jan 1, 1679 - Opinion: PROJECTION AS A POLITICAL WEAPON by Chris Bell and Gary Senecal. Principles of projection in the political language of Donald Trump

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From Unconscious Defense to Conscious Offense
Donald Trump’s penchant for attacking his opponents by projecting onto them his own disavowed personal attributes and apparent self-assessments has been a consistent feature of his rhetorical style and remarked upon by many observers. For instance, in her recent book The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, Michiko Kakutani (2019) observes, “Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ ‘Crooked Hillary,’ ‘Crazy Bernie.’ He accused Clinton of being ‘a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,’ and he has asserted that ‘there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats’” (p. 95). In a recent NYTimes opinion article, Michelle Goldberg referred to Trump as a “Master of Projection” and noted that many instances of Trump’s projections were uncannily predictive of his future actions as president, thus properly constituting themselves as projections only in retrospect. Examples include roundly criticizing Mitt Romney for failing to release his tax returns and berating Barack Obama for watching too much TV in the White House, playing too much golf, overusing Air Force One for “politics and play”, and potentially leading America into WWIII (Goldberg, 2020). Further examples of Trump’s projections include accusing Joe Biden of nepotism, referring to Joe Biden as “Plugs Biden” when Trump is so clearly the product of massive cosmetic work, and saying there is no way Nancy Pelosi prays for him, since she only prays for herself. Recently, in an interview with MSNBC, the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Lance Dodes noted, “[Trump] tells other people that they are what he is. It’s a common enough [defense] mechanism in early childhood, but as an adult, using it all the time, it is what we would call primitive.” Dr. Dodes contends that Trump’s predilection for the defense mechanism of projection is “primitive,” since it bypasses engaging with his opponents at the level of logical argumentation, which would involve at a minimum the cultivation of some sort of background knowledge on a topic and engaging in the necessary preparation in order to make a reasoned or rhetorically persuasive case about his favored positions and/or why he is being treated unfairly. While Dodes is right to emphasize that Trump’s use of psychological projection may not be a particularly mature defensive style, it is nevertheless surprisingly effective at discrediting his opponents and bringing them down to his level. As such, there is a distinct danger in writing off Trump’s projections as simply “primitive,” infantile, or unrefined, since in fact they operate as an effective political weapon.

Projection as a Form of Disinformation
In what sense are Trump’s projections an effective political weapon? At a fundamental level, psychological projections can function to make the relevant distinctions of a situation illegible or difficult to parse, such that it creates confusion about a situation’s basic parameters and thereby serves to obscure its very reality. According to W.W. Meissner (1988), “The result of these processes [of projection] is a fundamental confusion and an incapacity to differentiate subject and object, reality and fantasy, along with an inability to differentiate the real object from its symbolic representation” (p. 38). Thus, projection constitutes, “a form of interpretive distortion of external reality” (p. 32). Projections serve to muddy the waters and give the outward appearance that Trump’s opponents are operating with the same tactics, intentions, or even at the same moral level as Trump himself, creating a false equivalency, rather than enabling clear symbolic distinctions to be made.

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