Our Leadership Crisis Part III

In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…. It would never come into their minds to fabricate colossal untruths.

Hitler, Mein Kampf

In this paper, we revisit several themes which we explored in two other papers published earlier this year, concerning the leadership crisis which has intensified as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and the presidential election. To do this we will use the lens of Intersubjective Self Psychology (ISP), a powerful tool that visualizes the bi-directional nature of human psychological life. As we will show, ISP can be used to understand current and historical events, with a new psychological frame. It offers an understanding of Donald Trump’s and his base’s shared fears, their shared shame and humiliation and the psychological explosion that ensues when their world is shattered. We are focusing our attention on Trump’s fanatical base, not the single issue supporters of abortion, Israel or the stock market who side with Trump. We will explore the fate of Donald Trump’s malignant pursuit of success and power, and his manipulation of the grandiose/intersubjective bond with his base followers to fulfill his narcissistic goals no matter the cost. We will argue first that Trump’s relentless and now blatantly psychotic belief in his victory in the election (what we will call “The Big Lie”) is so infused with fear, hatred and rage such that, combined with the power of his office, he now poses an existential threat to our country. Second, we will argue that that as Trump’s and his core base’s grandiose fantasies were challenged, questioned and disputed, and as the election seemed to be slipping out of his reach, he and his base replaced their lies with violence and sedition, as they felt their intersubjective grandiose fantasies were crumbling. The Big Lie could no longer maintain a crippled and failing grandiose connection between Trump and his “base”, violence and chaos become the breakdown products of their failing merger placing our country in grave danger.

Analyzing the Trump Phenomena: An Intersubjective Self Psychological Understanding

Intersubjective Self Psychology (ISP) posits self-experience as a primary dimension of personhood (self psychology), but grounded in the shared emotional field of our relationships (intersubjectivity). From the perspective of ISP, we believe that all human beings are motivated by 1) the “Leading Edge”, a progressive developmental drive for healthy selfhood and positive relationships, characterized by hope, honesty and love, and 2) the “Trailing Edge”, a conservative, self-protective drive, arising out of past psychological trauma, characterized by fear, defensiveness and distrust. One or the other of these dimensions, or “edges”, is often dominant, determining the person’s primary orientation to self and relationships. Traumatized people often organize themselves primarily around trailing edge fears and defenses (and of those we include victims of acute trauma, but also those who endured chronic trauma from hostile, neglectful or rejecting parents). These people organize themselves around a grandiose fantasy about themselves (a genius, the best ever, the most successful) which protects against a deep feeling of worthlessness and self-loathing. On the other hand, they also see themselves as victims, blaming others for their own perceived failures, repeating the traumas of the past, living in all of these experiences represent what we call the trailing edge of history and the trailing edge of failed leadership. In some extreme cases these people cannot, under any circumstances, allow their grandiosity to be challenged or their enemies to win. Either would be devastating. Donald Trump is just such a “trailing edge” person, traumatized by his childhood family relationships.

For example, Mary Trump in her history of the Trump family, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, describes in painful detail how Fred Trump, Donald’s father, created and promoted in the family a culture of cruel expectation and crushing shame, which molded his children into grotesque characters, motivated by the sole desire to please their cold, scornful father. This abuse did in fact prove deadly as the eldest son Robert, having failed the measure of the old man’s expectations, was declared a loser, cast out of his special place in the family, eventually succumbing to alcoholism and an early death.

Donald supplanted his older brother and prevailed by aligning himself with the father’s cruelty, committing himself fully to a life of winning at any cost. Being a “loser” was not an option – being a loser meant a hellish sense of shame and self-annihilation. Trump’s defensive grandiosity became a lifelong necessity. He mostly used words and lying to fend off the demonstrators of his father’s crippling voice. However, at times he reverted to action, particularly around the many women who have charged him with rape and violence. In these situations, action, not just words and rhetoric were necessary to shore up an imperiled self. In other words, Donald Trump is no stranger to brute force to shore up a crippled sense of self. Nor does he do this alone. Haunted by the trailing edge of humiliation, searing shame and disintegration anxiety, Trump has turned to the psychological and practical support of his “base” of admirers, cultivating and exploiting a shared fantasy of his and their greatness and victimhood.

