The Method to Trump’s Madness

The U.S. mass communication media recently reported that Christian leaders in California had called former President Donald Trump’s claim invoking Jesus Christ in his electoral aspirations “ridiculous” and “appalling.” The Christian leaders were responding to Trump telling an interviewer (Dr. Phil) that he would accept the results of the forthcoming U.S. presidential election in California only if Jesus Christ counted the votes.

Donald Trump often makes outrageous and incomprehensible statements that make people think he is mad. Thus, his statement that he would accept the forthcoming election results in California only if Jesus Christ came down and counted the votes sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

Well, there is method to Trump’s madness, but it takes a psychoanalytic lens to understand the unconscious method behind the apparent madness.

The African-American Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the U.S. House Minority Leader, recently said at the Democratic National Convention that Trump is like a jilted boyfriend who won’t go away. America has rejected him but Trump is trying to force her to take him back. Why does Trump act that way?

Now, as we know from a book by Glenda Blair about the Trump family, as well as from the book Too Much and Never Enough by Trump’s niece, Mary Lea Trump, Trump was abandoned emotionally by his mother as a toddler (she had almost died in surgery and had a new baby to take care of). He did all he could to get back her attention and her love, which only made things worse, until he was kicked out of home to a military academy at age thirteen.

Trump never got over this. In his unconscious mind, America is his mother, and she abandoned him again in the 2020 election. He cannot accept this abandonment. It is too painful for him. So he denies the election results and runs for President again, convincing himself that he will win back America’s love (his mother’s love, really) this time. And if he does not, it is not his fault.

In his recent interview to which the Christian leaders reacted with such alarm, Trump said to Dr. Phil (the interviewer), “If Jesus Christ came down and was the vote counter, I would win California, OK? In other words, if we had an honest vote counter, a really honest vote counter, I do great with the Hispanics, great, I mean I had a level that no other Republican’s ever done, but if we had an honest vote counter, I would win California.”

Now, Christ is a very personal name for Trump. The name of his German-born paternal grandmother was Elisabeth Christ, and his father’s name was Frederick Christ Trump. So, unconsciously, wanting Jesus Christ to count the vote for him is like asking his dead father and grandmother to come help him win the election. This kind of talk naturally sets him up for more rejection. Trump’s claim invoking Jesus Christ in his electoral aspirations not only led to the Christian leaders in California calling his claim “ridiculous” and “appalling” but would also likely make Trump lose some of the Christian vote.  So, all his attempts to win back America’s love only produce the opposite effect, just as his attempts to win back his mother’s love did when he was a child. Without realizing it, Trump, who thinks he is doing everything to win the election and to achieve unprecedented success, is his own worst enemy.

It is no accident that Trump is fascinated by Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. There are so many similarities. Charlie Kane is also kicked out of home as a child, and is holding his beloved snow sled Rosebud when his mother gives him the bad news and hands him over to his future guardian. Both men are unhappily married and divorced. Both run for political office. Both seek to destroy their opponents. Both have a huge mansion in Florida. In short, a biographical film about Donald Trump could be titled Citizen Trump.

Due to his early abandonment by his mother and their ensuing perverse relationship, in which the little child Donny did everything he could to win back her love, but failed, throughout his life, ever since he was a little child, Trump has had a perverse and tenuous relationship with truth and reality. He lied and cheated his way to fake “success” in business, television, and politics, whereas in reality, as the forthcoming book Lucky Loser by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig shows, he squandered the fortune he had inherited from his father. Trump also deceived his television producer, James Mark Burnett, who had launched Trump’s political career. A poll of American presidential biographers and historians found Trump to have been the worst president in U.S. history, yet he repeatedly uses this epithet for Joe Biden, one of the best of U.S. presidents.

Donald Trump is living proof of George Santayana’s dictum “Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat it.