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Others suggest that Trump shows indications of sociopathy, including lack of empathy, absence of guilt and intentional ma­nipu­la­tion. Put it all together and you have “malignant narcissism,” which includes antisocial behavior, paranoid traits, even sadism.

“Mr. Trump’s sociopathic characteristics are undeniable,” retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes concludes. “They create a profound danger for America’s democracy and safety. Over time these characteristics will only become worse, either because Mr. Trump will succeed in gaining more power and more grandiosity with less grasp on reality, or because he will engender more criticism producing more paranoia, more lies, and more enraged destruction.” And when the president stands before the U.N. General Assembly and threatens to “totally destroy” an enemy country of 25 million people, enraged destruction seems on point.

Allen Frances wrote the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder used in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and he doesn’t think Trump qualifies.

In “Twilight of American Sanity,” Frances says the diagnosis requires the patient to experience significant distress because of his condition. But throughout his life, Trump “has been generously rewarded for his Trumpism, not impaired by it,” Frances writes. “Trump is a threat to the United States, and to the world, not because he is clinically mad, but because he is very bad.”

Frances’s judgment proves even more damning. He trashes Trump as a “secular antichrist,” a “two-bit, would-be Mussolini,” even an instrument of divine vengeance. “If you were assigned the task of punishing humanity for its original sins,” he thunders, “you could do no better than invent a Donald Trump and give him extraordinary power.”

Kurt Andersen is here to tell us that America has featured magical thinking and nutty impulses for centuries. Thanks to our mix of religiosity and Enlightenment values — plus the do-your-own-thing vibe of the 1960s and the super-powered distribution channel known as the Internet — Americans have developed a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue,”

“The Apprentice” tells Mr. Trump’s story through the lens of the two men who most influenced him: his father, Fred, and Roy Cohn, his longtime lawyer and one of the most notorious and disgraced fixers of the 20th century. What they had in common, and passed on to Donald in spades, was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others, whatever that took. The end always justified the means.

“The Apprentice” is less about how Mr. Trump rose to power than it is about the generational impact of his family’s trauma and dysfunction, and how it shaped the person Mr. Trump became and the impact he’s had on an entire country.

What Mr. Trump never let me know was that amid all those glittering external signs of success, he was in increasingly desperate financial trouble, drowning in debts that would lead him into a series of bankruptcies. I did not yet realize that he routinely lied as easily as he breathed, including to me for his own memoir, and without a hint of a guilty conscience.

What “The Apprentice” captures most evocatively is Mr. Trump’s transition from pleasing his father to enlisting Mr. Cohn as a mentor and role model. Mr. Cohn’s role was to help Mr. Trump outdo his father, even as Fred used his vast wealth and political connections to clear Donald’s path

he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

What Mr. Trump seems to have buried as he grew up was the core emotional need that all human beings experience from the day they’re born: to feel safe, secure and worthy because they’re loved unconditionally by their primary caretakers. From my observations — and what the movie details — that kind of love was never available to Mr. Trump or to his siblings.

Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, was openly disdainful of any acknowledgment or expression of weakness or vulnerability. He had amassed a fortune building low-income, government-supported housing and, along the way, he developed a harsh, zero-sum view of the world: You were either a winner or a loser in life. If you weren’t a killer, you were forever at risk of being victim and a sucker. Brutality, in the service of winning, was no vice.

“The most importance influence on me, growing up, was my father,” Mr. Trump told me for “The Art of the Deal.” “I learned about toughness in a very tough business.”

The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.

At the time that Mr. Trump first met Mr. Cohn at a private club in 1973, Fred and Donald had just been sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to Black people and other minorities at their Trump Village apartment buildings in Brooklyn.

The evidence of racism was overwhelming. But Mr. Cohn urged Mr. Trump to fight back rather than settle. “The Apprentice” distills Mr. Cohn’s worldview into three life lessons he shared with Mr. Trump: Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and claim victory and never admit defeat. Mr. Trump took those principles to heart.

“Whatever else you could say about Roy, he was very tough,” Mr. Trump told me for “The Art of the Deal.” “Sometimes I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him.”

For Mr. Trump, however, loyalty went only one way. By the time we began work on the book, he had long since bailed on Mr. Cohn, who had been diagnosed with AIDS. It didn’t seem personal for Mr. Trump because in my experience nothing was personal for him. It was all business, and Mr. Trump seemed to have no further use for his longtime lawyer, mentor and friend.

Mr. Trump did encourage me to interview Mr. Cohn for “The Art of the Deal,” and I went to see him in his last days. Over two rambling hours, Mr. Cohn shared an odd blend of hurt, bitterness, resignation and a certain awe at how easily his longtime student had walked away from their relationship. “Donald pisses ice water,” is the way he’d put it to one reporter.

It’s long been deeply unsettling to me how many behaviors associated with psychopathy Mr. Trump exemplifies. There are seven characteristics associated with “antisocial personality disorder,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse.

I’ve observed all seven in Mr. Trump over the years, and watched them get progressively worse. It’s the last one — lack of remorse — that gives him license to freely exercise the other six.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with.

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.