5.4 Trump's not the problem, it's us humans
It would be okay for Trump to be Trump…
If nobody followed him.
The problem is his tribe. The MAGA tribe. The tens of millions of people who rage against democracy and hate anyone not like them.
Except it’s not really Trump’s tribe. It’s actually…
A crowd-sourced tribe.
Trump is not the creator. He did not make a plan to build this tribe from scratch. He didn’t follow a blueprint. He’s not a skilled organizer.
MAGA looks like his tribe. Newscasters and pundits call him the leader of the MAGAs, but he’s not really. He’s the…
Catalyst.
He went out in the world and made himself visible and was obsessed with publicity and people gathered around him. And why? Because he touched something in them, and released it.
And he did this…
Unconsciously.
And it’s worked so well because it is unconscious. Trump is run by…
Unconscious compulsions.
Not by some smart and sophisticated super–strategy.
How do we know this is so? Look at the politicians who try to copycat him, maybe hoping to replace him. They can parrot the MAGA talking points, they can get themselves all worked up, they can pull stunts to please the base, but there’s one thing they cannot do…
Copycat Trump’s compulsion.
That’s because a compulsion is not something you can copy by plan or by rote You’ve either got it or you don’t. These wannabes can win supporters of their own, but so far none of them has come close to matching Trump’s popularity with the MAGAs. Because these guys and gals are…
Pretenders.
And the MAGAs can smell the difference.
Meanwhile…
Trump is authentic.
And I hate using that word in this context because I want “authentic” to be reserved for things that are good and noble and healthy.
But Trump is…
Authentic in his compulsions.
It’s true that he can be manipulative and cagey and strategic. But that’s around the edges. All his behaviors, even the tricky moves he makes, are motivated by his core compulsions…
To suck attention and have his own way, so he can suck even more attention.
At his core, Trump is always Trump and will be till the day he dies. The MAGAs can always count on him to be who he is. And this means Trump is…
Trustworthy.
Which is such a strange thing to say about a guy who is a world–class liar. I mean he’s really masterful. He would win the gold medal if there were an Olympics of lying.
Lying has been so essential to his life all his years, I imagine he thinks of it as just something you do when you’re going after what you want. Or what you think you want. For him, there’s no moral pejorative around lying. It’s just a tool.
And for the MAGAs, Trump’s lying is baked into his persona. They not only accept it, they admire it. Because they’re compulsive liars, too.
Being run by a compulsion means you’re not in control. And that’s true for Trump. He’s screwing himself.
As I’m writing this, he’s saying stupid things in broadcast interviews, he’s admitting to crimes. And he’s attacking witnesses, trying to intimidate them, which means he’s committing more crimes in public. He’s putting himself in legal jeopardy.
But this is Trump being Trump…
He can’t help himself.
This clear evidence that his compulsions are in charge.
Which makes his base trust him even more.
We know that there are many Republican politicians who hate Trump and wish he would go away, but they will never, ever say so publicly because…
They’re scared of the base.
And it seems to me that…
Trump is scared of the base, too.
Remember a couple years back at a rally of his supporters in Alabama, Trump said something positive about vaccines, and he got booed. How did he respond? Did he take a strong stand of conviction? No, he tap–danced around the issue.
He said people should take the vaccines, because they’re good and they work. But at the same time he told them, of course you all need to hold onto your freedoms.
He’s trying to have it both ways. He wants to brag about the vaccines that “he created.” But he wants to hold onto his base which is mostly people who are rabidly anti–vaccine.
I believe…
Trump depends on his base more than they depend on him.
Let’s look for a minute at another authoritarian nihilist. If you were in the audience at one of Hitler’s speeches and you booed, you would be taken away and locked up or shot on the spot. Hitler was the catalyst of the Nazi movement. And he was driven by brutal compulsions. But he was definitely the leader of his tribe from start to finish.
Yet even Hitler was dependent on his base. Albert Speer, a favorite of Hitler’s and his Minister of Armaments, said in his book, Inside the Third Reich:
As I see it today, Hitler and Goebbels were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course, Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbels’ baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme.
I believe the MAGA tribe does not belong to Trump, and does not even belong to the MAGAs. I believe…
It belongs to nihilism.
The MAGAs have no program. They have nothing to offer people who are hurting and in need. This is a tribe that is empty of nurturance. And so despair rushes in, and it’s despair so deep it erupts into rage.
This has consequences.
Look how Trump holds everyone but himself in disregard. The MAGAs are just like him. In our traditional tribes, people hold each other in the sweet warmth of…
Mutual care and nurturance.
But in the new nihilistic tribe, people hold each other in the icy chill of…
Mutual suspicion and disregard.
And here’s Trump trying to suck approval from this MAGA tribe. But the MAGAs don’t really care about him, not as a person, because they can’t care. That’s not part of nihilism. Caring is the antithesis of nihilism.
