HERE AT HOME: FROM MCCARTHY TO NIXON TO TRUMP TO ___________?
The United States has had several flirtations with HCP Wannabe Kings throughout the history of our democracy. In the past century, they have received a surprising amount of support from potential voters.
Americans have long had an authoritarian streak. It was not unusual for figures such as Coughlin, Long, McCarthy, and Wallace to gain the support of a sizable minority—30 or even 40 percent—of the country.197
Father Charles Coughlin was an immensely popular anti-Semitic Catholic priest in the 1930s who was openly opposed to democracy and questioned the value of elections. His nationalist radio program reached 40 million listeners a week, and he packed stadiums and auditoriums with people who wanted to hear him speak.
Huey Long was a Depression Era governor and then a senator for Louisiana. He was known for being a demagogue with dictatorial tendencies. He used bribes and threats to get what he wanted from legislators, judges, and the press. He called for the redistribution of wealth and his movement, Share Our Wealth, had almost eight million names on its mailing list.
In 1968 and 1972, Alabama’s governor George Wallace ran for president on a platform that opposed school integration and appealed to working-class whites’ sense of being left out of the nation’s economic progress. He made significant inroads into the Democratic Party until an assassination attempt halted his candidacy in 1972. At that time, he had a million more votes than George McGovern, who became the party’s candidate and who subsequently lost in a landslide to Richard Nixon.198
Although it appears that all the Wannabe Kings in this chapter are on the political right, there have been HCPs on the left as well. Remember, it’s not about the politics; it’s about the personalities. A notable example was Jim Jones, a revolutionary preacher and leader of the People’s Temple in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s. He took 900 followers with him to Guyana in South America to create a socialist utopian community. Unfortunately, his paranoia got the best of him, along with his apparently narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies, and he led his followers into the largest mass murder-suicide in American history.199
Joseph McCarthy
The most widely known and popular authoritarian politician in America was Joseph McCarthy. He was a US senator from Wisconsin from 1947 to 1957.
McCarthy’s Early Years
McCarthy grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. One of nine children, he was shy but “favored by a protective mother.”200 In his twenties, he became a lawyer and went into politics. Although originally a Democrat, he lost his bid to be a district attorney and changed his party to Republican and went on to become the youngest judge in the state. However, he apparently lied during the campaign and said his opponent was much older and that he was younger than he actually was. Apparently, his pattern of lying in politics was already established by his twenties. He was involved in at least one suspicious case as a judge, but he was eventually elected as a senator for Wisconsin.
High-Conflict Personality
McCarthy was at first a quiet and undistinguished senator. But apparently he had lied about his record during World War II and was also involved in a bit of tax fraud, so he decided he needed an issue “to distract attention from his affairs.” In 1950, he settled on communism, to exploit American’s fears of a Communist takeover. When World War II ended, Americans were concerned about the spread of Communism because Russia and China had become Communist. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea—only to be pushed back with the help of the United States. The Cold War was in full swing. He certainly fulfilled the Target of Blame aspect of a high-conflict personality as well as a possible sociopathic personality given the extent of his lying and willingness to destroy people’s reputations for his own benefit.
Fantasy Crisis
Although people were somewhat worried about Communism, McCarthy amped up the threat dramatically, sparking an explosion of anti-Communist paranoia aimed at promoting his own influence. McCarthy claimed, without any evidence, that there were hundreds of Communists—every one of them disloyal to the United States—working undercover, especially in the federal government and in Hollywood.
Fantasy Villains
To anyone who would listen, he insisted that these spies needed to be rooted out—and that no one was doing enough in that regard. McCarthy stepped into the imaginary breach and took charge as America’s self-appointed scourge of Communism. He accused innumerable people of disloyalty, hauled in thousands of ordinary citizens for questioning, and demanded that US government employees go to excessive lengths to prove their devotion to their country.
Thousands of people, especially in government and the film industry, lost their jobs because of McCarthy’s efforts. Many were blacklisted from their fields for years or decades. McCarthy was extremely media savvy and used the new medium of television to boost his visibility in many American homes. He kept the country spellbound by holding televised hearings in the US Senate. In these hearings, McCarthy aggressively questioned people about their ties to Communism and their relationships with other people who might be Communists.
