Trump's Fans Have Stockholm Syndrome

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

In mid-November five years ago, Donald Trump asked the people of Fort Dodge, Iowa, “How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?” He was, of course, speaking of Ben Carson, his main rival at the time and future HUD Secretary. That  was led up by Trump's skepticism of an account in Carson's book, Gifted Hands. In it, Carson had related an apocryphal tale at how he lunged toward his friend with a knife and the knife hit the belt buckle and broke the blade.

     “It ain’t going to be successful,” Trump had said after turning his belt buckle this way and that. Then, “Anybody have a knife, you want to try it on me?” Of course, in real life, Trump would've shit his pants if anyone had actually taken him up on it. 

     Now, on the other hand, with Secret Service protection that holds him in contempt for treating them as he treats his supporters- Like expendable human assets, with the emphasis on "assets," Trump's free to mock anyone on the planet, even the people baking and freezing at his rallies. And they love him all the more for the abuse he hurls at them.

     Criminal psychologists have a phrase for that- It's called "Stockholm Syndrome." It was coined after a failed 1973 bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in which the captives actually seemed to bond with their captors, even to the point of aiding them in their criminal endeavors even to the point of refusing to testify against them in court. Of course, Stockholm Syndrome in active criminal situations is virtually impossible to conjure as a coping mechanism unless there's some reciprocation of kindness. It's also quite rare.

     This is where this particular, marathon instance of Stockholm Syndrome deviates from the clinical definition. There is no reciprocity of kindness, especially on Trump's part. Trump, as anyone who doesn't paint reproductions of The Last Supper on the wall with their own fecal matter knows, is simply incapable of kindness. In lieu of random acts of kindness, there are merely calculated, carefully-weighed favors that, like a true mob boss, Trump expects to be repaid at some future date. Or. as his niece, clinical psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Mary Trump would say, all his relationships are "transactional."

     The most hopeless aspect of the deteriorating mass delusion Trump has woven around himself seems to be in his supporters cheering him on even as he's insulting him in one "Give us hell, Harry!" moment after another. Last night on CNN, Don Lemon memorably played a supercut of Trump's most recent rallies in Erie, PA, Omaha, NE, Allentown,. PA and other places. As well as risibly feigning hating doing rallies, Trump was essentially saying, "I'd rather do anything but be here with you losers."

     And, time after time, the peasants rejoiced.

 

In the Middle of Fifth Avenue

 

It wasn't so long ago even in political time that former Coronavirus Task Force member Olivia Troye revealed in a video last month at how much Trump loathes his supporters. Troye had said this statement by Trump "pretty much defined who he was"- During a meeting, Trump had said, "Maybe this COVID thing is a good thing- I don't like shaking hands with people. I don't have to shake hands with these disgusting people."

     He was, of course, referring to those attending his rallies, his small money donors and supporters, in other words, ones you'd never see at a Trump resort as a guest or member.

    That was earlier this year and Trump thought the coronavirus pandemic that thus far has claimed nearly 230,000 American lives was "a good thing" so he could personally be spared the "disgusting" experience of shaking the hands with the people who would, and have, and will, literally die for him. In the last five days before the election, with Trump losing in virtually every state in one poll or another, he's letting it all hang out and literally telling his supporters at his rallies that he'd rather be anywhere but in their hometowns.

    In other words,  "You Can Die After You Vote For Me. After that, I don't give a shit what happens to you."

    Trump might be a completely insane fascist, someone inexorably inching to Hitler's mindset in the bunker in the spring of 1945, but never let it be said he does not know his base. He once infamously said on the campaign trail years ago that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and not lose a single vote. That holds true more than ever, which is why he's now emboldened to tell these same supporters in the last week of the last presidential election in which he'll likely run how he really feels about them.

    He'd ridiculed fallen Marines in France two years ago as "suckers and losers" for making the supreme sacrifice in following the orders of Trump's predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Yet countless servicemen and servicewomen will still vote for him. He'd secretly called faith leaders "hustlers" (which most of them are) and considered them rubes waiting to be roped in by his snake oil pitch. And millions of them will vote for him.

     As Adam Serwer reminded us two years ago, there's a perverse joy among such people in shared cruelty and contempt squirted at self-perceived enemies, even if some of that cruelty splashes back on them. They tend to be as servile as that John Cleese character in the infamous Mr. Creosote sketch in which the customer hurls nastiness, abuse and even vomit Cleese's waiter's way and yet the servility continues without a hitch. This is the perverse strain of Stockholm Syndrome we're seeing these days- They're being abused. (The recent death march of a rally in Omaha, Nebraska put at least seven people in the hospital while Trump, who'd complained about the cold, jetted off on a toasty Air Force One and thinking, if he thought of them at all, what "suckers and losers" they were.) The same with the supporters who succumbed to the heat and had to be carried away on stretchers in Tampa today. And they love him for it even to the point of aiding him in his criminal endeavors.

     In his memoir, Gifted Hands, Ben Carson had written, “As an example, child molesting. You don’t cure these people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that.” And Donald Trump, a self-described rapist of women, one who was sued twice for raping a 13 year-old child in Jeffrey Epstein's Manhattan townhouse, is now rearing his ugly, double-woven head proving that, as Dr. Carson rightly pointed out, "there's no cure" for being pathological.

     And there's none for his completely insane supporters.