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President Donald Trump
The Projector in Chief
President Trump unwittingly betrays his guilty mind.
Posted July 29, 2018
With all of the retractions, denials, restatements, and contradictions about what he said at the Helsinki summit, most Americans believe that President Trump is hiding something nefarious from the country. But he has actually been revealing his guilty mind for some time. It emerges most clearly and unwittingly in his tweets about the Mueller investigation into his campaign’s ties to the Kremlin.
Last Saturday (7/8), Trump tweeted: “Public opinion has turned strongly against the Rigged Witch Hunt and the ‘Special’ Counsel because the public understands that there was no Collusion with Russia (so ridiculous), that the two FBI lovers were a fraud against our Nation & that the only Collusion was with the Dems!”
Never mind the evidence showing that every statement in this tweet is false. Psychologically, two points about such tweets are telling.
First, Trump sends them against the vehement opposition of his lawyers and closest advisors, who know that the tweets give Mueller’s team more ammunition. Trump can’t stop tweeting about the ongoing investigation. He has a compulsion. The question is, what’s driving it?
Second, of all the ways Trump might respond to the investigation, he repeatedly accuses Mueller’s team of the most heinous crime for which they are investigating him (collusion). And he calls them the same thing that he will be if these investigators find evidence of collusion with the Kremlin or other serious misdeeds: a fraud. The Mueller investigation is the “greatest witch hunt in political history”. Yet in many tweets like the one above, who is trying to turn whom into a witch?
According to Trump, not only are the FBI, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton colluding against him. So are all major news outlets except FOX. Any news organization that reports on myriad connections between the Trump campaign and Russia is delivering “fake news”. Who is actually lying to the public by making such accusations?
Too often, Trump sounds like he is turning things inside (of him) out, engaging in the unconscious defense mechanism that Freud called projection: the attribution of one’s own forbidden -- and typically malevolent -- motives, impulses, or emotions to others. When people project, what is true about oneself instead becomes true of others. As with other defense mechanisms, people are unaware that they are projecting aspects of themselves in the moment in which they do it.
Compulsive projections pave the road to unconscious guilt. The cut-throat businessman who believes that everyone is trying to cheat him is found guilty of illegal business practices. A religious leader becomes famous preaching about the immorality of homosexuality, only to be found cavorting with male prostitutes. A prosecutor builds a career convincing juries to send sexual abusers to jail -- until we discover that he is sexually abusive himself.
If Trump’s tweets are projections, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s guilty of colluding with the Russian government -- only that he’s guilty of acts that involve Russia in some way (e.g., financial crimes, sexual improprieties, even treason). It also means that behind his fury about the Mueller investigation, it’s his knowledge of his own guilt that is actually keeping him up tweeting at night. Each keystroke is directed at himself as much as at his followers on Twitter.
Once can of course say that Trump’s tweets are just lies to control public opinion, no more. But only guilty politicians need to tell lies about investigations into their conduct. It is in the context of besmirching such an investigation that projection emerges as the natural defense mechanism for Trump. A strategy for controlling public opinion about whatever conclusions the investigation might reach coalesces seamlessly with a psychological means for controlling whatever guilty knowledge he might have. He can strike up his political base and strike down unconscious guilt, all at once.
Psychologists regard projection as a maladaptive defense mechanism. Whereas more adaptive defense mechanisms distort only what a person believes about himself, projection distorts external reality, so people who do it run the risk of reality eventually catching up with them. The only way to prevent this from happening is to convince enough people that their projection is real. That may be what Trump is trying to do, both to control the impact of the Mueller investigation and to keep distressing truths about himself at bay.
