5 Moments Psychologists pinpoint That Turned Donald Into a Cruel Sociopath

May 17, 2026

5 Moments Psychologists pinpoint That Turned Donald Into a Cruel Sociopath

At a White House military Mother’s Day event on May 6, First Lady Melania Trump stated that while many know her husband, President Donald Trump, as a “strong commander-in-chief,” she believes he is a caring leader who “constantly remembers each and every American soldier is someone’s child.”

Well, I would add, the president at least remembers every American child whose father wasn’t rich and powerful enough to get a doctor’s note stating their kid was not fit to serve (on account of having bone spurs) — like Trump’s father did.

But does Donald remember also — “as someone’s child” — the comment, reported by The Atlantic, that during his presidency in 2020, he referred to dead American war veterans buried at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France as “losers” and “suckers”?

Does he remember the utter disrespect he showed a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, wearing his white baseball cap while an army team carried flag-draped caskets of six fallen soldiers who were killed in a drone strike at a command center in Kuwait after the U.S. and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran? The following Sunday, Trump wore the same cap while playing a round of golf at one of his golf resorts.

Melania continued by describing her husband as a “caring leader” whose “empathy transcends the role” of commander-in-chief. At this point, laughter and snickers were heard emanating from the crowd.

Definitely, Melania Trump earned her doctorate degree from the Donald J. Trump School of Hypocrisy and Lies in Public Speaking. Whether she was attempting to be ironic or if she actually believed her own words, nothing could have been farther from the truth.

Trump’s lack of empathy is a psychological disorder

As we understand in psychology, unless there is a developmental delay, infants demonstrate the rudimentary beginnings of empathy whenever they recognize that another is upset, and they show signs of being upset themselves. Very early in their lives, infants develop the capacity to crawl in the diapers of others even though their own diapers do not need changing.

Though empathy is a human condition, through the process of socialization, others often teach us to inhibit our empathetic natures with messages like “Don’t cry,” “You’re too sensitive,” “Mind your own business,” and “It’s not your concern.” We learn the stereotypes of the individuals and groups our society has “minoritized” and “othered.”

We learn who to scapegoat and target for the problems within our families, neighborhoods, states, nations, and world.

Through it all, that precious life-affirming flame of empathy can wither and flicker. For some, it dies entirely. And as the blaze recedes, the bullies, the demagogues, the tyrants take over filling the void where their compassion and humanness once prevailed.

And then they have lost something very precious, but something that is not irretrievable in many people. But for others, unfortunately, it is lost forever.

Five early childhood events destroyed Trump’s humanity and turned him into the damaged individual we see today.

This is the case of Donald John Trump. Though born with software responsible for empathy that is installed standard in most human operating systems, Donald Trump’s empathy software package was infected early in his life by a devastating family virus.

One does not have to have earned a Ph.D. in psychology to identify Donald Trump as someone suffering from personality disorders because he clearly manifests many if not all its symptoms.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines a personality disorder as “a way of thinking, feeling, and behaving that deviates from the expectations of the culture, causes distress or problems functioning, and lasts over time…. Without treatment, the behavior and experience are inflexible and usually long-lasting.” Such problems can be seen in at least two of these areas:

One’s way of thinking about oneself and others
One’s way of responding emotionally
One’s way of relating to other people
One’s way of controlling one’s behavior

APA enumerates 10 specific types of personality disorders organized under three categories or “clusters.” Most associated with Donald Trump are two disorders within Cluster B’s “dramatic, emotional, or erratic behavior” summarized as:

Antisocial (a.k.a. Sociopathic) Personality Disorder

Which the APA defines as evident when one “repeatedly discounts or infringes on the rights of others, and is unreliable. A person with antisocial personality disorder often violates social norms and rules, constantly and pathologically lies, manipulates, cheats, betrays others, acts rashly or impulsively, lacks remorse, shame, and guilt, needs constant emotional and physical stimulation, is often paranoid, and acts as an authoritarian.”

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

According to Greek legend, a young man was so fascinated, awestruck, and enraptured by his own image reflected on the surface of a pool that he sat lovingly gazing at the water’s edge for so long, until he succumbed to his own vanity and eventually transformed into a flower that carries his name, “Narcissus.”

Donald watched every day as his father destroyed Freddy while never defending his older brother. His father used Freddy as an example of what happens to a “weak” person.

