Trump’s Sense Of Self-Liberation Comes At A Dangerous Moment For Him-- And Therefor For The Rest Of Us

"The functional importance of the ego is manifested in the fact that normally control over the approaches to motility devolves upon it. Thus in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own."
-Sigmund Freud

Yesterday the NYTimes reported that Señor Trumpanzee "has decided not to hire two lawyers who were announced last week as new additions to his legal team, leaving him with a shrinking stable of lawyers as the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, enters an intense phase." They were referring to the bizarre husband/wife team of lunatic right crackpots Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing. Earlier in the morning Señor T was whining on twitter that he was having no trouble finding lawyers to represent him, although there's certain chance any reputable attorney would ever agree to be on a legal team that included sociopaths like diGenova and Toensing.

Last week, noted Trumpanzee watcher Gabriel Sherman reported for Vanity Fair that Putin's man in the Oval Office has decided to return to the seat-of-the-pants decision-making that he believes won him the presidency. "Trump," he wrote, "seems to be loving his new freedom. 'He was fucking excited and jubilant,' said one Trump friend who spoke to him in recent days. 'He was like, everything’s great and these fuckers in the media are beside themselves.' But Trump’s self-liberation comes at a dangerous moment, with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation reaching closer and closer, stoking Trump’s impulses to go to war. Earlier this month, Mueller crossed one of Trump’s stated 'red lines' when he subpoenaed Trump Organization business records. According to four Republicans in regular contact with the White House, the move spurred Trump to lose patience with his team of feuding lawyers. 'Trump hit the roof,' one source said. Today, Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd resigned under pressure from Trump... In private, Trump friends and outside advisers have been stoking his desire to go on the offensive for months. Trump has heard that his lawyers are 'idiots'; that Mueller’s probe is a 'coup d’etat'; and that Trump’s only crime is having 'won the election.'... [N]o heavy-hitting white-shoe law firm seems to want to represent him."

What a mad house! And it's worth revisiting a Jeffrey Goldberg feature in The Atlantic from earlier in the year, Trump's Tweets Are a 'Narnian Wardrobe to His Lizard Brain'. Jeffrey Goldberg, in way of introduction to sad right-wing loon Jonah Goldberg that some of the most interesting people in the world to him at the time were "the homeless conservatives, that not-so-merry band of right-leaning ideologues and idealists who reject Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party and who find it more pleasurable to stand outside Mar-a-Lago and throw rocks than to make believe that what is happening inside is normal. One of the most important of these homeless conservatives is Jonah Goldberg, who has been a stalwart anti-liberal voice for a generation. But Goldberg, a senior editor at the National Review (which is itself a kind of shelter for Never Trumpers) has seen many of his friends accommodate themselves to the new reality. 'The slow takeover of the right by the Trumpets is akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers,' he told me on a recent episode of  our podcast, The Atlantic Interview."





Jonah: "What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is the Republican Party get either dragged along or leap ahead into essentially a cult of personality. A cult of personality is somewhat misleading because it’s only a handful of people who really think that Comrade Trump will deliver the greatest wheat harvest the Urals have ever seen... A year and a half ago, at Fox and other places on the right, I remember being so unbelievably disheartened by how many pundits and commentators-- not just at Fox, but talk radio, all over the place-- lied. They would say, 'Trump is fantastic. Trump is awesome. Trump is a genius. He’s a businessman.' All this stuff. And then the camera goes off, and the microphone goes off, and then they would say, 'I can’t believe I have to defend this guy.' ...[T]he problem with Trump’s Twitter feed is that it is like the Narnian wardrobe to his lizard brain. It just vomits out whatever his raging sphincterless id has got going at the given moment. It gets him into an enormous amount of trouble."

Jeffrey:  Let me ask you how a person who is non-conservative, completely transactional, has no higher thoughts about America and its role in the world, and has no ideological thoughts per se-- how did he so easily take over an entire party?

Jonah: There are a thousand different variables. One was simply the structural, game-theory nature of a 16-person race, which was a huge problem. I think, in terms of important long-term trends, there was a certain psychic break that occurred with the tea parties. The general thrust of the tea parties was exactly the kind of response that I would want from Americans-- back to basics, back to the Constitution, limited government, living within our means. They were wholesale written off as racists and bigots. People overlooked the fact that many of the leaders of the Tea Party, their preferred candidates, were African Americans-- Herman Cain, Ben Carson. That was a tell. That was them saying, “We don’t like being called racists.”

A lot of people, including some serious intellectuals, said, “Well that project doesn’t work. We’re heading towards tribalism, so we might as well develop our own kind of tribalism.”

Two other factors are here. One is, Trump broke the blood-brain barrier of entertainment into politics.

Jeffrey: We needed 15 years of reality TV to bring about this shift.

Jonah: I think that’s right. A lot of Hollywood liberals were encroaching on politics for a very long time, chipping away at this barrier. It’s just ironic that Donald Trump was the first one over the fence. This is why I think in the long term, this is bad news for the left. The Republican celebrities-- our bench is mighty thin-- Kid Rock, Scott Baio. But meanwhile, I think in the summer of 2016, if Oprah, George Clooney, Tom Hanks jumped in...

Jeffrey: Well, Oprah very well might.

