The Psychopathology of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is not a politician, nor about policy, but a psychology. He’s the ultimate psychopathology acting out on the world stage, and part of why he’s the Biblical Antichrist.

When it comes to Donald Trump, we are not dealing with a political phenomenon, but a spiritual/psychological one. Since his pathology is so extreme and unique in American history, it’s understandable that the usual paradigms for analyzing the “phenomenon that is him” simply aren’t working. The key to understanding who and what he is, is found in the very core of his being, not in any sense of rational public policy.

Everything about Donald Trump is about Donald Trump. This man is the perfect embodiment of an age of narcissistic self-love, largely begun with the “Reagan Revolution,” and our transition from a “we” society to a “me” one. Donald Trump is emblematic of a culture that has lost any semblance of a spiritual, moral and social sense of reality. Ayn Rand’s work, The Virtue of Selfishness, one of Trump’s main philosophical influences, shared by so many “leading lights” in his now-perverted Republican Party, is one of the greatest philosophical absurdities of the modern world.

Pretending that this man gives a rip about professed things like “ending wars,” a “golden age of prosperity,” “wealth on a scale that’s never been seen before,” “waste, fraud and abuse,” or any such political concept, only misreads what Donald Trump is at the core of his soul, if he even has one left. Donald Trump represents the weaponization of self at war with society, society being a construct of social organization built upon human government as ordained by God Almighty in Romans 13.

The Horrible Human Being

There is something of a long-standing debate in Democratic circles as to whether Trump is the logical outcome of decades of Republican lies, delusional economic theories and perverse policies, or just a stand-alone unique phenomenon? I would agree that to some degree the first is true, but I would give far greater weight to the second. I have never seen anyone on the world political scene in our time, and maybe only rare times in human history, embody so much dishonesty in one inner man.

Donald Trump is such an aggressive, grasping, power mad soul that normal people often don’t get “where this man is coming from,” or “what makes him tick.” Jeffrey Epstein in taped interviews with Michael Wolff said of Trump, whom he termed his “closest friend for ten years”:

“He’s a horrible human being. He does nasty things to his best friends… [He told me] ‘the only thing I really like to do is f— the wives of my best friends;’ that Trump ‘basically lives a friendless life,’ that he was ‘functionally illiterate’ [except for the gossip column of the New York Post]; that he was ‘incapable of reading a balance sheet’; that ‘any act of kindness’ would have been an accident, that ‘The moral compass just does not exist.’”

And these damning things from a man many consider to be one of the worst sexual predators of all time! How awful do you have to be to have Jeffrey Epstein say you’ve got “no moral compass”!?

Professional Adversaries

Back in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was getting blowjobs in the White House, my people the Evangelicals, hypocritical as ever, loudly declaimed how much we needed “men and women of character and integrity” in political office. What they meant of course, was people with an “R” after their name, since they had already been brainwashed by that fundamentalist Catholic with his head in the Middle Ages, Paul Weyrich. Men of character was a legitimate-enough sentiment, one strongly endorsed by the Founding Fathers for that matter, since they considered political parties to be dangerous and divisive. They understood that a public official was only as good as the convictions and judgement he brought to the job, rather than party hacks who lick the boots of their tribal chief.

But isn’t that just the problem? Evangelicals had been convinced that only pseudo-conservative, pseudo-patriotic partisans for one party doing the bidding of greedy oligarchs is sufficiently “Christian” enough for “American Renewal.” Like good little Germans, no matter what the scandal, no matter what the hypocrisy, they were ready to circle the wagons for an endless parade of Republican criminals.

The Nature of Character

One of the great lessons of the Bible, let alone history, is that what people choose to be is what they are or become. As Martin Luther King Jr so biblically put it, people should not be judged by the amount of melanin in their skin or any other natural attribute beyond their control, but they must be judged by the content of the character.

But isn’t that the rub? “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” as the old saying goes. Maybe it all depends upon your values, tactics, and goals, and it’s something that’s been controversial since the beginning of time. Lucky for us, the Bible is chock-a-block full of examples, stories and discussions about exactly what God’s ways and standards are.

