This
article both comforts and scares me. It does help me understand a little more why good, moral, temple-worthy
intelligent family and friends still stand behind Trump. I always think we are
smarter and better than to support a lying, cheating, irreverent, rude,
selfish, uncouth, dishonest, egocentric, misogynist, mocker of the
handicapped, fear- and hatemonger as President of the United States. For our
culture, in particular, I think it is simply following the brethren whom we trust to never lead us astray.
Yale
psychiatrist explains how devotion to Trump
is based on emotional patterns most
people grow out of by age five
RAW STORY - Tana
Ganeva Dec 3, 2018
President
Donald Trump took to Twitter on Monday to heap praise upon his ally Roger
Stone, who continues to maintain his refusal to flip — even as Trump’s former
fixer, Michael Cohen, who once said he’d take a bullet for the president,
begged federal prosecutors to not serve jail time.
Stone
might be Trump’s most infamous supporter—but there are millions of Americans
who refuse to abandon the president regardless of the chaotic news cycle. A
poll conducted over the summer found that many Trump supporters trust the
President more than their own friends and family. Raw Story spoke with Yale
psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee on why the president’s supporters show such
undying devotion to a man who’s repeatedly reneged on promises and whose
tumultuous first term has been filled with shake-ups. (Lee speaks for herself,
not for Yale).
Raw
Story: In your opinion, what are the emotions driving Donald Trump’s base?
Bandy
X. Lee: The sense of grandiose omnipotence that he displays seems especially
appealing to his emotionally-needy followers. No matter what the world says, he
fights back against criticism, continues to lie in the face of truth, and above
all is still president. What matters is that he is winning, not whether he is
honest or law-abiding. This may seem puzzling to the rest of us, but when you
are overcome with feelings of powerlessness, this type of cartoonish,
exaggerated force is often more important than true ability. This is the more
primitive morality, as we call it, of “might makes right,” which in normal
development you grow out of by age five.
But,
in this case, Trump appeals to that childlike degree of emotional development?
Why?
Strongman-type
personalities are very appealing in times of socioeconomic or political crisis,
as the population is less able to think rationally but is rather overcome with
fear, or desire to draw strength from fantastical ideas. This happens to normal
people in times of stress, or to people whose development has been stunted
because of emotional injury. The problem is, the person who promises the impossible
and states, “I alone can fix it,” and gives himself an A+ on his performance,
is not a strong person who can deliver but the opposite. So Mr. Trump’s “base“
looks for someone to rescue them and their intense yearning does not allow them
to see through his deception, while Mr. Trump senses better than anyone their
needs (they are his) and makes use of them for his own benefit—even as he
disdains his supporters for being so gullible. In this manner, they fulfill
each other’s emotional needs in a mutually unhealthy way.
What’s
your biggest concern?
One
concern I have, in my 20 years of studying this personality structure while
treating violent offenders, is the disturbing societal trend. More and more of
this personality type are taking on leadership positions, including of
corporations, whereas 20 years ago one would mostly find them in jails and
prisons. This also means there are a growing number of people who emulate them
in the general culture, who become deprived from the structures that they create,
and who become emotionally traumatized as a result of any of these
consequences. People who are wounded this way continue to seek omnipotent
parental figures as adults, and the vicious circle continues. Unable to find
outer satisfaction for their inner needs, some keep pursuing ever greater power
until they reach the highest positions, but since this is the opposite of
proper treatment, their conditions only grow worse while society suffers a
trail of carnage. It is actually a tragedy that Mr. Trump cannot receive proper
care, even as his disorder is on display for the world to see, but is rather
surrounded by those who enable his illness and make use of his weaknesses to
their own destructive ends.
On
the one hand, different demographics that have tended to support Trump in the
past—let’s say white women and neo-Nazis—don’t have much in common. Are there
psychological factors that unite them?
Well,
he unites them through a common, mythological past that they can all be
nostalgic for, and that might be his “talent.” We know from the former
Yugoslavia that this past can be hundreds of years ago, not just decades, and
is really a metaphor for discontent with the self in the present. Mr. Trump’s
behavioral pattern is not that of leaders at all but rather of obsequious
followers, as we have seen Mr. Trump become in the presence of even more
successful strongmen, such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, or Rodrigo Duterte.
We find in him a pattern of following exactly what his base is looking for—he
has no intrinsic philosophy or ideology but is responding to an emotional need
for adulation and approval, and so he will try anything that gets as many
people on board as possible. He will also sense keenly those who will never go
along with his pathological methods—that is, healthy people—and drop them
instantly. That is why we see him desperately clinging to an ever narrower base
with increasingly fringe ideas.