Jonah: She might! The last thing is hugely important, and it’s lost on big chunks of the right and of the left, is that people did not like Hillary Clinton. They just didn’t like her. And whatever you thought of Bill Clinton-- Lord knows I wasn’t a fan-- everyone could recognize his political skills. I mean, that guy, you could pull him off an intern, slap him with a flounder, and say, “Give me 45 minutes on intellectual property rights in the Third World,” and he could just go. Hillary Clinton’s idea of extemporaneous speaking was leaping from her prepared remarks to prepared notecards. She’s the lady who says no eating in the library. She was also seen as much more left wing than her husband. Fair or not... [W]hat Trump doesn’t understand, what Steve Bannon doesn’t understand, is that Donald Trump’s mandate was: Don’t be Hillary Clinton. He accomplished that on Day One. Some part of his brain understands that, which is why I guarantee you that in the last 48 hours, Donald Trump has tweeted something about Hillary Clinton. Sean Hannity has done some raging scandal about Hillary Clinton. Psychologically, one of the things these guys have to do to justify their support for Trump is to remind people constantly, “You could have had Hillary.”

You hear echoes of this all over the place. I was on a National Review cruise three months after the election, and this person was asked, “How’s Trump doing?” And they said, “I judge it entirely by how much better this is than what Hillary would have done.” You hear this all over the place on the right. To me, this is a profoundly screwed up way of thinking about things. I don’t know of any other Republican or Democratic president that we said, six months into their presidency, “Well, Bush is making some mistakes but at least he’s not John Kerry.” That’s meaningless. Just one click better than the person that you thought would have ruined the country?

...Jeffrey: Which party is going to disintegrate first, the Democratic Party or Republican Party?

Jonah: I think probably the Republican Party. All the problems that we’ve been talking about that gave us Trump—they’re all made worse by more dysfunction on the right. If serious people don’t think seriously about immigration and deal with people’s legitimate frustrations with it, then unserious and irresponsible people will step in and take up the issue. I think Trump definitely proves that. If Washington does not get anything done anyway, why not treat it like a circus?

Jeffrey: The Republicans are spiraling down faster?

Jonah: They’re spiraling down faster. But a huge part of the reason for the Democratic Party and the Republican Party’s existence is to not be the other party. You take away the Republican Party, and you can get a catalytic effect where they can overtake each other in their dysfunction.

Jeffrey: What replaces the Republican Party if it disintegrates?

Jonah: I think we could be heading into some 1948-style election where you have a four-way race. Game theory says the more entrants you have, the less you need to be the winner. You can see all sorts of independent kind of runs. But let me put it this way: If the Republican Party goes first, I think what we know is the Democratic Party is soon to follow.

How Would You Diagnose Monsieur Trumpanzeé?

There has been so much said about Trump's mental health-- lack of mental health-- that the American Psychiatric Association sent out a warning to its members not to diagnose the mentally ill without personally examining them and not to release the results without explicit permission. Our resident psychologist, Helen Klein, took a stab at diagnosing Señor Trumpanzee and found him to be severely afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder and probably a sociopath to boot. Others have dignosed him to be a full-on psychopath and... well, have you heard anyone who knows him-- or any Republican elected officials-- denying any of these assessments?

Watch this short TED talk video about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder and see if it reminds you of anyone who happens to be running for president this cycle. The four basic traits you need to look out for, although in some cases, not very deeply:

• A grandiose view of oneself
• Problems with empathy
• A sense of entitlement
• A need for admiration

One little, tiny hint you might find useful: in recent years, social media provides narcissists a means to seek social status and attention.



OK, I'm persuaded. That said, Trump's single most persistent tactic in life has been projection. Anything you want know about Trump-- about what he knows or what he fears he is or even just what's on his prescription drug-addled mind-- just listen to what he says-- screams-- about his opponents. Think of every insult he's hurled towards any of them. He's describing his inner self. "Lyin' Ted?" Maybe... but I can think of someone who has a record of lying far more blatantly and consistently than Ted Cruz. "Crooked Hillary?" She's not my idea of moral rectitude... unless you compare her to her pal Donald Trump. He's Lombard Street compared to a gently curving, flat country road.

Unfortunately, the father of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, never analyzed Herr Trumpänzee...  but one can easily imagine how that might have gone from Freud's writing. He defined "projection" as people trying to "defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others." Projection is usually present in people suffering from psychosis and in people suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. Know anyone you might consider a bully? Bullies are often known to project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target of the bullying. That helps explain why no one knew how to handle Mr. Trumpanzee during those car wreck Republican debates. Has anyone ever behaved that way in a debate? Ever?

In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung, wrote about guilt and conscience and suggested that projection is related to false accusations, both personal and political. Ready for a little Freud, at least some Freud via Karl Wolfe?

Psychological projection is the phenomenon whereby one projects one’s own thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals, parents, children, neighbors, other drivers, political figures, racial groups, states and countries, also occurs).

According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, psychological projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals and inanimate objects also occurs). The principle of projection is well-established in psychology.

...Projection concerns externalizing the issues that we need to deal with ourselves. Usually we project onto others issues and problems that we need to address within ourselves, or are unable to manage properly.  Projection is irresponsible behavior as we dump our problem onto somebody else.  We justify these projections by blaming someone or something outside for the emotions  we do not want to feel.  We project our disappointments and problems onto other people, it is somehow their fault, we become a blamer.  Ultimately it is the person who projects that loses, as they never really sort out their own problems.

And, as though anticipating Trump, Wolfe added that "classic racism is an example of psychological projection; 'It’s all their fault that I feel they way that I do,' says the racist. I am a victim of another persons thoughts or actions."

I've read that one of the Trumpanzee daughters, Ivanka, is a very observant Orthodox Jew. That's probably an exaggeration but if she knows much about Judaism, she might remind Papa Trumpanzee about a Talmudic warning to the devout: "Do not taunt your neighbor with the blemish you yourself have."