The Deep Psychological Reason We're Stuck in This Feedback Loop With Donald Trump [View all]

[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*