The Psychology of the Anti-Trumpian: Part 1

by Dr. Charles William Dailey

Charles William Dailey discusses the deeper meaning of Trump derangement syndrome.

Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limited — also a sort of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature — finally an opportunity for acquiring spirit and becoming refined — malice spiritualized. It pleases them deep down in their hearts that there are standards before which those overflowing with the wealth and privileges of the spirit are their equals: they fight for the ‘equality of all men before God’ and almost need faith in God just for that.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The anti-Donald Trump movement — a large portion of the modern American Democrat Party as well as other assorted Marxists, socialists, anarchists, and fascists from around the world — is a secular religion. It is what I shall refer to in this essay as a purity cult in which, according to the cult’s ideological dogma and the prescriptions of its ‘high priests,’ cultists perform what I identify as the ‘ritual of hating’ Donald J. Trump. By various methods of direct and indirect social programming, this ritual has been translated in the mass of cultists into a general disposition that is directed towards the social construct ‘Donald J. Trump.’ This disposition has replaced cultists’ normal personality with a malleable ‘mass,’ or ‘anti-,’ personality that is useful to cult purposes. The product of this propaganda, ‘Donald J. Trump,’ is only the present focus of the cult — a temporarily useful focus of an intentionally formed mass fixation inculcated in order to develop a long-term, predictable, and irrational, mindset which is planned to, over time, replace in cultists any reasonable, or traditional, worldview. This programming was/is devised not for the purpose of hating one individual, as may appear to be the case, but in order to further long-term psychological manipulation, the ultimate end of which is the creation of a reliable ‘human mass’ which will affirm whatever dogma the cult endorses and deny whatever heresy it condemns. This programming’s (propaganda’s) end, again only presently centered on an admired and hated individual, has, thus, as its goal a planned general disposition that has been, and is being, created in accordance with identified antitheses to the cult’s axiomatic religious/ethical values — interpreted for the present, by the cult, to be archetypally instantiated in ‘Donald J. Trump.’

For ‘anti-Trumpian’ cultists, the above-mentioned incrementally entrained ‘ritual of hating’ becomes life itself, insofar as, for any religious believer, life is always completely infiltrated by the dogma of his/her particular faith. Having been so entrained — and since they have imbibed unawares a new concept of life by means of their entrainment — cultists no longer, in either their daily reflections or conversations on the social structure of America or of the world, distinguish a moral bearing in life other than the one centered on the cult’s newly constructed ‘enemy image.’ The religious programming processes that lead/led to this state, however, as they similarly do in the inculcation of atheism, for example, possess, for a religion, an uncharacteristically anti-metaphysical focus. For, it is a focus based not upon a positive conception of deity but, instead, the negative emotion of hate. Anti-Trumpian cultists’ ‘prime directive,’ as mentioned, is, therefore, religiously founded upon the ritual of hating the ideological construct ‘Donald Trump.’ This entire ‘scam,’ since it (intentionally) delves into religious sensibilities, can be only partially intended to serve purely political ends. What results, therefore, from the manipulation of a generally healthy religious sensibility innate in all humans is the construction of a postmodern ‘sacrificial lamb,’ or ‘scape goat,’ for cultists to focus all their negative energies on, though especially their hate. After eight years of, perhaps scientifically, inculcated irrational anger and obsession, therefore, ‘Trump,’ in cultists’ minds, has been articulated into the perfect archetypal villain of the twenty-first century. This ‘conclusion’ is based upon the same processes of ideology construction and techniques of mass propaganda employed in the building of the archetypal villain of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler. Let it be quickly said, however, before those searching for ‘white supremacists’ in their collective soup make the usual objections and screams of outrage, that the post-mortem caricature of Hitler is a different reality than the source of the non-debatable historical actions taken by him; it is what he has been fashioned into since his death that now obtains in the collective consciousness. The myth-making process involved in the construction of ‘Adolf Hitler’ appears, however, to be the same as that employed in the construction of ‘Donald Trump.’ In both cases, the basis of the constructed ‘meta-narrative’ is the systematic training, by means of repetitive programming, of individuals susceptible to the consumption of shallow mythologies, in order to make them focus inordinately on the negative deeds of one archetypally ‘evil’ individual while ignoring or diminishing the deeds of all others. Today’s constant comparison of Trump to Hitler is also for the propagandistic purpose of ‘handing the torch’ of ‘archetypal evil’ over to a new object of public focus, the creation, perhaps, of a ‘new mythology’ for a ‘new generation.’ Generally speaking, propaganda must be based upon both grinding repetition and beast-of-burden simplicity. Those who disagree with either of the identifications mentioned, from purity cultists’ perspective, are not lacking in reason — for reason is not employed in religious thinking or propaganda — but in the greatest of all cult virtues: pureness of cause in overcoming the ‘forces of evil.’