And besides the MAGAs don’t really know Trump because he’s superficial. He’s like a cardboard cut–out caricature. He wants so desperately to be known and loved, loved for who he is, but he’s an automaton running on compulsions. So who’s there for anyone to love?
If he wants to be known, if he really wants to be loved, he’d have to do some seriously deep personal work…
So he could become a real person.
Which his compulsions won’t let him do.
So he’s stuck sucking attention from people who don’t really know him, because he’s too shallow to be known and they’re too shallow to be able to know anyone really. And what does that do to him?
My guess is that he has a suck/hate relationship with the MAGA tribe. He needs them because he’s desperate for people to suck from, and they do give him cheers and adulation. But they can’t give him what the little boy in him is crying for. So they’re failing him, just like his father failed him, and everyone in his life. And he’s got to hate them for that.
I’m guessing that the MAGAs feel the same in return. They’re trying to suck salvation from Trump. After all he has promised to save them, from whatever. But he’s all me–me–me and suck–suck–suck.
He has nothing to give them but…
Permission to rage their ugly rage.
And what kind of life can you build on that? So they must feel that he’s failing them, not consciously, of course. They can’t let themselves ever admit that. But I’ll bet behind the scenes they have a suck/hate relationship with Trump.
This is how it is with a nihilistic tribe…
Despair and rage feed on each other.
They get all tangled up in each other.
And see how crazy destructive nihilism is. Which you can witness in Donald Trump wrecking himself and in tens of millions of MAGAs ready to destroy everything and themselves in the process.
Our media is obsessed with Trump. Reporters, anchors, and pundits cover every word he says and every action he takes. And why do they keep doing this? Because he attracts viewers. But why?
He’s not a creative, imaginative guy. He’s rigid and repetitious. It’s the same–old, same–old over and over again. What’s the appeal?
He’s outrageous, though in a predictable way. You see the pundits, enjoying themselves, huffing and puffing over his latest scheme. And it gives the rest of us something to talk about and emote over. Did you see that? Can you believe him?
Well, yes, we can believe him, because we’ve seen years of him running the same crap on us.
Psychologists have explanations for our obsession with this man…
Some of us are like rubberneckers at the scene of a gruesome accident. We’re fascinated by this guy who’s achieved success while simultaneously making a lonely mess of his life.
And maybe some of us wish we could just say to hell with being responsible and not have to care what anyone thinks.
And maybe some of us are just simply entertained by Trump the rogue who gets away with stuff the rest of us never could.
There’s good reason to keep a close watch on Trump because he’s dangerous. But Trump is not the problem…
The MAGA tribe is the problem.
If Trump gets taken down by the legal system, or if he gets locked away, which is still hard to imagine, or if he dies, the MAGA tribe will keep trucking.
Maybe it will lose a few steps and it might take them a while to find a new catalyst who serves them even half as well as Trump does, but…
Mass nihilism will not disappear just because Trump leaves the scene.
If we could find a way to bring MAGAs back into reality and convert them to lives of nurturance and contribution, then we wouldn’t have to worry about Trump, and we’d never have to hear his name again, which would be a hell of a blessing.
So why don’t the media mavens focus on Trump’s followers? And do something to help them live better lives. Because…
They don’t know how to fix the MAGAs.
They don’t know how to bring these people back to reality…
They don’t know how to convert them from nihilism to nurturance.
And they don’t want to look impotent. Not in front of the camera and their viewers.
And anyway, this would be a big, complex, labor–intensive, time–consuming project. And our media don’t take on big, long–term issues. They much prefer to focus on personalities, and especially personality battles.
Pundits say that the MAGAs are a cult. I don’t like to use that word in this context, because “cult” makes it sound like the MAGAs are some kind of aberration. Off in their own corner of the culture.
But they’re a major force in politics and society. They’re mainstream. So we should call them a tribe. And I find it scarier to think of them this way than as a cult.
Okay, so Trump is not the problem, MAGA is. Except MAGA is just a tribe, it’s not the source of the problem. The MAGAs didn’t invent nihilism.
Where does it come from then? What birthed it? What makes it possible?…
The source is the human psyche.
Our psyches have learned how to pull of the trick of transforming deep despair into explosive rage. And they’ve gotten good at it. And I hate that this is so, but it’s so.
The human psyche has created a way of life that is more monstrous than anything our hunter–gatherer ancestors could have ever imagined.
Nihilistic tribes are a stunning malfunction of what tribes are supposed to be. They’re supposed to support life not drive us down the road to extinction. We’re supposed to fight for ourselves, not surrender to death.
And as hard as it is to oppose traditional tribalism, it’s many times harder to oppose nihilistic tribalism. And so I want to urge you, especially if you’re an activist advocating for trans–tribalism to…
Protect yourself.
This first.
And then to understand this new game that our species is in…
This twisted tribal tragedy.
And to answer nihilistic despair and rage with…
Passionately fierce and passionately tender nurturance.
6.1 Using the best of tribalism against the worst of tribalism
