President Trump is showing symptoms of an addiction to power, evident in his compulsion to escalate claims of dominion over domestic and international adversaries. The size and scope of Trump’s targets for subjugation are spiraling ever upward.
Trump began his second term with his administration clamping down on law firms and universities. More recently he has focused his sights on an entire country, Venezuela, with Cuba, Colombia and Greenland also high on his current list — not to mention his claim to the Western Hemisphere in the 2025 National Security Strategy: “After years of neglect, the United States will reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere, and to protect our homeland and our access to key geographies throughout the region.”
“This ‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” the report added, “is a common-sense and potent restoration of American power and priorities, consistent with American security interests.”
I asked Manfred Kets de Vries, a professor of leadership development and organizational change at Insead, an international business school, about Trump’s relationship with power.
He replied by email:
It is possible to become addicted to power — particularly for certain character structures. Individuals with pronounced narcissistic, paranoid or psychopathic tendencies are especially vulnerable. For them, power does not merely enable action; it regulates inner states that would otherwise feel unmanageable.
Donald Trump is an extreme illustration of this dynamic. From a psychoanalytic perspective, his narcissism is malignant in the sense that it is organized around a profound inner emptiness.
Malignant narcissism is a combination of narcissism and psychopathology. Because there is little internal capacity for self-soothing or self-valuation, he requires continuous external affirmation to feel real and intact. Power supplies that affirmation. Visibility, dominance and constant stimulation temporarily fill the void.
What makes this tragic and dangerous, Kets de Vries continued, “is that this dynamic is not playing out in the margins of political life, but at its center. He is not the dictator of a small, contained state; he is occupying the most powerful position in the world, with consequences for all of us.”
It’s not just Trump; the compulsion to simultaneously project power and demean adversaries pervades the administration.
Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy and a homeland security adviser, thrives on assertions of domination.
“We live in a world,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Jan. 5, “in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
Or take Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Even before Trump took office, Vought fantasized in speeches about putting career civil servants “in trauma,” making their lives so miserable that “when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
The advisers do their best, of course, but no one outdoes Trump. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he told crowds gathered on the ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021.
In fact, Trump routinely outdoes himself.
In July 2019, Trump claimed to “have the right to do whatever I want as president.” In March last year, Trump declared that not only does he have the right to do whatever he wants, but “I run the country and the world.”
In a series of interviews, Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, captured Trump’s addictive character, telling Vanity Fair that the president has “an alcoholic’s personality.”
The exercise of authority over others is, for some, an exhilarating experience.
“Power, especially absolute and unchecked power, is intoxicating,” wrote Nayef Al-Rodhan, an honorary fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and director of the geopolitics and global futures department at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, in a 2014 essay, “The Neurochemistry of Power: Implications for Political Change.”
“Its effects occur at the cellular and neurochemical level,” Al-Rodhan continued.
They are manifested behaviorally in a variety of ways, ranging from heightened cognitive functions to lack of inhibition, poor judgment, extreme narcissism, perverted behavior and gruesome cruelty.
The primary neurochemical involved in the reward of power that is known today is dopamine, the same chemical transmitter responsible for producing a sense of pleasure. Power activates the very same reward circuitry in the brain and creates an addictive “high” in much the same way as drug addiction.
Like addicts, most people in positions of power will seek to maintain the high they get from power, sometimes at all costs.
I asked Ian Robertson, an emeritus professor of psychology at Trinity College in Dublin and the author of “How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief,” a series of questions in this vein. He answered by email.
How is it possible to become addicted to power?
“Power is a very strong stimulant of the dopamine reward system of the brain which is the seat of addiction.”
Does the addiction result in a need to keep exercising power in an increasingly domineering fashion?
“Yes, a central component of addiction is increased tolerance — i.e., you need to increase the dose to keep the same effect. It can become an unquenchable appetite.”
What are the personality characteristics that are associated with addiction to power? What needs are met for those addicted to power?
“People (men more than women) with a high need for control and dominance over other people (and a corresponding fear of loss of control). The need for control is one of three basic motivational needs — the others being affiliation and achievement. Having power over other people satisfies this deep need.”
In a Feb. 12 Irish Times article, “A Neuropsychologist’s View on Donald Trump: We’re Seeing the Impact of Power on the Human Brain,” Robertson described the frenzied opening days of the second Trump administration:
Deports manacled immigrants, closes AIDS-prevention programs, starts and stops and restarts a tariffs war, vows to cleanse Gaza of its troublesome inhabitants and demands that all Israeli hostages be released by Hamas by midday on Saturday or he would “let hell break out.”
This activity, Robertson continued,
fuels an aggressive, feel-good state of mind, particularly in dominant, amoral personalities such as Trump’s. It also creates a restless, hyperactive state of mind which, when combined with a feeling of omnipotence, fosters the delusions that you can snap your fingers and sort every problem.
At the same time, when Trump’s grandiose plans are frustrated, it poses high risks: “When that doesn’t happen — when Gaza or Greenland can’t be bought, or U.S. birthright abolished — this ramps up a hyperactive rage at being thwarted and escalates a flurry of even more frenetic and unmeasured responses.”
Virtually all politicians have a strong attraction to power. What distinguishes Trump? When does the appeal of power lead to its abuse?
In response to my inquiries, Adam Galinsky, a professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, emailed to say that he has developed a concept he calls “the little tyrant, someone who has power but lacks status, i.e., someone who controls resources but feels disrespected. It leads people to mistreat others in a domineering fashion.”
Addiction to power, Galinsky continued, “is partially the result of trying to fill the hole of insecurity left by feeling one is not respected by others. I believe this fits Donald Trump. He has always felt disrespected, and in many ways his entire persona resonates with his base as they feel their hold on society slipping away.”