In light of Intersubjective Self Psychology, Trump’s merger with his base can be understood as a purely defensive grandiose merger built not on the generativity of ideas and principles, such as being swallowed up by hordes of immigrants or being consumed by their failing ability to feel vibrant and alive in America today. These people seem always on their back foot, haunted by the fear of failing the American dream, while “others” surpass their aspirations and reap the rewards due them. Envy and resentment triggers rage. Driven by trailing edge fears., they come to believe that the solution is blame, vengeance and the extermination of anyone who dares interfering with what they regard as the only way out of hopeless lives. Trump’s and his base’s shared grandiosity is a life raft in roiling seas, and when the lifeboat begins to tip, there are no words to right the boat, and the group turns to desperate action and chaos in a desperate attempt to right their sinking ship. Searing shame torments people whose dreams have been shattered, and violence and insurrection seems to them to be the only means to hold onto hope, when words fail. The hate and violence that shame begets poses an imminent threat to the current presidential transition leading to the violence of January 6th.

Presidential Transition

The model for Presidential transition was scripted by George Washington in his famous farewell address. However, even before Washington relinquished the power of the presidency, he had in 1783 resigned his military commission, famously immortalized in a John Trumball painting on display in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capital. At the time, King George famously declared, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world. Then, in 1796, Washington gave his Farewell Address within which he warned of “factions” that might pose a danger to the new government and that they “demand a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into flame”. After enduring years of war and political struggle, Washington understood the lingering threat of what we call trailing edges in politics and society. He believed that vigilance must be built into our institutions and body politic, to ensure that the forces of factionalism, destruction and chaos don’t lead to the demise of the democracy he loved. And for several centuries Washington’s warnings have been heeded. Then, fatefully, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump struck the match when addressing a rally in Washington exhorting his followers, to “fight much harder” against “bad people” and “show strength” at the Capital. We have to “fight much harder”, and “you have to show strength” and “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules, and “take back your country”. We will continue this theme further in the paper.

“The Loser”: Donald Trump’s Annihilation Anxiety

The expression, “Let them eat cake” was first attributed to Marie Antoinette in 1789 during one of the famines in France during the reign of her husband Louis XVI, though this may not be historically accurate. Its attribution may have occurred 100 years earlier, by a princess having complete disregard for the starving peasants and the poor. On December 30th, 2020, more than 3800 Americans lost their lives to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since he lost the election, Donald Trump has spent more time either bitterly complaining about the stolen election, assassinating the character of anyone who does not agree that the election results are fake or playing golf obsessively, while Americans suffer and die. Donald Trump is our present day Marie Antoinette’s equivalent to let them eat cake, or let them die. He declared about the deadly virus: “It is what it is”. Trump has not shared one word of compassion or leadership while Americans are suffering and dying.

In our earlier papers, we discussed at length Donald Trump’s malignant grandiosity and his ongoing effort to gaslight his followers (and to an extent the American public) to believe a series of falsehoods regarding his specialness, power and entitlement, which in his largess, he would share with his followers. For four years he has spewed forth thousands of lies, fantasies and assertions, by whatever means he has had available (Twitter, Facebook, Fox News, etc.) to gain control of his fervent group of supporters, so as to accomplish his desire for power and self-aggrandizement. Their reward is to share a portion of Trump’s precarious grandiosity. And despite several major obstacles (loss of the House and an impeachment) he has been able to hold it all together, basking in the adulation of his raucous rallies. Then, fatefully, Joe Biden won the election for president on November 3, 2020. Being declared the “loser” posed an existential threat to Trump’s precarious grandiose fantasy. In Donald Trump’s world to be a “loser” is to be worthless, scorned and ultimately discarded and forgotten, living in the trailing edge fears of hopelessness and worthlessness. Donald Trump once said, “I win, I win, I always win. In the end I always win”. John Mc Cain, a heroic prisoner of war, was a loser because “he was caught”. American soldiers who were killed in action were “losers and suckers”. According to the Atlantic, Trump cancelled a trip to a US cemetery outside of Paris, because he said it was “filled with losers”. Being a loser was not an option. Faced with the “truth” of his loss, he jacked up the gaslight from a flickering flame to a white hot torch – he conjured the Big Lie. At this point, words were enough to maintain Trump and the groups shared grandiosity.

