Why Do So Many Millions Continue to Support Donald Trump?

I’ve been baffled for years about why millions of Americans continue to support Donald Trump after his disastrous handling of the Covid epidemic, his 34 felony convictions, his 54 remaining indictments, his massive grift, his pathological lying, his central role in the only insurrection led by an American president against the United States government in our nation’s history, his 2 impeachments, his craven disrespect for soldiers and gold star families, his utter lack of virtue, his dark, dystopic, cynical, and pessimistic attitude about America, and his racism, misogyny and hatred against immigrants of color and anyone who critiques him.

Political thinkers, psychologists, constitutional scholars and lawyers, podcast and cable news commentators, and print journalists have offered all kinds of reasons for the fealty of so many millions of Americans who show ongoing support for arguably “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”  (General John Kelly).

Many of the reasons offered make some logical sense: he’s entertaining; his need for vengeance resonates with the life-experience of many of his fans who are angry like him and feel they’ve not benefited in the American dream; his role as a cult leader that offers a sense of belonging for people on the margins of society; his tough-guy persona that gives many a super-hero with whom to identify; the perception that he was good for the economy; the expansive reach of a myopic right-wing media bubble that reinforces his brand; the persuasive power of ‘don’t believe your eyes – believe me’ that enables people to stop thinking; the racism, misogyny and fear of the “other” that many of his followers feel; the support of evangelical Christians who like his right-wing judicial nominations and reversal of Roe v Wade; and the fact that there are so many life-long Republicans who just can’t imagine leaving their political and cultural “tribe” and support a Democrat.

All those reasons are compelling and likely true – but what else might be attracting some of Trump’s followers?

The renowned Swiss-Polish psychoanalyst and philosopher Alice Miller (1923-2010) may offer a measure of insight not only into Trump’s character, but the character of many of his followers. She wrote at length about why people and nations follow evil leaders in her two books: For Your Own Good – Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence and The Drama of the Gifted Child – The Search for the True Self.

In the Preface to For Your Own Good she explained:

“Since the end of World War II, I have been haunted by the question of what could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death and of how it could then be possible for millions of others to acclaim him and assist in carrying out this plan.”

Donald Trump is NOT Adolph Hitler and the MAGA right is not the Nazi party. However, Trump fits the profile of the leader that Dr. Miller described in her books.

She concluded that every act of cruelty, no matter how brutal and shocking, has traceable antecedents in its perpetrator’s past – most often from childhood. She cited and quoted from a mid-18^th century German book on child-rearing by Johann Georg Sulzer who, in 1748, wrote in “An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Children”:

“Obedience is so important that all education is actually nothing other than learning how to obey…. It is not very easy, however, to implant obedience in children. It is quite natural for the child’s soul to want to have a will of its own, and things that are not done correctly in the first two years will be difficult to rectify thereafter. One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood. If their wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember afterwards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity that is required will not have any serious consequences.”

Sulzer continued:

“I advise all those whose concern is the education of children to make it their main occupation to drive out willfulness and wickedness [in the child] and to persist until they have reached their goal… by scolding and the rod [for the purpose of creating] obedient, docile and good children [from as early as] the child’s first year.”

Dr. Miller opines:

“Neuroses and psychoses are not direct consequences of actual frustrations but the expression of repressed traumata…” [the child] “…will experience feelings of anxiety, shame, insecurity, and helplessness, which may soon be forgotten, especially when the child finds a victim of his/her own… A child’s ever-growing discomfort at the loss of the pleasure he/she would have had if the child’s wishes had been granted, eventually find satisfaction only in revenge, i.e. in the comforting knowledge that one’s peers have been subjected to the same feeling of discomfort or pain. The more often the child experiences the comforting feeling of revenge, the more this becomes a need, which seeks satisfaction at every idle moment. In this stage, the child uses unruly behavior to inflict every possible unpleasantness, every conceivable annoyance on others only for the sake of alleviating the pain the child feels because his/her wishes are not fulfilled. This fault leads with logical consistency to the next; his/her fear of punishment awakens the need to tell lies, to be devious and deceitful…”

Does this sound familiar when thinking of Trump?

Dr. Miller concludes:

“When still in diapers, the child learns to knock at the gates of love with ‘obedience,’ and unfortunately often does not unlearn this ever after… all the requirements will have been met to enable a citizen to live in a dictatorship without minding it; he or she will even be able to feel a euphoric identification with it… In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of the child’s upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His/her ‘will’ is completely identified with that of the government.”

The psychoanalytic principle of “identification with the aggressor” – a defense against an over-powering and threatening adversary – is helpful in understanding why many of those who identify with Trump find such comfort in their doing so. He presents himself as the ultimate alpha male aggressor. Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, has written that when Donald was a child, he was a thin-skinned playground bully.

Trump loves dictators – Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán – and calls them “strong” and “smart.” One of Trump’s ex-wives said that he kept Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his bed’s night stand. Marine Gen. John Kelly and Trump’s former Chief-of-Staff said that, as President, Trump complemented Hitler saying that “he did some good things” seeming to ignore the millions the Nazis murdered and the 400,000 Americans who died in WWII.

Was Trump beaten into submission by his hard-driving father? It is unclear. However, in a NYT’s article (July 28, 2020), Trump’s father Fred was described as

“…a disciplinarian who spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing his son’s career and taught him to either dominate or submit. In Fred Trump’s world, showing sadness or hurt was a sign of weakness. ‘The only thing that Trump ever cared about was ‘I’ve got to win. Teach me how to win,’ George White, a former classmate of Mr. Trump’s at the New York Military Academy who spent years around both father and son, said in an interview. Recalling Fred’s hard-driving influence, Mr. White said that Mr. Trump’s former school mentor, a World War II combat veteran named Theodore Dobias, once told him that ‘he had never seen a cadet whose father was harder on him than his father was on Donald Trump.’”

Mary Trump has written that Donald “suffered deprivations that would scar him for life.” Perhaps many of his followers also suffered childhood deprivations that drew them to the former president.

It remains to be seen how many of the millions of Trump’s followers will vote for him again on November 5^th. It seems to me (anecdotally) that we are witnessing a significant enough abandonment of Trump by hundreds of former traditional Republican leaders from the Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr. and Trump administrations who have come to the conclusion that Trump is corrupt and a significant security risk to the United States. As Kamala Harris has emerged as a strong, competent, experienced, and joyful Democratic standard bearer, the Cheney family and so many others recognize that she (despite their policy differences) will assure the continuation of American democracy, the rule of law and obeisance to the US Constitution.

How significant the number of Independent-leaning Republicans and Republicans will vote for Kamala is hard to say, but I’m optimistic not only because Trump represents the worst in the American spirit, but that Kamala Harris represents the best.