In light of the recent revelation that Trump had tested positive for Covid last year before the first presidential debate, and the subsequent suspicions that Trump debated knowing full well that he might spread the disease to his political rival, I decided to go back and watch some of the footage. (I watched it live at the time; today, I took in a HasanAbi video from when he livestreamed his reaction, as I wasn’t aware of him at the time and I thought his take might be interesting. His hot take was way rougher than mine, as a supporter of the Democratic Party. He was concerned about Biden’s “delivery.” Not Hasan’s best work, but you can check it out.)
I was on the lookout for any sign that Trump was visibly under the weather. Honestly, I couldn’t really tell, at least not from his face. But he was made up for television cameras, and he had on what looked to be even heavier bronzer than his usual. I didn’t see any flagging in terms of his physical movements, though.
However, there was one point in the debate where Trump was asked directly about how Covid was raging at the time, and the man deliberately reached in his suit jacket, pulled out a cloth mask and detailed how he had it with him and that he would wear it if he felt he needed to.
Then, above and beyond that, he berated Biden for seeming to need to wear a mask all the time, using a tone of voice and facial expressions that made it clear that Trump considered such behavior to be weak, a visible sign of weakness. (This, incidentally, codes for masculinity; this helps explain how and why certain right wing men equate not wearing a mask with “not showing fear”; it’s a sign of hypermasculinity/machismo/rugged masculinity which is all the rage now that we have protofascism.)
Beyond that, a couple of things stood out for me.
I’ve been reading a lot this year about several disparate topics in order to try to get an intellectual grasp of this cultural phenomenon that is MAGA. After encountering They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, where he details the lives of ten ordinary German citizens and their recollections of their time in Nazi Germany, I knew I needed to be able to better compare what went on then with what we see now in the United States, because the parallels with just that one work were deeply resonant. I came across Joost Meerloo, who wrote rather extemporaneously about the atmosphere of Nazi Germany but did so retrospectively from the perspective of a psychologist trying to explain to a lay audience. In The Rape of the Mind, Meerloo said this about the subconscious:
The method of systematically exploiting unconscious guilt to create submission is not too well known, but it may be better understood in the light of our investigation of the unconscious confession compulsion and the need for punishment. Guilt may be instilled early in life when the parent urges the child, too much and too early, to apologize for his disobedience, or uses other means to burden the child with a sense of guilt when he does not understand what was unmoral or wrong about a given act. Teaching the child to see right and wrong does not of necessity imply being conditioned with submissive and anxious anticipation of punishment to follow. In one of my cases the patient’s mother cried after every little mistake the child made, “Look what you have done to me!” It took protracted therapy to relieve the patient of his hidden murderous impulses against his mother and his consequent burden of guilt.
In the political sphere, many such early child-rearing methods are symbolically repeated. Continual purges and confessions, as we encounter them in totalitarian countries, arouse deeply hidden guilt feelings. (p. 81, emphases added)
In a similar vein, social scientists warn us about early development and attendant risks involved with an infant’s exposure to unrelieved stress. Ralph Turner, in “The Real Self” (in the American Journal of Sociology) said this in 1976:
Evidence and experience suggest a curvilinear relationship between deprivation and the sense of reality. Severe and continued deprivation probably leads to a lessened sense of reality and sometimes a complete divorcement between self and desire. ‘Narcotization’ (Koos, 1946, p. 48) and ‘analgesic’ (Ball 1968) are terms sociologists have used to designate a pervading sense of unreality that stems from exceptional deprivation.
Furthermore, relative rather than absolute deprivation [that is, inconsistent abuse and/or neglect] is probably the key. (p. 1006)
Stanley Rosenman, in his very insightful “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero Revisited: Disasters and Brutal Child Rearing” (in American Imago, Spring 1998), revealed:
Hope based on idealized introjects [e.g., role models] was required to contest that desire to die in a young child who is the target of its parents’ detestation (cf. Freud, 1923; Spitz, 1946; Bloch, 1965). (p. 8)
The self, center of the represented world, when unstable, fails to hold under stress. A framework is then lacking to organize experiences or to plan behavior. The ominousness of the internal world is exacerbated by its kaleidoscopic air. The antagonistic setting has disorganized the infant’s capacity to assimilate and integrate. All later issues of development including unresolved dependency and rage, are affected by the earlier pathology. (p. 24)
The infant experiences failure of parental functioning as an attack. (p. 24)
Meerloo added further:
The deep hate the sick individual feels toward the parental figure cannot be expressed directly, and so it is displaced onto the self or onto scapegoats. Scapegoatism is also part of the totalitarian strategy. (Rape of the Mind., p. 122, emphasis mine)
Remember, Meerloo was writing to help laypeople understand the type of person who would be seduced by the Nazi siren call, where some of their motivations came from, motivations even they may not have known as they were not privy to consciousness. I mean to expand on this passage in future diaries, but here I want to focus on the fact that Meerloo believed (and that Theodor Adorno, in The Authoritarian Personality, essentially demonstrated) that certain traumas perpetrated upon some segments of the population made those people more susceptible to emotional manipulation. He specifically points to hidden guilt feelings and links them to murderous impulses. Adorno points to this as well, as he and his team of social psychologists underlined a correlation between underlying/unstated aggression and authoritarian personality analogues.