The American Psychiatric Association, in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual II (DSM) lists “Narcissism” as an emotional problem and “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD) with a number of characteristics. These include:

An obvious self-focus in interpersonal exchanges
Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
A lack of psychological awareness
Difficulty with empathy
Problems distinguishing the self from others (having bad interpersonal boundaries)
Hypersensitivity to any insults or imagined insults
Vulnerability to shame rather than guilt
Haughty body language
Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them
Detesting those who do not admire them
Using other people without considering the costs of doing so
Pretending to be more important than they actually are
Bragging and exaggerating their achievements
Claiming to be an “expert” at many things
Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people
Denial of remorse and gratitude

Professional clinical psychiatrists and psychologists have diagnosed Donald Trump with mental conditions in the 2017 book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

In addition, his niece and trained psychologist, Mary Trump, in her 2020 book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, wrote a tell-all memoir showing her uncle, Donald, as mentally damaged with clear signs of narcissistic and sociopathic personality disorders.

But how did Donald Trump lose his sense of empathy and humanity? What happened to Donald early in his life to psychologically damage him that turned him to respond so cruelly? Lucas Bean, in his Facebook video, after reading Mary Trump’s insightful and fully documented book, enumerates five early childhood events that destroyed his humanity and turned him into the damaged individual we see today.

Bean shows the genesis of why and how Donald Trump has taken the cruelty, chaos, and destruction exhibited in his childhood home and replicated it onto the country of his birth and extended it to the entire planet on which we all inhabit.

1. Trump was abandoned by his mother due to a severe illness when Donald was only two years old.

She was hospitalized for approximately six months undergoing a series of emergency operations in which she nearly died.

Bean refers to psychologist John Bowlby of Tavistock Institute in London who coined the term “maternal deprivation”: When the primary caregiver disappears, there is a failure of the “attachment bond.” When this occurs before or around the second year of life — at the time when the developing brain is learning whether other people can be trusted and whether other people’s pain matters — “affectionless psychopathy” often develops: the permanent inability to feel remorse, empathy, and the inability to form emotional bonds with other human beings.

Mary Trump described her grandmother, Donald’s mother, as “ghostly absent.” Mary never saw Donald show any form of empathy when he witnessed anyone’s suffering.

2. Donald’s father, Fred, destroyed his older brother, Freddy.

Freddy, the Trump’s first born, was very kind, sensitive, and empathetic. He was a child who loved people. His dream was to become an airline pilot.

His father, however, attempted to destroy the sensitivity from his eldest son. He accused him nearly every day of being “weak” while perennially mocking and scolding him at the dinner table in front of the entire family, for his father wanted a killer rather than a feeling and sensitive boy.

Donald’s father perverted his son’s perceptions of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.

This paternal scorn resulted in a son who learned to hate himself by wanting to be accepted by a father who would never give it. And Freddy took to the bottle and developed severe alcoholism which resulted in the loss of his pilot’s license.

He ended up serving as a maintenance worker in the family business. He died at the young age of 42 a broken man.

Donald watched every day how his father destroyed Freddy while never defending his older brother. His father used Freddy as an example of what happens to a “weak” person.

Mary said of her father, Freddy, that he was not weak, but rather, the only person in the entire Trump family who made her feel loved. Mary wrote about how her uncle, Fred, destroyed her father’s kindness as the most loving person in the family.

3. Donald chose to become his father.

Not only did Donald observe and not intervene in his father’s destruction of his older brother, but he actively participated in the cruelty alongside his father, sneering about Freddy’s sensitivity and weakness.

Bean referenced Anna Freud, one of the most important psychologists of 20th century, who identified this kind of behavior in 1936, “identification with the aggressor”: when a child cannot escape an abuser or defeat them, the brain chooses the third option of becoming the abuser themselves.

They adopt the cruelty they have witnessed and perform similar humiliation on the target. This action makes themselves indistinguishable from the thing that terrifies them so they do not become the target of abuse.

Anna Freud has discovered that his transformation into the abuser is not completely a conscious choice. And if one becomes the aggressor, other people often will not use the aggressor’s tactics against you.

Trump not only will never change but, more importantly, can never change since he was damaged psychologically too early and too completely.

The transformed abuser, however, pays a steep price for this sought-after sense of safety and security. Mary Trump wrote about how Donald’s father “short circuited” Donald’s ability to experience the entire spectrum of human emotions by limiting his access to his own feelings.

She wrote about how Donald’s father perverted his son’s perceptions of the world and damaged his ability to live in it. His father used Freddy’s destruction to cut Donald away from his own humanity thereby taking it from him. This turned Donald into the monster that his father was.

Mary never witnessed Donald feel or show empathy for another human being since he was a small child sitting at the dinner table as he was learning to laugh as his brother was being destroyed in front of him.

4. Donald Trump’s malignant narcissism makes him a dangerous infant

Bean discusses that in 1964, psychologist and philosopher Erick Fromm, identified the most severe personality pathology in clinical history. It combined four traits forming what Fromm called the purest form of evil a human being can become. These traits were narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality, and sadism.

