeur — so why do we continue acting like this is normal?

In a recent article for the New Statesman, journalist Lee Siegel argued this can be traced to the normalization of mental illness, with deinstitutionalization of people who supposedly just “problems in living” causing mass homelessness and violence.

“That led to figures like Rudy Giuliani and, to a lesser extent, Michael Bloomberg, and to law and order as a prominent and permanent plank of the political right,” Siegel wrote, then telling the stories of three men from Ypsilanti, Michigan who were institutionalized in 1964 because they each believed themselves to literally be Jesus Christ (and denied the others’ divinity).

“The three Christs of Ypsilanti – Clyde Benson, Joseph Cassel and Leon Gaborwere; real patients in – were hurt into their sickness,” Siegel explained. “One suffered terrible personal tragedies, the other an emotionally and physically abusive father, the third a mother who was herself psychotic.” By contrast, “Trump’s psychic injuries are in line with what has become the popular modern definition of trauma: the daily setbacks and defeats that send certain narcissistic personalities careening into defensive, unapologetic, vindictive idealised selves, invulnerable to setback and defeat.”

Indeed, former Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee told this journalist for Salon shortly before the 2020 presidential election that Trump would never accept the results because of his narcissistic personality.

“Just as one once settled for adulation in lieu of love, one may settle for fear when adulation no longer seems attainable,” Dr. Lee told Salon. “Rage attacks are common, for people are bound to fall short of expectation for such a needy personality—and eventually everyone falls into this category. But when there is an all-encompassing loss, such as the loss of an election, it can trigger a rampage of destruction and reign of terror in revenge against an entire nation that has failed him.”

She concluded, “It is far easier for the pathological narcissist to consider destroying oneself and the world, especially its ‘laughing eyes,’ than to retreat into becoming a ‘loser’ and a ‘sucker’ — which to someone suffering from this condition will feel like psychic death.”

In a similar vein, Siegel argued that “Trump’s situation in America is just as absurd. It is almost comical. He is acting like a god who needs only to lift his finger to make his impulses real. But the thing about gods – cruel, jealous gods – is that they say what they mean and they do what they say. For Trump to dominate America with the total control that he fantasises he has, he would need to seize the entire media, stigmatise vast segments of the population, socially ostracise and disenfranchise dissenters, imprison, torture, and murder people. For him to succeed in Iran, he would have to level the country from the air and recreate society from the ground up, as MacArthur did in Japan at the end of the Second World War.”

While some interpret Trump’s comparison of himself to Jesus through a psychological lens, others do so by turning to theology. Conservative author Rod Dreher wrote Trump is "radiating the spirit of Antichrist," while Calvin University professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez observed Trump’s use of the image "caused some real division within his religious base.”