He claimed that the election, (which he asserted he had won by a “landslide”) had been “stolen” from him. In the first week after he lost the election, Donald Trump tweeted over 300 times about the fraudulent election results. With the entire world as the onlookers, he needed to create an alternative reality in which losing was not an option. Weeks before the election he said that the only way he could lose was if the election was a fraud. He doubled down on this falsehood convinced that words and rhetoric would affirm his greatness warding off the trailing edge of humiliation, searing shame and disintegration anxiety,

It is important to distinguish between the process of winning, and the identity of being a winner. To Trump all that matters is to be a winner; how you got there does not matter. Being skillful, knowledgeable of one’s craft, experienced in the art of politics are only, perhaps, a means to an end, which is to be declared the “winner”. If you lose, it is your fault, resulting in self-contempt and searing shame. To lose the Presidential election to Joe Biden was literally inconceivable. The experience of losing, or worse, the feeling of being a loser, could never be accepted, hence the full and sustained repudiation of the reality of the loss was essential, Donald Trump’s survival depended on it. However, behind all of the self-protective lies, Donald Trump’s grandiose self has remained under threat, provoking a seething and insatiable rage at the shameful and deceitful claim, engineered by a vast anti-Trump conspiracy, that he had lost.

Trump’s Rage

Narcissistic rage occurs in many forms; they all share a specific psychological flavor which gives them a distinct position within the wide realm of human aggressions. The need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in pursuit of all these aims which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury.

(Heinz Kohut, Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic Rage, 1972.)

The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut argued that the narcissist’s rage knows no bounds. As with Trump he disregards all reasonable limitations in his seemingly boundless wish to obtain revenge. When not serving his purpose, election laws, procedures and legitimate legal regress are all part of the “steal” and must be attacked, repudiated and disregarded. There are many such instances in which shame based revenge has become the sole motivation of dictators and despots. Hitler’s first volume of Mein Kampf translates to revenge or reckoning in English. Another translation is “settlement of accounts” as Hitler called for Germany’s revenge after its defeat in World War I.

The narcissistic leader when confronted with the decisive evidence of his loss, cannot rest in seeking revenge primarily because in such a case as a national election, the evidence of his failure (of being “the loser”) is universally known and cannot be wiped out. Nonetheless, paradoxically, he must assert the Big Lie because to do otherwise, to admit defeat, would mean accepting the reality that he is not unique and perfect, which for the grandiose leader, such as Trump, is equivalent to annihilation and psychological death.

Throughout the past four years Donald Trump experienced many challenges to his grandiosity but few of these have posed a real threat. In fact, Trump loves the fight, hogging all of the attention as he basked in the ire of his enemies. He flaunts norms and glories in scandal. However, with the victory of Biden in the election, Trump has undergone a cascading series of failures which have cumulatively worn away at his capacity to deny and repudiate. These failures have amounted to existential threats to the core of his narcissistic self-organization. He continues to use all the words and lies at his disposal but they are failing, as the election outcome has remained unchanged.

Echoing Kohut, Eric Fromm also described the rage of the narcissistic leader when threatened: “When the one protection against his fright, his self-inflation, is threatened, the fright emerges and results in intense fury. This fury is all the more intense because nothing can be done to diminish the threat by appropriate action; only the destruction of the critic – or oneself – can save one from the threat to one’s narcissistic security” (Fromm, Individual and Social Narcissism, p. 72). Fromm believed that the narcissistic leader is alone in his splendor. Even his followers are not real to him. They are a means to assert his power and mirror his greatness.

Since the election we have seen Trump progress from stress to panic and finally fright. First he believed that he could simply get Biden’s victory undone. This bizarre disconnect from reality and lapse of mature judgement was evident in the buffoonish and sometimes perverse behavior of Trump’s “personal Lawyer” Rudolph Giuliani.