Ironically, and always with little empirical evidence and large amounts of innuendo, dubious ‘testimony,’ and half-truths, as well as from a state of (un-) consciousness or intoxication akin to (based upon ancient descriptions) that present in participants in ancient rites¹, anti-Trumpian purity cultists habitually claim that Trump and his supporters are themselves purists: ‘white supremacists,’ to be exact. The extension of the perceived ‘existential threat’ of Trump — as cultists imagine it — from Trump to his supporters is, I contend, from the level of religious commitment, psychologically necessary to cultists in order for them to inflate the nemesis that Trump represents to them, a projection that is psychologically vital to cultists’ maintaining the meaningfulness of the Trumpian threat as a sufficient reason for their (unconsciously) corrupting and degrading their own personality. This monstrous projection onto ‘Trump’ and his supporters of cultists’ own purity fixation is, more generally speaking, a projection of cultists’ obsessive and racialized view of human existence and social structures. In fanatical fashion, as is typical of true fanatics, an internal disharmony present in the subject (in the anti-Trumpian cultist, in this case) is projected onto an external object, person, or group, just in order for the subject to ‘overcome’ in this perceived-to-be external reality something which is really an obstruction in him/herself.

Anti-Trumpian cultists’ mass identification with the relatively new propaganda of ‘anti-racism,’ one of the defining traits characterizing the identity of many cultists, has found a convenient — or is it? — object of demonization in the tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed son of Northern European stock: a Scottish mother and a German father — a ‘white man’ who is not only financially successful but also personally charming and supremely confident. This combination of, to cultists: 1) archetypally disgusting physical traits and 2) ‘problematic’-to-the-formation-of-a-supplicant-collective character traits, in one individual, is, from the perspective of political animals sunk deeply into racialized and/or class consciousness ressentiment, overwhelmingly infuriating. In fact, no combination could more perfectly embody the anti-Trumpian cult’s ideal of ‘the historical enemy’ of their racial fixation, anti-personality, zeitgeist which is obsessed with the ‘rights of the marginalized,’ the ‘historical victimization’ of ‘people of color,’ and the plight of those who have been ‘denied success’ by men ‘who look like’ Trump. No other public figure — try and find one that meets all of the listed qualifications — more perfectly brings together both the immutable physical traits and the aristocratic character traits hated by anti-Western forces which are always busy exploiting the pent-up frustrations and engineered unhappiness of so-called ‘victimized and marginalized groups.’ These facts, for those paying attention, are manifested daily in the jargonistic diatribes which flow from cultists’ lips and pens in their attempts to satiate their drives to: 1) assimilate totally their perverse idea of ‘diversity’ (of appearance, racial heritage, sexual orientation, and ‘feeling’) and 2) adhere to the ideological ‘commandment’ of making the world completely ‘anti-racist’ — as if this state of being is a necessary condition for all future human life and happiness in the cosmos. The maniacal (as an actual mania) religious hatred of ‘Donald Trump,’ which lacks any metaphysical center of true religious sensibility and which has been programmed into cultists by exploiting their constructed or natural emotional instability, is, however, I contend, susceptible to an eventual, and dramatic, imploding of cultists’ deepest identities as persons, once the perceived ‘threat’ of Trump is eventually (‘hopefully,’ from cultists’ perspective) removed. This eventuality, it can be predicted, will likely cause widespread psychological harm and, in many cases, sublimation into further subcultures which are even more disconnected from healthy and traditional lifestyles than those the oxymoronic movement of ‘liberalism’ has already created.

Like all religions, the anti-Trumpian cult adheres to dogma concerning what makes humans acceptable (‘pure’) and what makes them unacceptable (‘dirty’) to the cult. 2016 Presidential Election loser Hillary Rodham Clinton infamously revealed this element of cult theology when she called Trumpians ‘deplorables’ — thereby giving permission to her minions, from her authoritative pulpit, to mass shame Trumpians rather than debate them in the spirit of true Americanism. Albeit now iconic, Clinton’s statement is but one example out of the toolbox of the ongoing anti-Trump conditioning process, which is, perhaps not accidentally, very similar to the propaganda techniques employed in communist Chinese ‘struggle sessions.’ All such vindictive-laden, derisive, divisive, and suggestive statements appear to be methodically ‘filtered out’ into the mass consciousness of anti-Trumpian cultists under the rhetorical shield of ‘plausible deniability’ as expressions of innocent frustration. They may also, however, be interpreted as crafty ‘doublespeak’ devices meant to imply how Trumpians should be treated — that is, they should be presumed in their nature to be ‘deplorable’ unless and until they have accepted the ‘higher truth’ of ‘progressivism’ and ‘confessed’ that the primary avatar of the modern-day devil is one ‘Donald J. Trump.’ This dehumanization process perpetrated against Trumpians must be, from the perspective of cult management, tirelessly and increasingly pursued — all time for other thoughts, especially doubts, must be systematically evacuated from cultists’ mental spaces in order to ensure ultimate ideological, then material, victory. “All spaces must be colonized,” for all-encompassing psychological assault is the key to maintaining in the minds of essentially freedom-loving people the ‘fact’ that ‘deplorables’ (Trumpians) don’t deserve to express their political, or moral, opinions or to ask non-kosher questions about the presumptions and goals of the cult. This hoped-for (from the perspective of the cult) state of metaphysical cleanliness, which is ‘next to’ the godliness of the god of ‘progress,’ was, and is, based upon the cult’s shriveled concept of deity and its similarly small conceptions of Self, human excellence (arête), and human potential.

1. Such as, for example, the Dionysian Mysteries in ancient Greece. The difference is in the ‘trance-inducing’ technique. Propaganda is an excellent substitute for wine and a much more subtle intoxicant.