An insightful article appeared in NewYorker recently. The title certainly got my attention (The Language of the Trump Administration is the Language of Domestic Violence). The author, Jessica Winter, describes a scene in which a man is in a rage at a woman and “wants her removed from the house before his anger turns into physical violence….” He says it’s all her fault. He says he can’t help it. “One of the abuser’s most effective tricks is this inversion of power, at the exact moment that his victim is most frightened and degraded: Look what you made me do.”
Of course, this is what Trump, Sessions, and others in the administration do every day. The most horrendous example is blaming Democrats for separating children from parents at the border. The rest of the article is about that.
See What You Made Me Do is one of the games introduced by psychologist Eric Berne in his classic book “Games People Play.” He popularized many concepts which have remained influential in the five decades since the book was first published.
The idea of three ego states — Parent, Adult, and Child — which are fully developed in the healthy individual, has been valuable to me is reflecting on my own behavior. While the book got a lot of criticism for its style, and for its misuse by people who “called games” on others, most of its concepts have held up rather well.
We can see in Donald Trump the classic Adult-Child fusion with the missing Parent. The Parent, of course, holds the values of morality, integrity, right-and-wrong, and so on. Trump is a sociopath who has none of these. He uses his rationality, his computer, his cold calculating Adult to get the constant whiny Child the attention and adoration the infant desires.
So, what do we do about it? In Trump’s case, you have to vote him out. With no Parent, he can’t be shamed. Nixon had just enough fear of being humiliated to resign when impeachment was coming. Trump would see impeachment as just another opportunity to play to the audience. He knows his followers would buy into his claims of persecution, and he would make the most of it. And you are not going to find fifteen Republican senators who would take on the Trumpanistas, so an impeachment trial would only make him the “winner and still champion” on a vote of 34 to 66.
This is what Putin, Russian hackers, and 60 million American voters have given us. Resist as best you can.