He
also has to scapegoat groups in order to distract from his billionaire cabinet,
tax breaks for the rich, and trade wars that hurt his base the most, and so his
demonizing of other helpless groups will only increase with time. We were
worried that he might lead us into a devastating war or stage a terrorist
attack, but he actually managed to turn a humanitarian crisis of people fleeing
violence into an invading army that required thousands of troops at the Mexican
border. If this “feigned war” fails to distract, then he may yet stage a real
war. With the special counsel’s investigations about to be released, after
devastating midterm elections for him and in a vulnerable economy, he will
experience loss of popularity as a terrifying threat to his inflated
self-image. There will likely be no limit to the violence he is capable of,
since destroying the world would be nothing compared to the shame and
humiliation he might suffer.
By
the way, I think we need to include a very different demographic group among
his supporters, which is the richest one percent. This will be the more
calculating, pragmatic group. How is such a minority able to control politics
and to keep convincing 99 percent of the population to give up what it has so
that it can grow richer still? It is by distracting and manipulating the 99
percent through advertising, hot-button issues such as abortion, Fox News, and
reality TV, which explicitly employ psychological techniques to make the
population more impulsive, irrational, and ill-informed. So when the
federally-funded American Psychiatric Association, which heavily depends on the
pharmaceutical industry, says that psychiatrists should not comment on the
president’s mental instability, we have to question: is it protecting the
psychological methods that are being used to manipulate the public so as to
make it more unhealthy, while blocking information that might restore its
health? If mental health professionals were allowed to educate and inform the
public more about psychological matters, then the population would be
empowered, and healing could start replacing the damage.
How
does Donald Trump mirror and communicate with his base?
A
big part of this is through Twitter. This is why Mr. Trump will not stop, no
matter how undignified people said it was of a president from the beginning. He
knows it is his psychological lifeline. I was recently asked in an interview to
comment on Twitter’s hateful conduct policy, which I read for the first time,
and it was clear that he violated it from the first line, but they were not
able to deactivate his account, since they know the backlash would be severe.
But the only way to manage someone with his condition is to set severe limits —
and restrain and remove his access to weapons—and tweets are his psychological
weapon, which he “shoots” in order to exert his power.
And
the rallies?
Another
way he communicates with his base is through his numerous rallies. He projects
a lot. Projection is a psychological term for displacing thoughts or qualities
in yourself you cannot tolerate onto someone else. He does this when he calls
legitimate news “fake” and news agencies “the enemy of the people.” He is
unconsciously telling us that he is himself “fake news” and “the enemy of the
people.” He also made up the clever slogan, “Democrats produce mobs.
Republicans produce jobs.”
And
that is not accurate because …
But
if you look at the statistics, the majority of the “angry mobs” that commit
violence and terrorism are right-wing, while Democratic policies almost always
lower unemployment rates. And when he calls Hillary Clinton “crooked” and that
we should “lock her up,” he is trying to disown his fraudulent tendencies and
to block thoughts of seeing himself as someone we need to lock up. The extreme
exaggeration, the inability to consider the possibility that it could apply to
him, and the failure to test against obvious reality give away the fact that
the opposite is true, but his obedient base is predisposed to believing his
defenses more than their own observations.
Trump
seems to have intuited how to communicate with his base, evading the filter of
the media. What do you think about that?
You
are right in that it is all intuitive, not rational or logical, which would
have less emotional force. Emotional power can be helpful when healthy, but
when unhealthy, it can overcome all healthy approaches. As mental health
professionals, we have to watch the media continue to get played, and it still
has not managed to catch up. There is a phenomenon called “shared psychosis”
(also called “folie à deux”) that happens when an untreated sick person is in
close proximity to, say, other family members within a household. In such a
situation, normal people grow increasingly out of touch with reality and take
on symptoms of the person who is unwell. It can also happen with an impaired
president—once in power, he becomes not only the most urgent problem that needs
to be addressed but a cause of widespread deterioration of health in a way that
can become a “folie à millions.” Treatment involves removing the sick
individual from the others, and very quickly, the others return to normal. It
shows how powerful mental sickness is: the otherwise normal person becomes sick
and not the other way around. His unfettered access to the people through
Twitter is as dangerous as his unfettered access to the nuclear codes, since he
is laying the groundwork for a culture of violence that can unleash epidemics
of violence. This is why waiting for the next decision of voters in 2020 is
itself dangerous and reckless in its lack of understanding of the present
danger the president poses.
