Why Trump?

Or the others

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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For Freud, sexuality was the driving force behind human activity. Narcisso-Fascism demotes sexuality to an also-ran. In view of a 53 page report issued this week by the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, that’s a bit shocking. The report describes the long-term sexual predation by one DJ Trump and his close friend, the late Jeffrey Epstein, among many other rich and powerful people. Doesn’t that sound as though that’s all they were after? No, that was icing on the cake.

Narcisso-fascism says the primary drive of the healthy human is to form social groups; close behind that, in No. 2 position, are two related drives. The first, xenophobia or fear of strangers, is more or less the reverse of the urge to mix with familiar people. The second, the urge to dominate, can’t take form unless there are people to dominate; once the social drive has done its job by forming groups, people move to their second priority, forming hierarchies and fighting to get higher. The opposite urge, the drive to avoid domination is equally as strong but lasts longer.

These are powerful, biologically-mediated drives but they are not absolutes, they can easily be overridden if the person chooses. Sexuality is a fringe benefit of being dominant but is not itself the primary motivation for people struggling to get up the ladder. Being higher in status is inherently rewarding. It has to be otherwise doddery old men (and a lot of old women) whose sexual lives have long gone would step aside and allow someone else to be top dog, but they never do. Even in their dotage, they tenaciously hang on to power and lash out at competition like things possessed – which they are, possessed by a powerful biological urge they don’t even know exists, although they know it feels good.

The Judiciary Committee report consists of a 6 page executive summary followed by 8 pages setting out the main characters and their modus operandi. The next 22 pages give details taken from witness depositions at the enquiry, all of which is deeply disgusting but the authors are clear that the report is only a very brief and sanitised version of the material on record. It’s followed by 15 pages that shows how Trump has consistently lied about every aspect of this sordid affair and, crucially, how the Dept of Justice and FBI and others have helped him cover his crimes.

The last section blows up the repeated statements by several attorneys-general and FBI directors that there is insufficient material to justify prosecution of Trump or his enablers, or even reopening the investigation of the entire Epstein saga. They conclude that because there is little reason to believe the Trumpians will ever do their duty, “Congress must continue to use its legislative and oversight powers to pursue justice for survivors and bring an end to the Trump Administration’s shameful, bureaucratic, and political cover-up.” With luck, that threat is keeping Herr Drumpf and a few hundred other depraved individuals awake at night, but it raises a very important question: Why Trump? Why, after his first disastrous showing, did 77million apparently sane and literate people vote to give him a second bite at the cherry? I haven’t spoken to any of them but we’ll see what they say of themselves.

First thing to note is the enormous contradictions between what Trump promised during his campaign and what the voters expected or should have known. Take farmers, for example, about 85% of whom voted for Trump II. He specifically and repeatedly stated that would immediately impose tariffs on a very wide range of imported goods, including machinery. Modern farmers are very dependent on machinery. Anybody who can read would know that supply lines for manufacturing farm equipment and so on are all international. You only have to look at a John Deere tractor to know it was made in Canada, or the pumps came from China, the ploughs from Mexico and so on. Every hammer and nail is imported, every hose, the huge tyres for the trucks built from parts in three or four countries, it’s written on them.

Farmers may not have known their fertilisers came from the Persian Gulf or their diesel fuel from India but most farmers are not stupid, they should have known that tariffs go both ways: you put one on my goods and I’ll put one on yours. Farms grow stuff for export, and the people who are buying American food are not going to sit quietly if the exports they send to pay for it are taxed. And so it happened. Without Congressional approval, Trump imposed massive tariffs on everything farmers need to buy, and the people who buy their produce promptly stopped buying. Oh dear. Another important factor comes from Trump’s “war against immigrants,” i.e. the very labour force that makes things grow and harvests them. Suddenly, there aren’t the swarms of small brown people flowing through the country, keen to take any job they could get, so fruit is rotting on trees and pigs aren’t being fed. Importing countries have simply stopped buying American but, once gone, buyers never come back. Now the farmers are going broke in droves, currently hundreds a month but by March or April, it will be thousands. OMG who could possibly have predicted this? A lot of people, actually, so why did farmers vote for the man who was promising to bankrupt them? It doesn’t make any sort of rational sense. There are a lot of farmers asking themselves that question right now but the answer lies in the irrationality. It was irrational, that’s why they voted for him.

Similarly, Trump promised to end “forever wars” which always got a big cheer at his rallies. A thousand times, he said the war in Ukraine was Biden’s fault, he would end it on Day One, if he’d been president, it would never have happened yet here we are, Day 646, the Russians are continuing to advance and Ukraine is on the brink of bankruptcy. And that doesn’t count the two unprovoked and criminal wars that Trump and his BFF Bibi have launched in the Persian Gulf that look set to cause a worldwide depression.