Since the election, all of Trump’s legal challenges have failed and many supports which he believed he could depend on fell away and some turned against him. For example, Trump’s corrupt intention to pack the Supreme Court with conservative justices, whom he considered loyalists, was to guarantee that if he in fact lost the election, he could be assured that the Court would back his appeal, and hand him the victory he was entitled to. (In fact the Justices dismissed his appeal “for lack of standing”. “The Court really let us down. No wisdom. No courage.” Trump responded.) Then his Attorney General, William Barr declared that there was no indication of fraud in the election. Mike Pence refused to act illegally to reject certification of the vote.

Following failure after failure during the transition, Trump’s experience of imminent collapse and the feeling of rising threat of shame and humiliation grew. In response, as the truth became increasingly evident and inescapable, Trump doubled down on the Big Lie with even more virulence and fanaticism, making catastrophic action all but inevitable.

Turning up the Gaslight: From Crypto to Outright Psychosis

In our last paper “Gaslighting the Pandemic” we discussed how Donald Trump used a set of lies, distortions and obfuscations to manipulate and ultimately control his followers (and to an extent other Americans) in order to evade blame for his mishandling of the greatest health crisis of our time. As we said there:

By gaslighting we mean the relational experience by which one person gains control over another, through the induction and manipulation of false beliefs, which take on a delusional character, a world of alternative facts. As a result of this psychological abuse, the victim begins to doubt his or her sanity, eventually submitting fully to the lies of the perpetrator.

Gaslighting was not new to Donald Trump, he has used lies thousands of times throughout his life and career to evade responsibility and shift blame onto others. The Big Lie, that he had won the election by a landslide and that it had been stolen, was his most desperate gambit as he tried to bend the mind of the American public to accept his reality, overturn the election to hand him the win. The lie was indeed big because as with all big lies, he had to deny the very nature of reality and truth, promoting not only an alternative fact, but the “truth” of his win, even as the reality of his loss was again and again repudiated. In our earlier paper, we explained this with the concept of cryptopsychosis in which a false belief is held to by an individual and/or a group despite its evident untruth. The person claims that they are the honest and sane one and that their beliefs are the only truth, despite the fact that everyone outside the “bubble of lies” knows the facts, the reality which contradicts the cryptopsychotic mind of the fanatic.

He had been laying the groundwork for months, the Big Lie was quickly in place and Trump began to promote it with a literal vengeance. The Lie consisted of two related components: the claim 1) that he in fact won the election by a landslide, and 2) that his victory had been stolen from him. The dual nature of the Big Lie had two functions, to assert that Trump was still “the winner” and to blame his fake loss on a criminal cabal of Democrats, socialists, and Satan worshiping pedophiles. But this Big Lie was not enough by itself, almost immediately Trump began to wield it like a cudgel, berating his enemies and going on the attack.

Every effort to overturn the election failed. And with each attempt the integrity of the electoral system became clearer and clearer. Eventually Trump’s “Election Integrity Watchdog” asserted that the 2020 election had been the most honest in history.

In response to each validation of the truth of Biden’s victory, Trump turned up the gaslight till it burned with a hideous and toxic brightness day and night. His twitter feed was a storm of indignation, self-aggrandizement and lies.

Promoting Conspiracy: Who’s to Blame

The grandiose leader under threat must find the enemy and drive home the call for revenge and restitution. Despite the moderate politics of Joe Biden and the Democratic party, Trump repeatedly attacked them as socialists, anti-American, and enemies of the people. Relentlessly Trump asserted that the Democrats were behind the “steal” and that their corruption knew no bounds.

The problem was that he had no facts to back up his assertions. No problem. According to the leader, the Big Lie needs no validation, it is self-evident and incontrovertible. Trump’s intention was that through the emphatic ceaseless repetition of the lie, it would become true, at least to his followers. This delusion has in fact proved accurate as 70 percent of Republicans came to believe that the election was not free and fair. Even after the collapse of Trump’s support in Washington D.C. his followers in the states remained loyal believers in “the steal” and Trump’s blamelessness (New York Times, January 15).

But it turned out that Election Officials and the Courts did demand some facts. But all that Trump and his attorneys had were wild assertions and exhortations to invalidate votes (mostly those of black Americans).

