A different, non-Narcissistic, pathology of specialness

 

In future sessions, I may have the opportunity to try to “cure” some now-lame-duck Trump aficionados of their sense of uniquely entitled righteous indignation. “Why would you think the psychopath was robbed of the presidency? He simply lost.” “Why is your rage so superior, so right? Trump made you think he was God’s gift, didn’t he? He might have made you think you were God’s gift, I suspect. And yet he was just a blowhard.”

This is, or was, indeed a phenomenon: the extraordinary certainty of “God damn you, this is ours!” that Trump adherents owned and blasted into the nation’s cultural atmo­sphere. I don’t think I’ve seen this before. If in the past I lost a job oppor­tunity, I didn’t feel vicious rage. I knew no one who wanted to set fires and or who threatened murder when the election was stolen from Al Gore.

What has made these strange whites feel this way? Why is their anger so absent of reflec­tion, or even of regret, much less sad regret, or of a world view? I am certain the answer is childhood, where so much injustice was laid down in them day to day through abuse, disrespect, neglect, brutality, alcohol and drugs, coarseness, ugliness, fists to their face, watching mothers being choked. They never were helped, never allowed to cry. They became bruised and callused vessels filled to the brim with injustice. They became tiki torch marchers with their group self-soothing. They became the affable client whose marriage is improving but whose wife thinks he’s “kind of sociopathic,” who said that “I liked Trump because he has my mentality.” When he was fourteen, his father said “Have a nice life,” and set him free.

Almost all of us have an “inner child,” the unloved or neglected stages of our early lives that could not evolve. But those of the Trump cult, starved as they had been, could never move beyond their rage-pain. Thus their child was laid bare before us, yelling their tantrums of despondency and need, and their loss of an advocate, their echo.