The Spellbound Summer of Trump

Salvador Dali Animation From the Film "Spellbound"

It's been quite the surreal week of weeks in the Show of Shows.

Donald Trump retweeted a right-wing testimonial proclaiming him King of the Jews and the Chosen One, even as he accused any Jew who votes for the opposition party ( a/k/a The Enemy) of stupidity and disloyalty.

 He called the Danish prime minister "nasty" because she scoffed at his offer to buy Greenland. He is stalking away from an upcoming state visit to Denmark the same way he's pretended to walk away from other real estate deals his whole adult life- including his ultimately successful and highly leveraged acquisition of Mar-a-Lago at a relatively cheap (for him, personally) price after he and his lawyers performed much local government finagling, arm-twisting, whisper-campaigning, gaslighting, and other tricks of the property plunder trade.

So give the Greenland debacle some more time. Despite his legendary short fuse, Trump is a very patient man when it comes to real estate. He is also a lot smarter than he lets on in his word-salad tweets and rants. It should be fairly obvious that his craving for Greenland is proof that he is indeed rationally tethered to the reality of climate catastrophe. Greenland will turn green as the ice melts. It would be quite the haven for a good chunk of what The Economist in 2011 optimistically forecast to be the comfortable survival of hordes of remaining "reasonably rich people." The Brave New "Smart" World-Creators. The Chosen Ones. The Saviors.

You can help Trump and the Chosen Few to seal the deal and relocate for their own national security and that of their heirs by forking over $25 for a special t-shirt. It'll make you feel so cool while you swelter in our increasingly hot summers. Because Greenland will be closed to the proles, unfortunately.

But wait. There's more!

To effect what his cohort deems the survival of the fittest, Trump also ordered that refugees and immigrants be imprisoned indefinitely in border concentration camps and other lock-ups as vaccines, basic hygiene products and timely medical care are withheld from them. Even the newly "race-woke" New York Times euphemizes these gulags as "family residential centers." This hearkens back to the recent past when, for nearly a decade, the Times euphemized the Bush-era program of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and other torture techniques as "enhanced interrogation" methods.

I'm sure there is still more Trump atrocity news, but I can't think of any more right off the top of my head and I'm too bummed out to go in search of the latest criminal caper or yet another example of the opposition party's group ennui. All the Democrats can do is counter-tweet in tepid outrage as they stuff themselves full on Iowa corn dogs, fund-raise to the hilt in the Hamptons or vacation their blues away on Martha's Vineyard.

It's the Dog Days and the dog-tired days and everybody is exhausted.

That is pretty much the whole point, isn't it? To make us so depressed and feeling so helpless that we're rendered paralyzed and even questioning our own sanity. It doesn't make us feel any better to realize that Donald Trump is acting nuttier than usual because he's worried about the coming economic recession and his plummeting poll numbers. Examining his damaged psyche is a complete waste of time. Been there, done that.

As the late psychiatrist Andew Lobaczewski wrote in Political Ponerology, authoritarian leaders' diseased psyches can easily spread to the rest of society. Emotionally damaged demagogues like Trump possess the preternatural ability to spread their malignant personality defects far and wide, spellbinding whole societies into veritable contagions of mass psychic distress. 

'Persons with an innate talent for intuiting psychological situations tend to take advantage of this gift in an egotistical and ruthless fashion. In the thought process of such people, a short cut way develops which bypasses the handicapped (brain) function, thus leading from associations directly to words, deeds, and decisions which are not subject to any dissuasion.

Such individuals interpret their talent for intuiting situations and making split-second oversimplified decisions a sign of their superiority compared to normal people, who need to think for a long time, experiencing self-doubt and conflicting motivations.

 "Such characters traumatize and actively spellbind others, and their influence finds it exceptionally easy to bypass the controls of common sense. A large proportion of people tend to credit such individuals with special powers, thereby succumbing to their egotistic beliefs. If a parent manifests such a defect, no matter how minimal, all the children in the family evidence anomalies in personality development.

 "Subordinating a normal person to psychologically abnormal individuals has severe and deforming effects on his or her personality: it engenders trauma and neurosis. This is accomplished in a manner which generally evades conscious controls. Such a situation deprives a person of his natural rights: to practice his own mental hygiene, develop a sufficiently autonomous personality, and utilize his common sense. In the light of natural law, it thus constitutes a kind of crime - which can appear at any social scale, in any context - although it is not mentioned in any code of law."

Witness the apparent helplessness, if not the outright collusion, of Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders on the imprisonment of refugees. Without so much as a blink, they robotically appropriated Trump the billions of dollars he demanded for his cruel militarized border policies. All that Pelosi reportedly demanded in return for her cooperation was to be "kept in the loop" about child migrant deaths as they occur.

In a healthy society, Lobaczewski wrote, the activities of spellbinders can usually be stifled fairly quickly. But in an unhealthy society, riven by extreme wealth and social inequalities, the spellbinder finds that people are amenable to his influence. And all that "normal" people can do is moralize and express disgust, rather than do anything concrete to stop the madness. That would necessarily include acknowledging the evil of their own policies, which helped give rise to Trump in the first place.

There are many psychopaths behind the scenes who steer and/or enable Trump even as they pretend to condemn his words. Even the "good" Democrats seem  increasingly exhausted by the futile effort of telling the president he ought to behave himself so that the quiet work of the oligarchy can proceed apace, and they can pretend that bombing and droning people to death in foreign countries is not also a form of hideous racism.

 Trump's deviant personality is no more deviant than American hegemony itself. He is simply the exception to the unwritten rule that it's the skillfully discreet psychopaths who, after careful corporate vetting, win high office because, as Lobaczewski wrote, "they have thought-processes more similar to the world of normal people; in general, they are sufficiently connected to the pathological system to provide a guarantee of loyalty."

It's telling that in the updated preface to his book, Lobaczewski used the George W. Bush administration and its immoral invasion of Iraq as a prime example of how the psychopathy of leaders can infect societies, specifically those (Congress, media) who normally might be in a powerful enough position to combat it.

So we ordinary people have to protect ourselves both from Trump and from the equally dangerous, reactionary, self-righteous and ineffectual ruling class reactions to Trump. Our own psychological health as individuals and as members of society depends upon it.

We should be neither the helpless Ingrid Bergman wife in Gaslight nor the hapless Ingrid Bergman therapist in Spellbound. We can't play the part of analysts and critics only to succumb and let our emotions of fear and disgust rise above our intellects. We can't be good citizens if we criticize the villainous Trump one minute, and then besottedly fall for the next slick political marketing campaign and neoliberal savior the next.

Howard Zinn was right: "The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating? Those are the things that determine what happens."

Even Bernie Sanders, who judging from the latest polls has a better than ever chance of winning the presidency, acknowledges that he can't do it alone, that the residual evil and sickness of Trumpism will last long past the time that Donald Trump physically leaves the scene.

We have miles to go before we sleep. And gallons of coffee to drink.