Fortunately, during and after the 2020 elections the guardrails of democracy held firm. The mechanics of voting were reliable and accurate. The officials providing oversight proved honest and capable. The courts settled disputes fairly. And investigators charged with pursuing fraud, found none. The democratic process supported a clear truth – Biden won.

Crashing the Guardrails: Attacking Democracy at its Heart

In normal times democracy is protected by a variety of guardrails which are commonly recognized and supported. These guardrails are not just institutions, laws, governmental procedures but importantly a shared commitment to live according to these rules and to respect them. They insure that a leader, such as Trump, driven by antidemocratic intentions, can be managed and controlled. (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018, “How Democracies Die”)

However, in pursuit of revenge and his futile assertion of overwhelming victory, Trump attempted to subvert any guardrail which did not promote and validate the Big lie. In this regard there is a direct line from election night to the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6th.

Insurrection

Trump built an army of believers who have bought the Big Lie, believing at his urging that the election was a fraud and that “their President” must be retained in office at all costs. For these fanatical supporters there is no longer a need for Trump’s gaslight. They have as a community organized themselves around a whole series of falsehoods and paranoid conspiracy theories which have become self-generating and self-sustaining. In the face of defeat, they too were beginning to psychologically crumble. Only action could not prevent the disintegration of their fragile sense of self. The intersubjective field composed of Trump and his followers was now forlorn, living in the trailing edge of hopelessness and dread. Survival required more than rhetoric or rallies to shore themselves up and their failing grandiose fantasy.

If the narcissism of a group is wounded, then we find the same reaction of rage that we have discussed in connection with individual narcissism…The wounded group can be healed only if the offender is crushed and thus the insult to one’s narcissism is undone. Revenge, individual and national, is often based on the wounded narcissism and on the need to “cure” the wound by the annihilation of the offender. (Fromm, 1964, p. 83)

Trump’s base felt wounded to be sure, but it was the damage done by the Lie, the corrosive deception which Trump promulgated simply to assuage his own bloated and precarious Self. He knew that the more he stated the Big Lie, the more it would in fact become true to his followers, and when as Hitler noted, the Base had become “sufficiently corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature” he would call them to Washington to do his bidding with action and destructive behavior.

In spite of his cleverness, Hitler was not capable of seeing reality objectively, because his wish to win and to rule weighed more heavily for him than the realities of armaments and climate. (Fromm, p.82)

If political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorification the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences. (Fromm, p. 80)

After failing in every attempt he and his “lawyers” made to refute or overturn the election, Trump faced the imminent certification of Biden’s victory by the Congress on January 6, 2021. At that point, in the real world, Trump would be out of options. However, now the gaslight was turned upon the Congress. Trump insisted that the senators and congressmen had the power to throw out the fraudulent votes from many states. He lobbied and threatened until some Republicans agreed to accede to his wish and vote against certification. However, that was not enough, he then turned on the Vice President, who Trump insisted had the authority to throw out millions of votes, handing Trump the victory (a clear violation of the Constitution). During this time, he also called Governors and State Secretaries of State, cajoling, threatening, bullying them in an effort to throw out the clear Biden victory.

Finally, confronted by the imminent defeat of all his efforts, Trump summoned his followers to the “Save America’‘ rally at the Capital. Action not words became the imperative. He goaded them on: “Be there. Will be wild!”. At this point Trump’s wounded narcissism, desperation and rage were flailing at anyone who had ever humiliated and shamed him. His typical MAGA followers showed up, but he needed other groups with far more paranoid beliefs and more violent intent (most worryingly white supremacist militias) to help him affirm his and their greatness. Many of Trump’s henchmen addressed the group. “We will have trial by combat.” Rudolph Giuliani declared to the crowd’s delight. The mood was one of indignation, rage and self-righteousness. As Kohut noted:

The leader of such a group is not primarily the focal point of shared values, but self-righteously expresses the groups ambitions and extols its greatness and power. (Kohut, 1981, p.36)

Trump addressed the crowd:

“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by bold and radical left Democrats, which is what they are doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That is what they have done and what they are doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. You don’t concede when theft is involved…We will not take it anymore. That is what this is about…We will stop the steal. We want to go back, and we want to get this right, because we’re going to have somebody in there that should not be in there, and our country will be destroyed. And we are not going to stand for that…You will never take your country back with weakness…”

On January 6th, to the eager, emboldened mob, he once again asserted the Big Lie. He has won a great victory for the American people. But the enemy had stolen their vote. America was at risk of destruction. He and his followers would “save America” and “keep America Great” And they all knew who was to blame! He exhorted the group to defy the theft and fight to save America from destruction. When Trump spoke of the country being destroyed he was speaking about his own internal state of mind. He was collapsing into the despair of becoming Fred Trump’s soul crushing failing child, and he needed the violence and rage of the mob to save himself.