Character is a confluence of many factors that ultimately leads to what you are. As such, we are looking at a combination of aspects that can lead to a lot of disagreement and vigorous debate. Myself, what people choose to be far out-weighs what they are naturally born with.

One of my mentors in theology explained character as what you can consistently expect people to do or be motivated by in any given situation. He also described it as a process. Thoughts become actions, actions become habits, habits become character, character becomes our nature, and nature becomes our destiny (Eph 2:3).

You’ll notice he didn’t start with being born with a “sin nature.” This false concept, promoted by St. Augustine, suggested Adam and Eve didn’t just confer upon the human race a death sentence, but an inherited nature as well. If this were true, all human beings would struggle with all the same temptations and have the same faults.

Truth be told, we are all born babies, not sinners. Due to many factors, we develop sin natures that vary wildly from one another, and that due to cultural influences, family upbringing, personal choices and the like. Both the Bible and commonsense observations of life confirm this.

Teach Your Children Well

So, what are we born with? We can assume that we are born with a certain natural temperment or personality, a kind of God-ordained spectrum that is found in every ethnicity and culture in the world. But what happens to us even before these traits begin to emerge? Since we are born babies, we are totally dependent on adults for everything. In fact, so many people wait on our every need that it’s easy for us to start thinking we’re the center of the universe, perhaps explaining the phenomenon of the “Terrible Twos” (two year-olds).

It’s at this point that parents have to start breaking us of this delusion, with varying results. Some children become very cooperative, others like Donald Trump learn quickly how to manipulate adults to get their way, and how to be stubborn and abusive. His sister Mary who went on to be a federal judge said, “Donald was a brat at five.”

I think by this point in human history we’ve learned that every child must be accepted for the unique personality they are and loved and accepted, first and foremost. But since they have no experience and judgment, they also need discipline and correction, thus the Biblical admonition to not spare the rod if need be. Children that get beaten by their parents, especially their fathers, who get continually told they’re no good, etc., get the priority reversed, and often end up rebelling or getting scarred, sometimes for life.

At the same time, the child is being subjected to cultural or family standards, and since cultures and families can vary greatly in morality, this can have a good or bad effect upon him. Generally speaking, the more violent a society is, the more danger it’s in of being destroyed by God. It’s not surprising that God told king Saul to utterly destroy the Amalekites, right down to the “ox and sheep, camel and ass” (I Sam 15:23).¹

As children grow older though, the bent of their character is influenced more by their own personal choices as to who or what to admire, who they hang out with (I Cor 15:33 NASB), and who to listen to (Prov 15:2; Isa 59:3; Mt 15:14). This is where the world of personal philosophies come into play, and everybody has them.

His Natural Personality

Obviously, anyone as complicated as this man is going to defy a comprehensive description of his natural personality, but I’ll try. Aggressive and a bully seems to have been there from the start, as well as someone who learned how to manipulate adults at an early age. He may well be a classic case of what Evangelical icon James Dobson was referring to in his book, The Strong-Willed Child.

There is a theory long-circulating around Christian circles that Romans 12 describes seven personality types that explain why we all are so different from one another and have different gifts. Donald’s seems to me to fit the title of “ruler” or administrator in verse 8. These are supposedly people who are gifted in overseeing big projects, and who have an ability to recognize the gifts in other people and knowing where to assign them. We can easily see this in his life as a real estate developer and on The Apprentice.

The problem with Donald though, is that his love for mafia philosophy prevents him from stocking those roles with qualified people because he’s so obsessed with loyalty to the boss first and foremost. This naturally “bossy” personality coupled with a certain prissy, fussy, critical streak may explain a lot of why he acts the way he does.

The Trumpian Trajectory

Donald Trump’s rise to power has so alarmed professional psychiatric experts that it has rekindled a debate about whether Presidential candidates ought to be required to take some kind of a minimal mental health test first (which I’m sure Trump will “ace”). Such proposals of course elicit howls of protest from right-wing America of “pointy-headed liberal elites” trying to “control our culture” via “cultural Marxism.” But professionals have been trying to sound this alarm for a long time.

From a professional review of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Analyze A President (2017):

“A forensic psychiatrist, who has studied the principles on which the assessment of current and future dangerousness in violent criminals is based, concludes:

‘Trump is now the most powerful head of state in the world, and one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving. He has his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power.’

The authors also consider the ‘Trump effect’ on society, and the malignant normality that is established — what was previously considered unthinkable becomes the norm.”²

One thing they all seem to agree upon is that Trump is a classic example of “narcissistic personality disorder,” a standardized pathology listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a life-long pattern of exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people’s feelings. It is often comorbid with other mental disorders and associated with significant functional impairment and psychosocial disability.³

“Comorbid” is putting it mildly. There are so many other vile traits and processes swirling around in the mind of this man, which we shall list at the end. But narcissistic personality disorder is a pathology almost all professionals agree is his foundation. And please note, we are not talking about a mere psychological type, but a pathology.

The Tree This Acorn Fell From

As aggressive, restless and overbearing as Donald’s natural personality may be, we should not underestimate the powerful effect his father Fred Sr. had upon him. After Donald’s older brother Fred Jr died, Donald swindled his surviving family out of their inheritance. One of those people was Mary L. Trump,⁴ daughter of Fred Jr. and Donald’s niece, who has unsurprisingly gone on to be a psychologist herself, and a well-known public critic. She has described her grandfather Fred Sr. as a “high-functioning sociopath” who preyed upon others.

Fred Sr., who was a member of the KKK as a young man, was the only parent available to raise Donald at the critical age of 2 ½. His mother, Mary Anne MacLeod ran into complications giving birth to his youngest brother and was largely out of the picture during his childhood. This left his overbearing, cynical and corrupt father to raise him.

Fred Sr. would often tell his boys they were “killers and kings,” neither of which is an American ideal. His overall effect upon Donald’s older brother Fred Jr was devastating, who did not have the temperament or personality to be either. When he told his father that he “only” wanted to be an airline pilot and not a business tycoon, his father rejected him as weak and a loser. He died of alcoholism, perhaps why Donald does not drink to this day.

Donald seemed both repulsed by what his father did to his brother and yet fascinated, because he was of the same kind of bent. This set up perhaps a lifelong love/hate relationship he had with his father, a desire to both emulate him yet resent him and out-do him. At the very least, it’s safe to assume that it began a lifelong hatred of any authority figures or anyone who simply said “no” to him about anything.

There is no doubt that Donald also grew up as a “Richey Rich” kid, with an attitude of entitlement and greed which the Bible equates with idolatry (Col 3:5). It is reflected quite obviously in the way he decorated his Trump Tower living quarters like Louis XIV’s Versailles. After his gold-festooned redo of the White House this year, one wag put it, “Versailles as reimagined by Tony Soprano.” He even named his youngest son “Barron,” a play on baron.

As he got older and became acquainted with his father’s corrupt associates, especially Abraham “Bunny” Lindenbaum and the entirety of the New York City government and general atmosphere,⁵ his cynicism and contempt for “the system” only grew. His forced dealings with the Italian mob which controlled the NYC construction industry at the time also reinforced all of this.

The Deadly Role of Philosophy

After his early dealings with his father, Donald began entering into the phase we all go through, deliberate philosophical choices to guide our moral compass the rest of our lives. And for him, it started very early, before he was even a teen. First off, his parents were members of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, pastored by Norman Vincent Peale, the famous/infamous⁶ author of a runaway best seller at the time, The Power of Positive Thinking. Like Kenneth Hagin who popularized the Word of Faith “gospel”⁷ later on,

“Peale was influenced by New Thought writers such as Ernest Holmes (Science of Mind), Charles Fillmore and Napoleon Hill. They all believed the mind can influence reality directly.”

For Donald, this was just what he wanted to hear.⁸ In fact, “The idea that winning was everything was brought home in those Sunday services.” And, in typical juvenile narcissistic fashion,

Trump took Peale’s teachings as a kind of scripture and suggested he won the approval of his mentor. ‘He thought I was his greatest student of all time,’ Trump, no practitioner of false modesty, reported.” ⁹

Mind Science vs The Gospel

I hate to make this article so long, but I don’t think we should skip over this influence too quickly. “Mind science” may seem to resemble the Biblical message, but it is its complete opposite. The Gospel is a relationship or “walk” with God through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. God leads and we are to follow, faithful to the end of our lives. It is likened to a marriage which is for better or worse, richer or poorer. Its goal is to make us less and less selfish toward others (Rom 13:8,9; Gal 5:14), and more and more given to God’s will over time (Mt 22:37). Faith or trust in God is the key to both justification and a life of sanctification.

But this is way too passive for mind science philosophies. In Word of Faith doctrine, faith is a “force” activated by our words with a mindset of no doubts. When applied to the world around us, this force legally (and ridiculously) binds God to then grant us the things we want.

Peale’s philosophy was similar, but with an emphasis on how the mind can create our own reality. In legitimate “positive thinking” circles, this is fine if taken in a figurative sense. If you take it literally though, you end up in a fantasy world of your own making.

“Part of this belief system is your firm belief in your heart of hearts that the reality you desire will happen, and if facts get in the way, ignore them. There can be no doubt, and we see that exhibited by Trump in his denial of his election loss.” ¹⁰

But if everyone is creating their own little realities, they all must be competing with one another. Whose will “win”?

“So, how does this work? How can this work when one visualized future conflicts with another’s? If there is no other measure than the strength of a person’s will to determine the outcome, it means only those with the strongest will win.
It’s a kind of “survival of the fittest” mentality, or might makes right. Is there any morality or any sense of right and wrong in this endeavor? It appears to be a battle of egos and the strongest or mightiest wins. If ego was the determining factor, there’s no doubt that Trump would triumph for no one has a bigger one.” ¹¹

There was a time when any person with an ounce of humility and honesty would admit that there is an objective reality we all live in and have to deal with. This is what Jesus meant when He said you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (Jn 8:32). He was affirming the existence of objective, fact-based truth based upon objective reality. Anyone who denied that was considered to be clinically insane, and often ended up in an institution.

Yet because Donald Trump, like a functional drunk, is a functional madman, people don’t understand “where he’s coming from” philosophically. This is why he’s called “The Donald,” the impossible person whose “reality” always has to prevail. And thus, they take all his lies, his made-up statistics, his gas-lighting, his psy-oping, his game-playing everyone seriously. Yet they are dealing with a clinical madman, a fantasist, whose psychosis eventually infects all of society, or at least millions of Americans as we are seeing now. It is also what the prophecy means about the Antichrist will “wear out the saints” (Dan 7:25).

Plus At Least Three More

The second philosophy, and perhaps even more deadly, was the personal mentorship of Roy Cohn, the infamous defense attorney Donald hired to get his father out of a legal mess with federal housing authorities. Trump, who was mentored alongside the Republican Party’s most notorious dirty trickster Roger Stone at the time as well, was taught by Cohn how to game and play the US court system.

This was done by refusing to pay fines levied by the court, by flooding the system with frivolous lawsuits, by stiffing creditors and forcing them to litigate, by crushing poorer people with lawsuits designed to bankrupt them, by digging up dirt on judges and blackmailing them, by bribes, and many other dirty tricks. It is instructive to note how “ministries” like the Sekulow show never stop psy-oping their audience with the charge that Democrats are always resorting to “lawfare” (legal warfare) to get their way, when it’s their own Dear Leader that’s the master of the art.

It was Cohn who also taught Donald the basics of moral reprobation with his advice of always, “Deny, deny, deny,” and “Attack, attack, attack.” That is, even when people have you dead to rights, don’t even think twice about this kind of defense. It’s why he can lie right to your face, because shame and conscience simply do not fit into his aggressive philosophy.

It is also noteworthy that even Cohn by the end of his life came to realize what a monster he had created. One of his last statements about him was, “Donald pisses ice water.” If anyone wants an excellent dramatic re-enactment of this phase of his life, I would suggest the 2024 movie The Apprentice.

Lying As A Weapon

“Man is the most vicious of all animals and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”
– Donald J. Trump to People Magazine, 1982.

