William McCarty

Let’s say you wanted to construct the most dangerous possible man. How would you do it? You would start with someone naturally stupid, but not so stupid they can’t perform. You’d place them in a privileged family with sociopathic parents who provided no emotional attachment. You’d have them be the second son of a father who rejected his first-born as weak—to the point he committed suicide. You’d raise him to be cruel. You’d introduce him to sadists like Roy Cohn. You’d model belittling women, minorities, and anyone less privileged. You break him down until everyday sadism becomes his lifestyle. By adulthood, you’d have a fully formed malignant narcissist, a psychopath so consumed with his own superiority that he believes everyone is out to get what he has—a paranoid, Machiavellian sadist with no empathy and no morals. You’d give him access to criminals like Jeffrey Epstein who cultivated his sexual sadism and collected compromising information. You’d send him to Moscow to get brainwashed by Soviet intelligence. You continuously feed his narcissism by ensuring he’s rescued from every situation—as if by magic. You’d make him feel legally and financially invulnerable by letting him get away with crime after crime, fraud after fraud, and six bankruptcies. You’d rescue him from the sewer of his life by giving him a prime time TV show based on his narcissistic self-image—a show which celebrated his cruelty as business acumen. You’d let him get away with colluding with a foreign power to steal a presidential election. You’d let him get away with a violent insurrection to try to hold on to power when he lost. And you’d stand by for four years while he plotted to come back and take his revenge. However, you haven’t quite completed the path to the worst possible man, although you have achieved a rare feat. You have successfully created a messianic narcissist with the nuclear codes. Great start! But you must take things one step further: you must give him frontal lobe dementia and drain from his brain any remaining ability to reason, make judgements, or take advice. This will destroy his ability to understand the consequences of his actions. His salience network will be disintegrated, making it impossible to tell what matters—even to himself. You’d surround him with people incentivized to conceal his incapacity to function. You’d fill the federal government and the Pentagon with deviant psychopaths who are perfectly happy to exploit his disorders for profit, ideology, and enjoyment. And then you would create a global emergency of his own making. You’d have him repeatedly fail at everything he tries and have his popularity plummet to historic levels. You’d have him be mocked by the entire world. Finally, as a last straw, you threaten him with losing an election by a monstrous landslide. That’s how you get the most dangerous man in the world.