I keep expecting the leak of a Republican, talking-points memo that says, “Pick three things that Trump did last week and accuse the Democrats of plotting to do them.” The memo must be out there; the entire Republican Party has become a walking definition of psychological projection. Of course, Trump himself is the ultimate practitioner. Whether an unconscious mechanism or a conscious tactic, his use of projection is simultaneously impressive for its persistence and laughable for its infantility.
One would have thought that the manifest irony in “Lying Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” would have provoked sufficient ridicule to penetrate even Trump’s oafish defenses against reality. It didn’t. And it’s no wonder, looking back at the state of press coverage in those days it. The absence of such ridicule then likely emboldened his herd of geldings now to embrace a personality defect as a political tactic.
As his position (not to mention his mental state) deteriorates, we see an inflationary expansion of the behavior. Calling Biden the puppet of fascists and an agent of “crime, chaos, corruption and economic collapse” is equivalent to holding up a huge poster of Trump’s face with “Joe Biden” scrawled across it in black, permanent marker. And how profound a warning is it, how stark a warning, when he repeatedly claims that Democrats are trying to steal the election.
The press is getting better, but it’s too little and far, far too late. They still will not even fact-check with the directness and clarity required. Don’t expect to see chyrons below clips of Trump describing some Democratic, dystopian future that explain, “Trump actually is describing his own administration, here.”
We need to harp on this specific tactic (a subgenre of their only remaining tactic: lying). There should be one goal: never let anyone forget that every ugly accusation disgorged from Trump’s big mouth or tapped out by his little thumbs is a self-portrait.
