Many mental-health professionals have voiced the opinion that Donald Trump exhibits symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). A Change.org petition posted on January 26, 2017 by Baltimore psychologist John Gartner urging Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office received 60,000 signatures by October 2017. Gartner told the Baltimore Sun that he believed Trump was a “malignant narcissist.” In a 2015 Vanity Fair article several mental-health professionals had agreed that Trump appeared to present symptoms of NPD, but Harvard’s Howard Gardner identified what for him was a more serious problem. “For me,” he told Vanity Fair, “the compelling question is the psychological state of his supporters.”

Otto Kernberg, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City wrote an article for Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 2020 titled “Malignant Narcissism and Large Group Regression.” (Kernberg 2020)

The term malignant narcissism was first used by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in 1964, calling it a “severe mental sickness” that was the “quintessence of evil.” Malignant narcissism is now regarded as a combination of traits that can appear in narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy.