5.6 Trump is not the real problem
It would be okay for Trump to be Trump…
If nobody followed him.
The problem is his tribe. The MAGA tribe. The tens of millions of people who rage against democracy and hate anyone not like them.
Except it’s not really Trump’s tribe, in that it doesn’t really belong to him. It’s…
A crowd-sourced tribe.
Trump is not the creator. He did not make a plan to build this tribe from scratch. He didn’t follow a blueprint. He’s not a skilled organizer.
MAGA looks like it’s his tribe. Newscasters and pundits call him the leader of the MAGAs, but he’s not really. He’s the…
Catalyst.
He went out in the world and made himself visible and was obsessed with publicity and people gathered around him. And why? Because he touched something in them, something already there inside them, and released it.
And he did this…
Unconsciously rather than consciously.
Actually it’s worked so well specifically because the core of his behavior is mostly unconscious. Trump is run by…
Unconscious compulsions.
Not by some smart and sophisticated super-strategy.
And this is why shame doesn’t touch him. And why he keeps trucking even when caught in lies, even when he screws up, even when he falls flat on his face, he keeps telling his own story, compulsively, to himself and to the world.
And compulsion is a special kind of force. How do we know this? Look at the politicians who try to copycat Trump, maybe hoping to replace him. They can parrot the MAGA talking points, they can rage and rant, they can pull stunts to please the base, but there’s one thing they cannot do…
Copy Trump’s compulsion.
That’s because a compulsion is not something you can copy by plan or by rote. You’ve either got it or you don’t.
These wannabes have compulsions of their own, and immaturities of their own, and evils of their own, and they can win supporters of their own, but so far none of them has come close to matching Trump’s popularity with the MAGAs, because these wannabes are missing…
His depth of compulsion.
And…
The invincibility of his compulsion.
And the MAGAs can smell the difference.
Meanwhile…
Trump is authentic.
I hate associating that word with him because I want “authentic” to be reserved for things that are good and noble and healthy.
But Trump is…
Authentic in his compulsions.
It’s true that he can be manipulative and cagey. But that’s around the edges. All his behaviors, even the tricky moves he makes, are motivated by his core compulsion…
To suck attention and have his own way, so he can suck even more attention.
At his core, Trump is always Trump and likely will be till the day he dies. The MAGAs can always count on him to be who he is. And this means Trump is in a twisted way…
Trustworthy.
Which is such a strange thing to say about a guy who is a world-class liar. He’d win the gold medal if there were an Olympics of lying.
Lying has been so essential to his life all his years, I imagine he thinks of it as just something you do when you’re going after what you want. For him, there’s no moral pejorative around lying. It’s just a tool. One that has proven to be very useful to him.
And for the MAGAs, Trump’s lying is baked into his persona. They not only accept it, they find relief in his lying, because they’re liars, too. He gives them permission to live inside their delusions.
Still…
They own him more than he owns them.
It was the same with Hitler. Albert Speer, a favorite of Hitler’s and his Minister of Armaments, said in his book, Inside the Third Reich:
As I see it today, Hitler and Goebbels were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course, Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbels’ baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme.
If we could find a way to bring MAGAs back into reality and convert them to lives of nurturance and contribution, then we wouldn’t have to worry about Trump.
So why don’t the media pundits focus on Trump’s followers? And do something to help them live better lives. The reason is…
They don’t know how to fix the MAGAs.
For all their posturing as being the smartest people around, and ready to explain everything to us brilliantly every night, they have no idea how to bring these people back to reality…
They don’t know how to convert them from nihilism to nurturance.
And they don’t want to look impotent. Not in front of the camera and their viewers. So they focus almost exclusively on Trump, who a family systems therapist would call the identified patient of our society.
And anyway, such a thing would be a big, complex, labor-intensive, time-consuming project. And our media don’t take on big, long-term issues. They prefer to focus on personalities, and especially personality battles. They prefer debilitating gossip to serious, intensive healing.
Pundits say that the MAGAs are a cult. I don’t like to use that word in this context, because “cult” makes it sound like the MAGAs are some kind of aberration. Off in their own corner of the culture.
But they’re a major force in politics and society. They’re mainstream. So we should call them a tribe. Which is a more fearsome thing than a cult
Trump is not the problem, MAGA is. Except MAGA is just a tribe, it’s not the ultimate source of the problem. The MAGAs didn’t invent nihilism.
Where does it come from then? What birthed it? What makes it possible? The source, I’m sorry to say is…
The human psyche.
Our psyches have learned how to pull off the trick of transforming deep despair into explosive rage. And they’ve gotten good at it. And I hate that this is so, but it’s so.
The human psyche has created a way of life that is more monstrous than anything our hunter-gatherer ancestors could have imagined.
Nihilistic tribes are a stunning malfunction of what tribes are supposed to be. Tribes are supposed to support life not drive us down the road to extinction. We’re supposed to fight for ourselves, not surrender to death.
And as hard as it is to oppose traditional tribalism, it’s harder to oppose nihilistic tribalism.
Which means that right at the heart of political activism in our time is this truth…
We need to be more powerful in our smart and strategic nurturance than the nihilists are in their soul-destroying hate.