He said he would reduce inflation but it’s now worse than when he took over and we’re only seeing the start of it. Interest rates are up, the cost of fuel has nearly doubled, food is more expensive and all the clothes from Vietnam and Bangladesh cost twice as much. He promised to get rid of his pet hate, Obamacare, which he has done, so twelve million people have now lost health cover and rate that as one of their most pressing concerns. School lunches, food stamps for the poor, all those wasteful socialist measures have been dumped, yet the bulk of people who relied on them voted for him. Trump specifically and repeatedly said he would deport people so Hispanics voted for him in bulk, first time ever, and what does he do? He deports them. You can’t make this up.

Similarly, nobody could possibly have been fooled by his lies. He is on record of lying 30,573 times first time round, starting in his inaugural address and accelerating from 6 per day to 43 times a day by the end. This time, it’s worse but at least he can now plead dementia. And let’s not forget his repeated promises to release the Epstein files, all 6 million of them; despite a specific Act of Congress, nothing has happened. He is a lying sexual predator, a known fraudster and cheat, yet tens of millions of people who would claim to be “God-fearing Christians” lined up, dutifully spat on the Democratic candidate and plumped for Trump. How come? He went on and on about the “Biden crime family” and “Hunter Biden’s lap top” and how he would clean up their corruption but now we learn that Kushner J, the First Son-in-Law, has been implicated in a fraudulent scheme of truly cosmic proportions. A book due shortly, reviewed in Vanity Fair (pay wall; also here and here), shows how several billion dollars passed from the UAE and Saudi Arabia to accounts in Azerbaijan and Israel that Kushner could operate. The purpose was to facilitate contacts with the White House. Apart from the normal operations of the arms and high tech spying industries, this is probably the most egregious example of high level corruption in US history. Not just corruption; almost certainly, it involves treason of a high order. Did Trump know about it? Of course he did, he knows all about dirty money. It’s worth mentioning that, as a “volunteer” envoy, Kushner did not have to go through the Senate vetting process, so no burrowing in his dirty linen, and does not have to comply with financial transparency or conflict of interest regulations. That’s clever, don’t you think?

You get the message: people voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party and now they’re shocked to wake up with no face: “But I didn’t think they would eat my face.” When asked why they voted for him, people say “I believed him.” What did the 80% of evangelicals who voted for him believe? Their votes made him, without them he would have crashed and burned. Obviously, they didn’t believe everything he said, only the bits that suited them, and they ignored his depravity, so what was so exciting? As I said, I haven’t spoken to any of them but we can guess: they believed him when he said he would crush their enemies. He licensed them to hate and despise as much as he manifestly hates and despises, and they loved it. They loved it so much that they managed to convince themselves that his many past failings were minor and future failings would be temporary, a small inconvenience on the path to glory. That is, they heard him say he would lift them up the hierarchy to make them feel more important and more powerful. Of course, he didn’t say he would make them personally more powerful, he made their religion more powerful, he would help it all come true via wars in the Middle East, and they swooned. He told his adoring fans to activate the second most powerful but most destructive of all human drives, the urge to be on top, to stand over all the lesser people and sneer at them. They believed him because they could tell he was speaking from the heart, which he was because hating is the only impulse that has driven him these 80 years.

Now we all like to win, we like our children to win but for most of us, it’s not oxygen. We can be very comfortable as No. 2 or No. 2,002 in the hierarchy, it’s not that important. For Trump and his millions of followers, winning is indeed oxygen because they have nothing else, no inner resources that allow them to say “I’m fine, I don’t need to win every point. Somebody else can have a go.” However, when being on top is written into the national psyche, there’s trouble. Four examples stand out. First is Britain, which used its industrial power to build an enormous navy and army in order to conquer distant tribes and princedoms. The British perfected the art of getting a toehold in some foreign place, then using that to form shifting alliances with the local panjundrums to defeat one tribe after another until they had control over the whole territory. They said it was to bring light to the benighted but that was just to fool the old ladies at home who held the family loot; the real purpose was to bleed the colonies of their natural wealth while making them dependent on British manufacturing. Nothing has changed, they’re still doing it although a touch more sophisticated than blowing away the opposition with naval guns, as Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) put it:

Whatever happens, we have got

the Maxim gun, and they have not.

(He also said: “Our legal machinery has become little more than an engine for protecting the few owners against the necessities, the demands, or the hatred of the mass of their dispossessed fellow-citizens” p62 of The Servile State, 1912). That’s Britain. In Germany, the Nazis came to power by promising to Macht Deutschland wieder groß, Make Germany Great Again. Their appeal to racist dominance was so fundamental to everything they did that it soaked through the entire nation. The ordinary Hans and Helga loved the intoxicating idea of Deutschland über alles and they fell for it, ecstatically waving their young Heinie goodbye as he shouldered his rifle and set out to carve an empire out of the Slavic lands. That was the last they ever saw of him as the Slavs had other ideas, as all humans do. There are probably hundreds of other examples in history but that brings us to the present, where two countries with a superiority complex are making serious difficulties for everybody else. Case example No. 1 is, of course, the Good Ol’ US of A, the “greatest, most powerful, richest and most amazing country in human history,” if Mrs Rubio’s little boy is to be believed. So what? Who cares? He didn’t contribute anything to building it so why is he running around, beating his pigeon chest and playing with himself? Because he gets a surrogate thrill out of it, same as people who have never kicked a football get their jollies out of waving a flag and squealing when “their” team scores a goal.

