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| Donald Trump, mocking a handicapped member of the audience |
If you're like us, you've been kept awake at night ever since the summer of 2016---when Hillary Clinton, despite the pundits' communis opinio, never managed to escape the shadow of Trump's polling numbers, and eventually succumbed to them---so, you've been kept awake at night about/by Trump, and by the question: HOW COME.
And we are still being kept awake, four years later. Well, here's a COMPREHENSIVE EXPLANATION of the Trump phenomenon.
Simple minds, like ours---with their reptile brains schooled by Occam's razor---always look for THE explanation, THE cause, when it's almost always a COMBINATION OF FACTORS that leads to serious accidents.
This comprehensive explanation here, by Bobby Azarian, was published in 2018 on the blog of Psychology Today. It combines fourteen factors. It feels a bit dated at the edges with its references to HILLARY (who, we might add, was factor #15). Still, you'll sleep better once you've read it. It all makes sense. Trump makes sense, regrettably; he's not our fault---as opposed to Hillary---so don't let her disturb your future nightmares:
Bobby Azarian Ph.D.
A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump's Support--Science can help us make sense of the president's political invincibility.
Posted Dec 27, 2018
Whether we want to or not, we must try to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, as it has completely swept the nation and also fiercely divided it. What is most baffling about it all is Trump’s apparent political invincibility. As he himself said even before he won the presidential election, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Unfortunately for the American people, this wild-sounding claim appears to be truer than not. It should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.
In all fairness, we should recognize that lying is sadly not uncommon for politicians on both sides of the political aisle, but the frequency and magnitude of the current president’s lies should have us all wondering why they haven’t destroyed his political career, and instead perhaps strengthened it. Similarly, we should be asking why his inflammatory rhetoric and numerous scandals haven’t sunk him. We are talking about a man who was caught on tape saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.” Politically surviving that video is not normal, or anything close to it, and such a revelation would likely have been the end of Barack Obama or George Bush had it surfaced weeks before the election.
While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters. While various popular articles have illuminated a multitude of reasons for his unwavering support, there appears to be no comprehensive analysis that contains all of them. Since there seems to be a real demand for this information, I have tried to provide that analysis below.