“…for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
-Jesus Christ, Matthew 12:34

I’m not even sure if this is but a subset of all the evil, reprobate things Cohn taught him or whether he just evolved this way over time. But it’s important to understand that Donald Trump is no ordinary liar. Most people will resort to lying if and when they’ve backed themselves into a corner. Not Donald Trump. He lies as a strategic weapon to confuse and disorient his opponent, which is everyone, since everyone is his enemy, according to the philosophy found in that quote above.¹²

Even when he can finish a coherent thought, Trump will pack a sentence with six or seven lies, sometimes one on top of the other. The effect is to leave you so disoriented, confused and exasperated as to think, “Where do I even begin to deconstruct all of this?” I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been left in complete vertigo trying to follow the convoluted logic behind half of the inanities he utters.

It really is quite a waste of your mental energy, yet is a strategy. As was said, one of the characteristics of the Antichrist is, he shall “wear out the saints,” simply by being so stubborn and intransigent.

This partly explains his admiration for Vladimir Putin who may have inspired him in this. At a critical point in post-Yeltsin Russia, Putin hired one Vladislav Surkov, a singularly devious man with a theatrical background to manage public perception:

In 2011, Peter Pomerantsev described him in the London Review of Books as central to a system of “ceaseless shape-shifting” designed to confuse and weaken opposition. In the 2016 BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, filmmaker Adam Curtis argued that Surkov’s blend of politics and theatre offered a model later mirrored in the rise of Donald Trump. Around the same time, journalist Ned Resnikoff likewise highlighted the “phantasmagoric” nature of Surkov’s techniques. ¹³

Phantasmagoric is a good way of putting it, and may be an indication Surkov was influenced by the Israelis. Bad ideas have a way of getting around.

Pomerantsev also interestingly observed how,

As deputy head of the administration he would meet once a week with the heads of the television channels in his Kremlin office, instructing them on whom to attack and whom to defend, who is allowed on TV and who is banned, how the president is to be presented, and the very language and categories the country thinks and feels in. Russia’s Ostankino TV presenters, instructed by Surkov, pluck a theme (oligarchs, America, the Middle East) and speak for 20 minutes, hinting, nudging, winking, insinuating, though rarely ever saying anything directly, repeating words like “them” and “the enemy” endlessly until they are imprinted on the mind.¹⁴

Sound familiar?

Two More

Thirdly, Trump’s embrace of Ayn Rand. Rand, the creator of the absurd philosophy of Libertarianism that took the GOP by storm, put forth the romanticized idea that American business tycoons can never be predatory capitalists, but misunderstood “noble entrepreneurs.” Hers is an influence which has turned the minds of right-wingers especially, into utter mush, the very thing the late Rush Limbaugh, a big Rand fan himself, would cynically use to describe the minds of children.

The substance and contents of libertarian philosophy is such a sordid story, and I don’t have the time to go into it here. I have written about it somewhat myself in this article as well as in the “Economic Beast” chapter of my book, American Babylon, American Antichrist. An even better coverage can be found in this article by the inestimable Thom Hartmann.

Fourthly, Donald Trump’s love of authoritarian leaders. Having spent a lot of time in the company of Russian, Italian and other mobsters who swim in a culture of tough-guy strong men probably primed him here. The Italian mob have pretty much been reliable Republican voters for decades now.

The first inkling of this infatuation may have come from his first wife Ivana, who once said he kept a book of the collected speeches of Hitler at his bedside.¹⁵ Michael Cohen, his one-time lawyer and enforcer has likewise testified of Trump’s infatuation with Vladimir Putin, arguably the absolute worst human being on the planet at the moment (in close competition with Benjamin Netanyahu). At this point, it’s obvious to anyone honest that the “authoritarian playbook” in every classic way is exactly what Donald Trump is pursuing.

This Absolute Awfulness of This Man

As I’ve mentioned in other articles, trying to sum up who or what Donald Trump is, is a near-impossible task. If you try to say he’s a conman, or a fraud, or a traitor, or a deceiver, a manipulator, an eccentric or any number of other roles, the real answer is “all of the above.” He ticks every box of awful a person can embody. Even any good qualities he has are tainted by ulterior or self-serving motives. He’s like the little boy who cried wolf. When the wolf actually showed up one day, no one believed him because he had lied so many times.