However, perhaps in the end, the most frightening thing about the insurrection on January 6, is that Trump may no longer have needed to stoke the group’s beliefs, rage and motivation for revenge. Having spent years nurturing the grievances and loyalties of right wing paramilitary groups such as the Proud Boy’s, Qanon, and the Boogaloos Bois, these groups, once marginalized, had become autonomous, organized and self-driven for revenge and violence. Trump had provided them an answer to the desperation of their own lives. Violence could affirm their greatness. Actions not words were necessary to secure a deranged “hope”.

All Trump had to do was whip up the group’s paranoia and rage, and set them in motion towards the Capitol. The mob behaved like a voracious, rampaging animal without a head, surging up Capitol Hill, thrusting aside the police as they invaded the building searching for Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi, or any other of the “traitors” who had stolen their country. Claiming that they were acting on instructions of “their President” it soon became clear that they were loosely organized, coordinated and clear in their intent. The fact that so little blood was in fact spilled was only because of resourceful police and the availability of numerous hiding places for the congress. The group were acting on Trump’s unconscious desire to not sink into the despair of his trailing edge of hopelessness and existential annihilation.

Ominously, during this time gallows was constructed on the lawn outside, with a noose suspended and ready for the neck of Mike Pence, who had betrayed the President by fulfilling his constitutional duty by certifying the election.

The mob had a clear intent and purpose: to stop the election certification and apprehend and punish government officials whom they declared to be traitors. This was clearly no longer a grandiose fantasy, but cold blooded insurrection and sedition. Fantasy alone no longer supported the imperiled narcissism.

An essential question, which has dire implications for the security of our country in the immediate future, is how did Trump’s strategy of a grandiose tie between him and his followers, which largely involved rallies, tweets and a web of lies and falsehoods which rarely went beyond the “small lie” and simple falsehood; how did this fantasy become transformed into frank violence and insurrection?

As Kohut and Fromm explain, normally the leader’s aggression is bound and contained by the restraints of reality and the self-confirming environment which mirrors and sustains his or her narcissism. In Trump’s case for many years his destructiveness was directed by means of lawsuits, tweets and verbal threats. However, when the grandiose leader such as Trump is faced with a truly dire threat to his precarious self-organization, annihilation anxiety follows, accompanied by a desperate need to attack and destroy “the Other”, who is to blame. In Trump’s case, as the evident and irrefutable reality of his loss closed in on him, his rage lost all constraints as he mobilized and exhorted his faithful rabble to attack the evil perpetrators who had undermined his fantasy of grandeur. Trump “the Loser” was intent on taking them all down with him.

The Collaborators

It is important to note that the forms of psychological and political pathology which we have discussed would never have been successful without the support and collaboration of self-interested politicians, media companies and personalities, and business leaders who saw in this movement opportunities to promote their own interests and gain political power. These actors in the tragedy of our nation were not motivated by emotional and psychological necessity but financial and political interests. They aided and abetted Trump and his followers to the extent to which their own desire for power and profit saw an opportunity. Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Sheldon Adelson, Rupert Murdoch, and many others took advantage of Trump’s influence to pursue and achieve their interests. Their cynical and avaricious pursuit of power has been inexcusable. Their promotion of narrow partisan goals without concern for the National interest has sustained and promoted the psychopathological aims of Trump and his followers. Understanding and interpreting their values and motives is beyond the scope of this study. Perhaps Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” might explain the dreadful opportunism which they share with the likes of Adolph Eichmann.

Trump’s Forever War? – The Grandiose Struggle and the Perpetuation of Trumpism

What will become of Trump and Trumpism after January 20, 2021?