Trump, Galinsky argued,
represents what researchers call the Dark Triad of three interconnected, malevolent personality traits: narcissism (grandiosity, self-centeredness), Machiavellianism (manipulation, cynicism) and psychopathy (impulsivity, lack of empathy/remorse).
Trump wants to be seen as the greatest president of all time and makes everything about himself (narcissism), he views the world as only functioning through manipulation and exertion of power (Machiavellianism) and he is impulsive and shows no empathy (psychopathy).
One of the most exhaustive analyses of the adverse consequences of an addiction to power is a 2023 article, “On Power and Its Corrupting Effects: The Effects of Power on Human Behavior and the Limits of Accountability Systems” in the journal Communicative & Integrative Biology, by Tobore Onojighofia Tobore, an independent scholar and medical researcher.
In the paper, Tobore explores the extensive scientific literature on the study of power to show that when power is wielded by abusive politicians or chief executives, the harm can have pervasive consequences.
In an email responding to a series of question I posed, Tobore wrote:
Trump shows characteristics of a grandiose narcissist lacking in empathy. In the current divided political environment, where checks and balances have become significantly eroded, and critical stakeholders, possibly out of fear of bullying, are unable to push back on his behavior, we may be in for more bad behavior from Trump.
Trump’s success in Iran and Venezuela, in Tobore’s view, “is likely to make him emboldened and more risk-prone. There is the possibility of more foreign escapades and increasing talk of a third term.”
I asked Tobore what personality characteristics are associated with addiction to power. He replied with a quotation from his article:
The grandiose narcissist is assertive and extroverted and distinguished by their sense of entitlement, overconfidence, high self-esteem, feelings of personal superiority, self-serving exploitative behavior, impulsivity, a need for admiration and dominance, and aggressive and hostile behavior when threatened or challenged.
Grandiose narcissists are more likely to seek and achieve positions of power in organizations, but they are more likely to abuse their power, pursue their interests at the expense of the organization, disregard expert advice causing them to make poor decisions.
In his paper, Tobore also cited evidence that among those inclined to abuse power, the exercise of power has similar, if not identical, biological effects to those experienced by addicts:
Power abuse disorder has been coined as a neuropsychiatry condition connected to the addictive behavior of the power wielder. Arguments have been made on the relationship between power addiction and dopaminergic alterations.
Indeed, changes in the dopaminergic system have been implicated in drug addiction, and research on animals suggests that dominance status modulates activity in dopaminergic neural pathways linked with motivation.
Evidence suggests that areas of the brain linked with addiction including the amygdala and dopaminergic neurons play a major role in responding to social rank, and hierarchy signals. Multiple lines of evidence from animal studies indicate that dopamine D2/D3 receptor density and availability is higher in the basal ganglia, including the nucleus accumbens, of animals with great social dominance compared to their subordinates. Animal studies suggest that following forced loss of social rank, there is a craving for the privileges of status, leading to depressive-like symptoms which are reversed when social status is reinstated.
If that’s true, then the linkage between dominant power status and the loss of status to variations in hormone levels helps explain both Trump’s obsessive refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat and his continuing efforts to criminally charge those who have challenged him.
The appeal of power is itself a healthy and natural phenomenon, according to many of those I contacted. The problem arises when those who acquire power do so to fulfill their narcissistic need to subjugate others and are biologically rewarded when they do so.
Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, made the case in an email that “because in our evolutionary history, enjoying elevated power has benefited individuals in terms of reproductive success, the health of their children and kin, and their own individual flourishing.”
But, Keltner wrote, “given individual differences, there will be a small subset of people who compulsively seek out power in every social context, and through whatever means necessary, to satisfy the need for power — to influence (and often control) others.”
While voicing caution over the use of the word “addicted,” Keltner contended that
the study of addictions like alcohol or porn offers criteria for calling someone addicted to power. I’d state those criteria as:
When someone is compulsively exercising their power, often in inappropriate contexts; when they can’t stop trying to control and rise in power; when it brings about disruptions in social life.
Who is quite likely to go overboard in the pursuit of power?
Keltner:
We know that people who are prone to addictions, like the addiction to power, are impulsive, they have trouble staying on task, they want intense sensational, gratifying experiences, and they’re prone to antisocial tendencies — fighting with others.
We know those same tendencies predict who will exercise power in a domineering and coercive fashion. So what this tells us is that certain individuals — the impulsive, the angry, the individual who has trouble focusing and staying on task — will gravitate toward exercising power in domineering, as opposed to collaborative, ways.
Addiction to power in the right hands, Keltner contended, can be beneficial:
If you have a strong need, even addiction, for exercising power and are inclined to the more collaborative approach, you will engage in more of that kind of behavior in your exercise of power — of bringing individuals together, building collaborations and alliances, encouraging and strengthening subordinates, etc., and if you are more domineering or coercive by default, that need or addiction to power will amplify those tendencies — undermining others, dehumanizing others, aggression, violence, and extraction, weakening allies, hording resources.
Over the past week, it felt like Trump was even more intensely compelled to publicly announce his determination to dominate everything in sight, and anyone who wants to block him better watch out.
Perhaps most spectacularly, during a Jan. 7 interview with four Times reporters, Trump was asked if there were any limits on his global powers.
He replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,” he added.
Trump may think his own morality and his own mind are the only constraints on his otherwise limitless power, but if we are dependent on either — not to mention Trump’s sense of empathy, compassion or sympathy for the underdog — we are in deep trouble. The nation, the Western Hemisphere and the world at large need to figure out how to place restraints on this ethically vacuous president or we will all suffer continued — and ever-worsening — damage.
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