Narcissistic rage is one of the darkest and deadliest force…

...adulation and glory is insatiable and he can see the world populated by the undeserving, inferior people who nevertheless dare to be happier and/or more successful than he is.

It thus creates enemies out of the innocent and often weak who become vessels for the narcissist’s hateful and envious projections.

These sustained projections form a basis of an attitude called the narcissism of minor differences, first described by Freud, where we exaggerate..

...small differences in people who are our neighbors (...) in order to feel superior to them and exclude them from our group. This attitude, like anything else based on fear and hatred, easily infects others, already narcissistically predisposed; and the sharing makes...

...the hateful projections grow and spread.

The co-existent phenomenon of collective narcissism, which intensifies the in-group ties (and which is unsurprisingly associated with authoritarianism) at the expense of excluding and demonizing those who do not belong to our group...

...strengthens this pathological, but common and predictable enough process.

Once established as a more or less legitimate shared worldview, the narcissism of minor differences leads to an easy dehumanization of The Other, entrenched in racism and other forms of prejudice.

It culminates in mob actions, gang violence, terrorism, and endless internal conflicts and wars, which — because of their grand scale and the magnitude of destruction — are the ultimate expressions of narcissistic rage and the deadliest manifestations of our Shadow.

(...)

When dressed up in grandiose and empty sloganeering on patriotism, faith, national purity, and other perverted “ideals,” this pathological process [of narcissistic splitting] is mistaken for “political brilliance” and other such dangerous nonsense, as it inspires...

...too many people to follow the leader, even if straight into an abyss.

His irresistible pull lies not in any specific policies he may be promising (& being blissfully unacquainted with reality he is always short and/or vague on those), but in the feelings his words engender...

...in his followers, specifically a narcissistic identification with the strongman, which compensates for his followers’ inadequacies; and narcissistic rage, which the strongman embodies and already unleashes on the nation through inciting chaos and violence.

The only promises that matter are those which bring in a possibility of revenge for the real and imagined hurts of his followers. That, too, is our Shadow at work.