What they’re saying is: “On my own, I’m nothing much but if I join this strong group, I’ll feel part of something powerful, I’ll feel bigger than I am.” That’s why people wear uniforms and badges, it identifies them as part of a power structure and they feel the power flow through them. The higher people go up the hierarchy, the gaudier their uniforms become. This is true of all decorations, including women’s jewellery. It simply says: Mine are better than yours. The uniform itself is actually ridiculous – imagine one of the Grenadier Guards going to the beach in his scarlet tunic and busby. What a joke. It only looks impressive when it’s one of hundreds marching along in step, radiating the sense of power that’s intended to subdue the hoi polloi. But it goes both ways. Little Jimmy can look at the Guards and think “If I joined them, I’d be big and powerful too so that’s what I’m going to do.” At the same time, the recruiters can go around saying “If you join us, sonny, you can stop being a suburban nobody and have people look up to you. Believe us, it’s so much better.” With all their flag-waving and saluting and pledges of allegiance, Americans have spread this through the nation until it’s second nature. When the Nazis did it, it was called brainwashing. Germany got over it but there’s no chance of Rubio coming out and saying: “Actually, we don’t have the moral right to invade and sanction and bomb and starve people. All we’re doing is wrecking their lives and bankrupting ourselves, so we need to tone this stuff down.” Everybody has so much invested in “Amerika über alles” that nobody dares even think that.

Where Uncle Sam has elevated the lust for superiority to a political dogma, Israel has elevated it to the level of religion. Armed with 200 nuclear weapons and backed by a superpower, Israel since inception has been busy with two related projects. The first, as anticipated by the founders of Zionism, was the physical job of clearing several million Palestinians from their traditional lands and eradicating any evidence that they once existed. In 1895, Theodore Herzl, one of the most influential of the early Zionists said:

(We must) try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

This became Plan Dalet, the program for ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Similarly, in his essay The Iron Wall from 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky (who started the movement that became Likud, Netanyahu’s party) said:

Zionist colonisation must be carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonisation can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

The second job is ongoing. Today, something like 92% of the Israeli population, male and female, young and old, are actively in favour of destroying Gaza, South Lebanon, the West Bank and various other places, driving out the indigenous population and flattening the place in order to fulfil God’s will. This is also true of the many atheist Israelis. This attitude is hammered home through two agencies, school and army. Nurit Peled-Elhanan, sister of Miko and a renowned educator and researcher in her own right, says Israeli schools conduct “education” in Israeli superiority from Day One (here and here). This continues during military conscription, which only applies to Jewish Israelis. Formal “education” classes are a mainstay of their two year period in uniform but they are never actually out of uniform as they automatically go into the reserves and are routinely called for service. The message is beamed at them night and day:

We Jews are unique, we’re special, Jews are chosen by God, everybody else hates us and wants to destroy us, we must stick together and support each other, if we relax our guard, they’ll try again, we can only be safe here in Israel Eretz, this land is ours by divine right, anybody who opposes us is satanic and must be destroyed, by driving off the Arabs and killing them, we are doing God’s will, we can never hand back any of this land because that defies God’s will ...

Brainwashing. From birth, delivered relentlessly by a combination of heretical religion and unlimited state power and money, all designed to make little Ikie Finkelstein feel that he is a vital part of some vast and immensely powerful cosmic plan and not just a shy, snotty-nosed kid with weak eyes who hides at the back of the class. It is difficult, verging on impossible, for an ordinary person of ordinary resources to resist it. All it is doing is what absolutist (aka fascist) regimes have done since the dawn of time, using a specific technology to activate the sense of excitement that comes from being lifted up the dominance hierarchy. It is all planned, all deliberate, Israel is no different from the Hitler Jugend, the Young Pioneers in the USSR, or Korean Kids for Kim Jong Il (roughly speaking). As the Jesuits said: “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man.” And woman. The only difference is that Israel now has the resources of Hollywood to aid the process of turning brains into putty – and of Silicon Valley to work out who the dissidents are, not that there are many.

So to the question we started with: Why do people do stupid, irrational, self-destructive or just plain evil things? Because humans are turned on by the sense of going up the ladder. It’s just so much more exciting than being nobody, so they’ll follow anybody who says “Hey, join my movement, I’ll help you get higher so you too can look down on people.” They believe that bit because it’s so exciting and it allows them to ignore the other side of the story: “Hey, farmers, vote for me and I’ll bankrupt you,” or “Hey, Latinos, vote for me and I’ll deport you,” or “Hey, students, vote for me and I’ll have you kicked out of your school,” or “Hey, parents, vote for me and I’ll send your kids to war.”

We believe what makes us feel good, that’s why the descendents of victims of pogroms are running their own pogroms, and children of Holocaust survivors are visiting a Holocaust on their neighbours, and the West doesn’t care because the neighbours are brown. It’s all to do with power and domination, and it will be our undoing.

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.