Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT: Most attempts to understand and explain Donald Trump have focused on his personal characteristics and traits. In this paper we explore the crucial role of Trump's followers in the creation and sustaining of Donald Trump. The mirroring process between leader and followers is discussed, and the role of projective and introjective identification in this dynamic is examined. The critical role of Fox News in intensifying this mirroring and group polarization is portrayed. Finally, we explore the dynamics of the triangulation of Trump, Fox News, and Trump's followers.
INTRODUCTION
The election of 2016 yielded an unexpected outcome with Donald J. Trump as the new leader of the most powerful nation on earth. This election of a leader who is a ruthless and self-serving executive (Buettner & Baglijune, 2016), and a reality TV star of a program in which he was the focal point, has led to a predictable chaotic outcome. Considerable efforts to understand the leader from a psychodynamic perspective have emerged. Diagnostic questions have been posed: e.g., does he have some combination of personality disorders such as narcissistic, antisocial, paranoid, or some other clinical label such as sociopath (Lee, 2017)? In this paper, we do not wish to plow this fertile ground further, but look instead to understand those who elected him to fulfill their fantasy of "draining the swamp," Making America Great Again, and the leader's relationship to his loyal followers.
The drain the swamp slogan refers to a potpourri of Trump promises, grievances and tweets, some of which are: voter fraud, media companies, shortcomings in the fight against ISIS, Clinton's foreign policy, Obamacare, liberal Supreme Court justices, the Clinton e-mail investigation, and the revolving door where government officials become highly paid consultants and lobbyists for special interests and foreign governments (Arnsdorf, Dawsey & Lippman, 2016).
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) slogan is adapted from Ronald Reagan's and George H.W. Bush's "Let's Make America Great Again" that they used in their 1980 campaign but did not copyright it as Trump has (Tumulty, 2017). Reagan and Bush spoke of American exceptionalism, consistent with Trump's 2011 book, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, where he framed his agenda as a defense of American exceptionalism (Jouet, 2017).
MAGA is like all good...