Less than a fortnight ago, after dilly-dallying for years, Trump consummated the pact with QAnon, wedding his electoral future with their bizarre outlook.
After Donald Trump made these overtures, some of the press began to put 2 and 2 together to see that Trump was fully moving in the direction of cult leader. Take Nicolle Wallace, for example. She pulled no punches in her characterization in her reaction on her show last Monday.
I saw the pictures and was horrified but not shocked. This is where we’ve been heading. You don’t start with footsie and end up anywhere other than tangled up in the sheets together in bed, and that’s where Donald Trump is right now with QAnon.
There’s no way to back out of this development. Any “divorce” will be fatal to the movement (as much of its energy is supplied, I believe, by those with abandonment issues as a consequence of growing up in the era of widespread familial divorce—that resentment is one of the movement’s golden geese).
So he’s bound to them. I don’t think Keith Olbermann, who claimed Trump by embracing QAnon has made them his slaves, has adequately considered the flip side of that coin.
He’s embracing them now because, considering the damage he’s suffered politically this year, he’s shed so much “regular” support that he loses little to nothing at all by snuggling close to QAnon now. They are his most extreme and steadfast base.
Trump wants supporters who are constantly trafficking thoughts in that mental world of paranoia. He’s saying, with his full endorsement, that they are indispensible to him. (This flattery will be reflected back to him by his mirrors [followers] a hundred fold.)
The GOP is engaged in mirage politics. Thus the apocalypticism, the selling of a great past, etc. This all smacks of selling pipe dreams.
They’re selling aspirations, not concrete policies. Again, this fits: neverending grievance can train one’s focus on the relief of pain, not methods of allieviating that pain. (Of course, the rhetoric used by the ultra-conservatives is a form of conditioning, combined with something akin to an acquired taste, like the ingestion of scotch bonnets. This is an insula mechanism, this psychological response to gustation.)
[The insula has been linked to politics in the academic literature. I’ve written about it elsewhere.]
Yesterday, sageblue here at DKos quoted James Baldwin:
I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.
— Notes of a Native Son (1955)
The emotion of hate, through this evocation, drives the glucocorticoid response, thus providing a physiological balm to psychological pain. This revving up can then be psychically (that is, mentally) displaced and even more physiological relief can be had at such dispensation of energies: yelling, cursing, breaking things, on up the escalation ladder. All the intensity one feels in a road-rage situation would be present, and similar discharges of anger would occur.
That’s what Trump as a psychically non-fungible object represents to these folks, his devotees.
He’s a totem and a fetish. He provides pleasure through pain—narcotization through the dissemination of superiority piggybacked onto discriminatory hatred. It’s an inoculation, pain the follower hopes is a lesser magnification of the two: to choose to hate others instead of hating oneself.