The Deep Psychological Reason We're Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/10/how-donald-trump-could-still-be-winning.html

This is the third time Donald Trump has run for president as a major-party candidate, and yet, this cycle, the American electorate and the American press seem unable to fully comprehend the choice we are facing.* It is not, as we’ve been trained to think, a contest between an extreme Republican and a middle-of-the-road Democrat. There is still no language that conveys what the stakes really are. This election is not about politics; it’s much more basic—it’s about how the American determines what is real. Will the future of the country be based on evidence and law, or will government be twisted to reflect whatever Donald Trump tells us is true?

It reminds me of a series of phone calls I started receiving, when I was a teenager, from women I didn’t know. They were all looking for a man named Steven Reisner, whom they had been dating; somehow, none of them had ever gotten his phone number, so they had found me in the phone book. It turned out that, invariably, after a few dates, this other Steven Reisner had borrowed money from them, then disappeared. I remember one particularly plaintive voice on the phone: “Steven, why are you lying to me? What have I done wrong?” Try as I might, I couldn’t convince her that it wasn’t me. “Does this mean our engagement is off?” she asked me.

Since those calls, I have come to realize that those women simply did not understand that they had been dating a sociopath. That’s because people who are not sociopathic just can’t believe that pure sociopathy exists. They can recognize that they are being lied to, even being manipulated, but still they believe that somewhere inside the sociopath there is a human being like they are, perhaps a hurting soul gone astray. Psychologists, too, make this mistake, believing that sociopaths are not strategic but, rather, mentally ill, because they were traumatized in childhood. It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.

Democrats in particular suffer from this neurosis; they are regularly surprised and outraged with each new iteration of Trump’s lies and cruelty, reacting not unlike the women who used to call me on the phone. They just can’t believe that someone could be so brazenly deceptive and selfish and get away with it. Over and over again. Politics has always been a tough game, Democrats think, but even Dick Cheney believes in the rules. These rules can be stretched, but ultimately, they continue to tell themselves, the system will persevere, right?

*snip*

[highplainsdem]

1. Interesting read, but Reisner is blaming the wrong people Democrats know exactly what Trump is. It's the media

normalizing him. Sanewashing him.

[spooky3]

4. I agree. Expressing outrage doesn't mean TFG's behavior surprises you.

If the author really wants to explain the “deep psychological meaning” of something, he must explain why only some people, eg, Republicans, fail to see or act on the abundant evidence that TFG is a sociopath.

[Scrivener7]

7. I partly agree. But we do still have people, even here on DU, who say things like,

"He won't do that. That's illegal. There are laws against that."

It amazes me.

That has NEVER been a consideration for him. NEVER. And it never will be in the future.

[Walleye]

2. This is why a big lie is more likely to be believed than a small one

[Quiet Em]

3. I love the banner you have in your posts.

Awesome.

[Nevilledog]

5. ...

[Metaphorical]

6. Psychologists treat sociopaths as a syndrome, not a disease

A syndrome is a collection or cluster of related traits, without there necessarily being some kind of associated pathology. This distinction is important because there are no treatments that will make a sociopath into a whole person. Many people do not understand this - they see the image the he has woven around himself, but they don't examine his behavior, or the fact that this behavior has remained remarkably constant for the last fifty years.