Roots of the Trump follower (aka Take it from a former callous Libertarian)

Trump followers were bent in a bad direction in their childhood. One of a million possible analogies to their plight is the woman who, once an abused girl given no empathy, buried and lost her expansive heart, lived under siege, ran from warmth to sex then to immature abusive men, remained a victim under siege, too emotionally ungrown and too suppressed to defend herself or her children, eventually stumbled upon a man who had a heart, who didn’t keep her chains on her, then her hell broke loose. That’s not the best analogy, but it points to the eyes that could never see selfless warmth again, only possessive warmth; to the child in the adult, to what was dormant and latent all along: hell.

It’s a pretty terrible plight to have to be a person whose formative years merely survived, without love, without gifts, without peace, falling over the Rubicon onto the adult plateau with infinitely heavy baggage and an empty suitcase. I know these people – women and men. All of their feelings are different from more fortunate people’s, though they will seem the same. Their love is different, their loyalties, their distrust, their neediness, their hate which can be murderous in suppressed fantasy, unless they come to therapy and voice it.

I want to make it clear that I’m not talking only about the worst abuses, growing up. I would have been fine, deliciously fine, with Trump had I not found some pieces of my heart later in life, yet I was never abused. Rather, I was silenced by the aridness of my home. I was invisible to everyone, as they were preoccupied with their own prisons and their own escapes. That can be enough to make someone survive but on the wrong nourishment, the fuel of self-medication, superiority, plotting anger.

Could someone on his deathbed laugh at a good joke? Of course: We’re ridiculously layered, with our conscious, preconscious, unconscious (Freud), our basic adherence to the norms of society while there are various hells sitting still inside or running in tiny loops. Because of our complexity, a Trump fan could, like me, feel different if something moved inward. He or she could heal somewhat or a lot.