The Mind of the Trumper
A Melange of Apophenia. Onychophagia and More
Noah Malgeri, a Republican candidate for congress from Nevada, wants Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, to be executed on live television for treason.
Republican Patrick Witt, a former Yale quarterback running for Georgia’s 10th Congressional District seat, insists that trump won the 2020 election but was robbed by tens of thousands of fake votes. Witt wants to drain the swamp of D.C. corruption and he is seeking trump’s endorsement.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who is under investigation for sex trafficking, went on the road together this past summer, holding “America First” rallies in various states, getting rousing applause after commenting on the theft of the 2020 election and the dream of trump running in 2024.
Former Army Green Beret Joe Kent, candidate for a U.S. House seat in Washington state, demanded an investigation into the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and said that “President Trump attempted to get us out of pretty much every conflict. The apparatus of the Pentagon, the military industrial complex, the blob, whatever you want to call it, found ways to thwart President Trump.” Kent has won trump’s endorsement.
Pundits from far and wide have tried to understand those who blindly bow down to trump, why they swallow the obvious and outrageous lies and why they see Democratic conspiracies everywhere. The answers as to why these followers do what they do lies not in politics but in psychology.
Like many others, these acolytes suffer from a malady known as false memory syndrome, with a smidgen of Satanic panic and a dash of eschatology. Spice up the brew with a phantasm or two, a healthy serving of hypnagogic hallucinations and a sprinkling of Apophenia and add a touch of onychophagia.
This is all proven science or as proven as anything you’ll find on Fox, OANN, Newsmax or the true source of reliable information, QAnon.
False memory syndrome, also called recovered memory, pseudomemory, and memory distortion, is the situation when people seem to remember events that never actually occurred. Pseudomemories are often quite vivid and emotionally charged and can explain the hallucinations of the “Stop the Steal” gang who believe that trump won the 2020 election because of widespread voter fraud, which, in reality, never existed. Or that trump really did try to drain the swamp or that trump really had the solution to the war in Afghanistan.
The Satanic panic arose after more than 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of Satanic ritual abuse, also known as SRA, ritual abuse, ritualistic abuse, organized abuse or plain, old sadistic ritual abuse. The reports were first seen in the United States in the 1980s, spreading throughout many parts of the world by the late 1990s, and persisting today, with an especially virulent strain in the red states.
Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient and future wife, Michelle Smith, started the panic campaign while using the discredited practice of recovered-memory therapy to make sweeping lurid claims about satanic ritual abuse involving Smith.
In its most extreme form, allegations involve a conspiracy of a global Satanic cult that includes the wealthy and powerful world elite in which children are abducted or bred for human sacrifices, pornography, and prostitution. QAnon, which originated on 4chan in 2017, has adopted many of the tropes of SRA and Satanic Panic. Centers of alleged abuse include liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking government officials, all part of a cabal of child-abusing Satanists.
To fully understand the foundation of trumpism, you have to know about eschatology, a theological belief that is concerned with the final events of history, the ultimate destiny of humanity, otherwise known as “the end of the world” or “end times.” It is not a leap to see the zombie-like support of trump,seen as a savior, to be based in eschatology and the time when humanity can reunion with the divine, based on the biblical texts within the Old and New Testaments.
When you meet a true trumper, look at her or his fingernails. You will likely find a person who engages in chronic onychophagia or nail biting. In itself, nail biting can be a temporary, relatively benign behavior. But with those who are driven by a need to follow, onychophagia can develop into a severe, long-term problem characterized by chronic, seemingly uncontrollable nail-biting that is destructive to fingernails and the surrounding tissue. The definition of a person with obsessive, compulsive disorder or OCD, is one who cannot detach from a connection, like trump.
Which leads us to another salient characteristic of the trumper and that is eigengrau also called eigenlicht which means dark light, or brain gray, the uniform dark gray background that many people report seeing in the absence of light. A true trumper sees only a gray MAGA world, also referred to as “visual noise” or “background adaptation.”
And now we move on to a vital component of the trumpian psyche, apophenia, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Those who are afflicted with apophenia, see all the troubles of the nation and the world to be linked and follow a hollow leader who promises much. Apophenia is also considered as the beginning stages of schizophrenia, which involves hallucinations and voices, which are typical of the trumpian disorder.
Those suffering from apophenia have a propensity to see patterns in random information, such as can occur while gambling or by connecting trump to world events over which he has had no real effect.
The trump followers find much of their grounding in hypnagogia, the transitional state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. During hypnagogia, it’s common to experience involuntary and imagined experiences like an unreal and unsupported belief in a being or savior like trump, known as hypnagogic hallucinations.
Trumpers generally believe in phantasms, also known as apparitions or specters, imaginary fantasies while they overlay these fantasies on leaders like trump.
Another quality of the trump follower is a psychic staring effect called scopaesthesia, in which people sense they are being watched by extrasensory means. Victims of scopaesthesia are much more prone to submitting to an all-powerful leader or deity who they believe is watching them all of the time. The effect has been the subject of contemporary attention from parapsychologists and fringe researchers from the 1980s onwards, most notably Rupert Sheldrake.