This was not ordinary cruelty but cruelty that feeds on itself, needs to escalate, and is never satisfied. Bean discussed several incidents when Donald Trump exhibited this severe personality pathology: when he mocked a Gold Start family on national television; when he said that a female journalist was bleeding from a face lift.

Bean accuses Trump of gloating over other people’s pain as a form of entertainment.

Chaos is the only thing that feels like home to Donald.

Bean discussed John Gardner, a psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins University medical school for 28 years, who applied Erick Fromm’s concept of malignant narcissism to Trump specifically. Gardner called it the most destructive collection of psychiatric symptoms possible in a leader.

Gardner asserted that Trump not only will never change but, more importantly, can never change since he was damaged psychologically too early and too completely, and that he will exist until his death as a three-year-old, while being incapable of growing or learning, unable to regulate his emotions, or take in new information.

5. Donald Trump needs chaos

Consider the daily explosions, constant firings, threats, reversals that make no sense, and a leadership style that bounces from crisis to crisis. While seeming as incompetence, Donald Trump needs the chaos he creates because it feels familiar to him. Contrary to reason, Donald feels safe and secure in the midst of chaos.

Bean stated that Sigmund Freud called this “repetition compulsion”: the unconscious drive to recreate the conditions of one’s original trauma in childhood because it is familiar. The pain experienced in childhood feels safer than an unfamiliar calm.

Psychologist Besel Vanderkoek, at Boston University, stated Bean, studied how childhood trauma rewires the brain. He discovered that people who grew up in chaotic households do not simply tolerate chaos as adults, but they actually recreate it because calm feels like the moment just before something bad happens. In that sense, chaos feels like home.

As Trump accumulated power over the course of his life, he continually recreated the chaos evident within his childhood home environment. Chaos is the only thing that feels like home to Donald.

As president of the United States, he has plunged the United States and the remainder of the world into a constant state of chaos in his rhetoric, policy initiatives, choice of cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and other governmental positions, and by his foreign relations policies, including warfare and other bombings throughout the world.

During his time in office, he showed no perceptible empathy toward images of drowned children and babies washing up upon Mediterranean shores, after their rickety boats tossed them and their families into the cold sea, as they attempted to flee their war-torn countries.

Plus, his mocking of a reporter with a disability; his permission to allow Elon Musk and DOGE to deny aid to the poorest people in the world (denying them food and life-saving drugs); his refusal to reauthorize Medicaid subsidies to help people purchase quality healthcare insurance, thus forcing them to terminate their policies.

Why didn’t the names and images of the then over one-quarter million deaths and over 13 million others infected with the COVID-19 virus move him out of his denial and deflective mode to mount a systematic and constructive national education mobilization effort during his first term?

Why haven’t the pictures of the thousands of diseased and impoverished faces of people forced to live in refugee camps moved this president to act with empathy rather than with apparent contempt?

How could anyone with the least modicum of empathy forcibly separate young children from the arms of their desperate parents and lock them away in wire cages with some remaining separated?

Why didn’t the videos of the brutal and needless murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hands of his ICE goon squads move him to at least publicly call for an investigation into these events, but, instead, instigate him to refer to them as “domestic terrorists”?

As we commemorated the 63rd anniversary of the tragic assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35th president, we remember that during his inaugural address on January 20, 1961, he challenged us all to contribute to the good of our nation in his now-famous words: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

Each day of our 45th and 47th President’s tenure, Donald John Trump has reversed and distorted Kennedy’s challenge by figuratively demanding: “Ask not what I can do for my country – ask what my country can do for me.”

Several times each day, political historians and pundits label Trump’s statements and actions during his runs for the U.S. presidency and throughout his residency in the White House in such terms as “unprecedented,” “abnormal,” and “surprising,” and describe him as “breaking norms,” “going against transitions” and “standard practices,” “violating rules,” “being a grifter,” “a disrupter,” and “a street fighter.”

Though Trump’s conduct is certainly unprecedented and surprising in the annals of presidential history, when examined under the psychological lenses of personality disorders, it comes into clear focus and as just another day at the office.

Mary Trump’s analysis of her uncle Donald assists us in answering the question, “How did Donald become so cruel?” Her answers include five categories: the disappearance of his mother at an early age, his father’s destruction of his older brother, his choice to become his father, his malignant narcissism, and his need for chaos.

But as the old proverb reminds us, “The higher they fly, the harder they fall.”

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5 Moments Psychologists pinpoint That Turned Donald Into a Cruel Sociopath

Trump’s lack of empathy is a psychological disorder