To end this article, I want to make a list of these awful traits to remind us of the totality of all he embodies. Trying to make sense of his ways and words are so disorienting that we forget how much it encompasses. I don’t do this because he may have some good traits; God alone is omniscient and is the Judge of us all. But for the life of me, I have a hard time finding any.

When I pray about and for the man, I often see him on his knees before God sweating bullets. He’s not as reprobate and unself-aware as he may act, but he knows what a spiritual fix he is in, and that if he should come clean, it may mean the rest of his life in the slammer and as a “loser.” I pray he would do so because eternity is far more important than one’s pride of life down here.

So here is a list of his traits as I constantly find myself pondering, without links to documentation. There simply are too many:

A liar, deceiver, con man, fraudster, cynical, nihilistic, manipulative, aggressor, predator, sadist, bully, impatient, rage-a-holic, eccentric, audacious, provocateur, divisive, bombastic, windbag, pompous, proud, arrogant, stubborn, vain, narcissistic, selfish, delusional, sociopath, psychopath, a fantasist, lacking empathy, impulsive, emotionally stunted, a thief, a swindler, a rapist, pedophile, inconsiderate, rude, impertinent, impudent, dishonest, scheming, indecisive, double-minded, disloyal, a scoffer, a fool, a whiner, censorious, a busybody, a gossip, lazy, entitled, greedy, exasperating, crude, cruel, boaster, braggart, conceited, bigoted, unjust, lawless, dangerous, incompetent, subversive, humorless, vindictive, lacking judgment, imprudent, irresponsible, contemptuous of others, blasphemous, inflexible, jealous, envious, covetous, tasteless.

And God knows what else. Oh, that’s right. He doesn’t like dogs either. I will give him credit for being colorful and marginally-entertaining at times, if he wasn’t so dangerous.

In Conclusion

I hope what is above is not just an exercise in self-righteousness on my part, but Donald Trump is not just any public figure. He’s one with more power over the world than any other person on the planet. I find it mystifying that so many millions of Americans put any faith in this man at all, especially after so many years. But as it says in Ecclesiates, “Madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead” (9:3).

Notes:

1. This may be because they were so perverse, they had given venereal disease to their own livestock. Conversely, God likewise told Israel not to touch certain other nations on the way to conquering Canaan, something today’s Talmud-soaked Israelis fail to understand. ↩︎
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6145972/#:~:text=A%20forensic%20psychiatrist,becomes%20the%20norm. ↩︎
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder
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4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_L._Trump ↩︎
5. Anyone who’s ever grown up in the New York City area such as I did knows what I mean. ↩︎
6. Although Peale’s advice was very practical and benign on a social level, he was still considered quite controversial among more orthodox Christian circles, who knew this was not the Gospel. See note below.
   ↩︎
7. The actual Gospel of the Bible is a relationship-based “walk” with God and Christ likened to a marriage (i.e., through thick or thin). Its faith is a trust in God no matter where He leads or what we go through. To “faith as a force” demagogues like Hagin, that was way too passive. Instead, you declare what’s yours and God follows you around making things happen according to your demands and how stubborn you can be about it. ↩︎
8. He actually in this way foreshadowed the later coming of so much of his base in the Word of Faith circles who believe you can create your own reality by your words, literally, not just figuratively. A base he makes no bones about despising, and not without reason. ↩︎
9. https://www.bruce-mcgraw.com/trump-and-norman-vincent-peale/ ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. Again. Emphasis added. ↩︎
12. The only exceptions are when someone has more money than he does, or if you’re too strong for him, https://donald-trump-antichrist.com/trump-in-revelation-13/#:~:text=Another%20interesting%20thing,buck%20stops%20here.%E2%80%9D or if you’re useful to him for the moment. Everyone gets the back stab in time though. Like Epstein said in that opening section, he unsurprisingly lives a friendless life and has a long list of best friends whom he’s cuckolded and wears like a badge of honor. ↩︎
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov ↩︎
14. “The Hidden Author of Putinism,” by Peter Pomerantsev, The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/ ↩︎
15. Under pressure, she apparently had to later retract or modify her statement. ↩︎