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Attraction to flagrant narcissists often reflects aggression the admirer cannot express themselves.

People with lower empathy scores tend to harbor covert rather than overt admiration for narcissists.

Defending an objectionable public figure often signals identification with their behavior.

Unexamined attraction to transgressive figures makes people easier to lead by what they disown.

At some point in your life, you have been drawn to someone whom you should not have liked, at least on paper. Not the charming rogue of a romantic comedy or the morally complex antihero in a prestige drama. I mean someone whose appeal was less about psychological complexity and more about audacity. Someone who said the thing you'd never say out loud, or who went after people with a kind of gleeful disregard for consequences that made something in you (some quiet, buried part of you) feel a flicker of satisfaction. Someone whose cruelty, even directed at others and clearly wrong, somehow landed on you as a kind of relief.

If there is even a small, reluctant part of you that recognizes that description, it is worth examining why, because it points to a psychological dynamic with implications that extend well beyond individual taste in entertainment.

When someone is genuinely and repeatedly drawn to a figure who is flagrantly narcissistic, openly contemptuous, or casually abusive, they are not necessarily responding to their charisma. They are responding to a mirror. The narcissistic public figure gives visible,........

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