Mary L. Trump has detailed in Too Much and Never Enough how her uncle was deprived of his mother due to catastrophic illness when he was but two, and his father by her estimation was emotionally distant and psychically demanding. To me, as a layperson (feel free to disagree with me), this was a recipe for generating a psychopath, and I genuinely think Trump is one. I also think, above and beyond that, he is also a narcissist, which compounds his personality disorders and his resultant mental derangement. He’s got lots of issues.
There are so many subtle fantasies of self-betrayal and secret aggression in everyone, and there is so much desire to revenge secret resentments, that any government may make use of these unhealthy neurotic feelings to stir up the country. (The Rape of the Mind, p. 248, my emphasis)
This is MAGA in a nutshell. It, as well, is fascism, or at least its primary mechanism.
We’re in a psychological maelstrom, so it is important that we understand our battle in psychological terms. In fascism, we’re dealing with the politics of projection. It’s the basic defense mechanism involved in scapegoating and displacement. What the psyche cannot tolerate existing in the self, it projects onto others. With the bad traits thus projected outward onto enemies, the offense can be separated, attacked or destroyed. In a purely political arena, this would involve verbal instances of such attacks. As fascism progresses, of course, this routine of scapegoating and projection spills over into material reality with physical violence.
Trump reveals himself in this debate. Already, on September 30, 2020, he had prepared to attempt to take the government by a coup d’etat if he legitimately lost at the polls (which we know he happened to do). He tells us this via projection (emphasis added):
[Biden exhorts Americans to vote, saying they determine the outcome of 2020]
WALLACE: Mr. President, two minutes.
TRUMP: So when I listen to Joe talking about a transition, there has been no transition from when I won. I won that election. And if you look at crooked Hillary Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition, because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won, and even before I won. From the day I came down the escalator with our first lady, they were a disaster. They were a disgrace to our country, and we’ve caught ’em. We’ve caught ’em all. We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught ’em all.
So Trump ostensibly was saying that Obama, and by extension Biden, attempted a coup and would not cooperate with a transition. Hmm. I seem to remember Obama and his team trying to work with Trump’s team in 2016, and I distinctly recall Trump’s team not cooperating with Biden last winter. Also, he attempted a coup, which was caught on tape. Trump was telegraphing his own plans by attributing them to someone else.
Trump, of course, famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in downtown Manhattan and no one would hold it against him. What that amounted to, psychologically speaking, was a suggestion. It was a way of moving the goalposts so far that no matter what he did, as a country, collectively we did not hold him accountable, because everything he did fell below the standard of heinousness set by that yardstick, of murdering someone in cold blood.
Now, with Covid, some people wanted to hold his feet to the fire, but please notice how we all got bogged down (collectively, not here at DailyKos) as to whether Trump was really responsible for those deaths. But, beyond that possibility of suggestion, what Trump effected there was a confession of sorts, a confession that he harbors a deep desire to commit homicide. He has, indirectly, told us exactly what he wants to do. And not only that, but he wants to get away with it in broad daylight. (Right now, the only people who can get away with that are police officers. And Kyle Rittenhouse; honorary mention.)
Theodor Adorno, in his Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, said:
[T]he only thing that really strikes me as effective is to warn the potential followers of right-wing extremism about its own consequences, to convey to them that this politics will inevitably lead its own followers to their doom too, and that this doom was part of it from the outset, just as Hitler started saying, at an early stage, “Then I’d rather put a bullet in my head”, and then repeated the claim at every opportunity. So if one is serious about opposing these things, one must refer to the central interests of those who are targeted by the propaganda. (p. 17, bolding mine)
Hitler had also made public reference to a final or ultimate solution to “dealing with the Jewish problem” before assuming power. He communicated in a subterranean fashion.
Keep this, as well as our understanding of projection, in mind. Because Trump, during this first presidential debate, accused Biden of this:
TRUMP: There aren’t a hundred million people with pre-existing conditions. As far as a say is concerned, the people already had their say. Okay, Justice Ginsburg said very powerfully, very strongly, at some point 10 years ago or so, she said a President and the Senate is elected for a period of time, but a President is elected for four years. We’re not elected for three years. I’m not elected for three years. So we have the Senate, we have a President-
BIDEN: He’s elected to the next election.
TRUMP: During that period of time, during that period of time, we have an opening. I’m not elected for three years. I’m elected for four years. Joe, the hundred million people is totally wrong. I don’t know where you got that number. The bigger problem that you have is that you’re going to extinguish 180 million people with their private health care, that they’re very happy with.
I’ve added emphasis.
There’s some non-grammatical extemporaneous speech from both candidates in this exchange, but I sincerely believe Trump unconsciously or subconsciously here lets us, the audience, know that someone wants to extinguish 180 million people. To me, that’s a true Freudian slip.
[T]he substance of this entire complex of authority-bound personality and extreme right-wing ideology is not, in reality, the designated enemy, not about the people they rage against; it is about elements of projection. (Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, p. 38)
The drawback to analyzing the politics of projection, at least from what I’ve found so far, is that it is difficult to determine future behavior. The problem with Trump is that he lies with such frequency that it is difficult to discern which of his utterances may prove portentious. Thankfully, at this point, he’s mainly reduced to issuing written statements, which are more easily parsed and dissected. But he’s famously difficult to predict (part and parcel to his psychopathy), which is why he remains such a unique danger.