In the film Hellboy by Director Guiermo Del Toro, the Nazis had built a “dimensional portal” linking our world with an alternate universe populated with hellish demons. In the course of the film the possibility of further infiltration by these demons threatens the world.

By attacking the values and institutions of American Democracy, rending the body politic and the integrity and viability of the Commonweal, Donald Trump not only allowed for, but encouraged the eruption into mainstream society, corrupt forces of mendacity, archaic narcissism and destructive rage. In the course of this calamity, Donald J. Trump was raised up in the minds of his followers as a perverse ideal, a caricature of a President, not a true leader, but a destroyer, the embodiment of all the overwhelming shame, panic, and self-hatred – hell bent to enact revenge and to assert the rule of chaos.

They believed that they were invited to insurrection by Trump and that they were carrying out the great leader’s directives as they streamed up the hill towards the Capitol. And we believe that as the mob broke into the Rotunda of the Capitol Building they looked up at the interior of the dome, around at the numerous marble columns, sculptures and grand paintings. And what did they feel? – fear, envy, and rage. As we argued in our last paper, there is no communal feeling in Trump-world. There is no caring for the other, or concern for the common good, only self-interest and envy. And in the end, the ultimate satisfaction is in violence and the joy of smashing what is perceived as better than oneself.

All that will come of this bizarre insurrection, if it truly takes hold and spreads, is ruin.

Going Forward

“The Winner”: Joe Biden’s Quest for Restoration

Joe Biden will have a lot of work to do. Managing a pandemic, preventing economic collapse, fighting racial inequality, and implementing a fair policy towards immigration, these are all major challenges.

And he will do this in a country in which Trump’s Big Lie lives on. Even now just several weeks since the Capital insurrection the Republican party is trying to alter history through lies. The riot was caused by Antifa. Black Lives Matter protests were just as bad. The rape of the Capital was no worse than the prior summer’s marches and scuffles with the police.

Even now, throughout the country Republicans continue to promote the Big Lie. The election was rigged and Trump had his victory stolen from him is still asserted by a majority of the Republican base. The Lie will outlive the liar. The damage which Trump has done to the body politic will endure.

Joe Biden’s career and life have been shadowed by major losses as well as powerful personal ambition and quite a bit of success. In the midst of a long career as a Senator, he lost two bids for the Presidency, efforts which were undone to some extent by his own hubris and mistakes. Finally, it was the death of his beloved son Beau which underlay Biden’s decision to seek the presidency once again. Specifically, it was his quest to fulfill his dead son’s exhortation to run again (perhaps to fulfil Beau’s destiny), as the bereaved father, placing aside his own needs, to live up to what he imagines to be Beau’s wishes (expectations). Biden has said that he often stands in front of the mirror and asks Beau: “How am I doing?” An apparent effort to maintain the idealized bond which he shared with Beau. His relationship with Beau also provides an intersubjective dyad of two who are residing in the leading edge of their hopes and dreams. In leading edge experiences, we feel the hopefulness of living and acting with healthy ambition and living by and with principles that enrich us and keep us alive and vital.

Hence, Biden’s motivations to seek the presidency are fundamentally different from Donald Trump’s. To be clear, anyone who has succeeded politically, as Joe Biden has, is motivated by ambition and the need to be seated in the chair of the most powerful man in the world. The chair behind the resolute desk is occupied by someone whose sense of himself must have a healthy sense of grandiosity and ambition. However, he has been as close to being a selfless campaigner and president elect as any in our nation’s history. Rather than seeking self-aggrandizement and power he seems focused on getting things right, on seeking expertise and wise counsel and making use of his power to craft a professional, competent and ethical administration.

Of course Biden’s apparent “goodness” will be put to the test, once he confronts the dark reality of our toxic political world in his effort to return to his moderately progressive agenda. The restoration we long for is not going back to days before Trump, because as malignant as Trump has been, he marshalled a vast population of followers who attached themselves to his grandiosity as an antidote to their own quiet suffering. Their suffering will have to be addressed. The Restoration we speak about is a return to economic fairness, social and political order, belief in truth, justice for all, and a consistent rule of law that we believe most Americans still hold dear. This is a tall order.