Fantasy Hero
Eventually McCarthy became the most powerful and visible person in Congress. Many elected officials feared him and what he could do to them. In 1950, McCarthy claimed that he had a list of over 200 US State Department employees who were “known Communists.” There was, of course, no such list. Nevertheless, the claim sparked nationwide hysteria. McCarthy refused to provide the names of any of these people and was unable to produce any coherent or reasonable evidence that Communists worked at the State Department.201
One of McCarthy’s most high-profile supporters was Richard Nixon. As vice president during Dwight Eisenhower’s first term as president, Nixon endorsed Senator Joe McCarthy’s wild witch hunts. Nixon shifted his position only after McCarthy slandered Eisenhower and became a liability to the Republican Party.202 Although McCarthy scared millions of Americans, he was able to consolidate enormous power and make his own name a household word. Nevertheless, during his entire anti-Communism campaign, McCarthy successfully fingered exactly zero Communists.
High-Conflict Media
Just as Hitler was the first politician to use the radio to connect intimately with ordinary people in their homes, McCarthy was the first politician to use television in a similar intensely emotional, repetitive manner. He dominated television news for four years. But his power collapsed in 1954 when he accused the US Army of coddling known Communists. He overreached.203
Televised hearings of his Army investigation let the American people see his bullying tactics and lack of credibility, and he quickly lost support. Eventually, McCarthy’s own political party turned against him. In 1954, the Senate censured him for his aggressive tactics, and all but one senator voted against him. This vote “effectively end[ed] his career,”204 but he still had popular support until his death from likely alcoholism in 1957.
At the height of McCarthy’s political power, polls showed that nearly half of all Americans approved of him. Even after the Senate’s 1954 censure of him, McCarthy enjoyed 40 percent support in Gallup polls.205
It appears that his emotional repetition was in isolation because of the lack of any competing voice or television broadcasts. Television was new in the 1950s, so it had the authority of a single voice. Since McCarthy was a senator, he obviously was someone to be highly regarded, and no other television station was going to criticize him—especially regarding the hot topic of Communism.
This allowed him to gain a tremendous following by focusing so intensely on his fantasy villains. It was high-conflict drama from start to finish. For four years the country was captivated and many careers were ruined. When the nation finally caught on to the dangerousness of people like him, they called it McCarthyism. His aggressiveness and his lack of empathy and remorse in publicly and pointlessly humiliating people appears to fit well into the Wannabe King pattern. He is a classic example of promoting a Fantasy Crisis Triad using the latest potentially high-conflict medium—television.
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was president of the United States from 1969 to 1974, when he resigned from office during his second term. He was faced with likely impeachment charges because of his role in the Watergate scandal involving a break-in to the Democratic Party’s headquarters during the 1972 election.
Nixon’s Early Years
Much has been written about Richard Nixon’s difficult personality. He was named after King Richard the Lion-Hearted, and three of his four brothers were also named after kings (he was the second oldest). His mother was emotionally unavailable for a lot of his early childhood due to illness and caring for the other children, so he often stayed with relatives and apparently cried a lot. At the same time, he also showed a tendency toward self-reliance, a quiet seriousness, and a precocious maturity.
He was a quick study with a remarkable memory. He could read before he started school and read over thirty books on his own in first grade. He was known to enjoy reading rather than playing outside. His parents encouraged his intellectual specialness, although his father could also be very mean-spirited and physically abusive.206
High-Conflict Personality
Some authors say that his childhood of emotional deprivation and specialness led to him developing a narcissistic personality.
We will now observe the manifestations of a narcissistic personality in Nixon, providing examples of how he repeatedly attempted to prove to himself and others his right to be “number one” and how he denied his dependency, rage, and envy. At times when the reality of his environment or his own internal turmoil threatened his grandiosity he would feel humiliated, enraged, envious, physically ill, paranoid, and willing to strike back at “unloving” others or dangerous things in order to reaffirm his grandiosity.207
How much of his personality was inborn and how much was due to his early childhood is hard to know. Did his king-like name and upbringing make him want to be in charge and to dominate others? We will never know. But he appears to have had the makings of a brilliant politician who was brought down by his own highly aggressive personality.
Another important aspect of his self-defeating personality was his constant lying. In a psychologically informed biography, Fawn Brodie explained:
Nixon lied in matters both important and trivial. She stated that “Nixon lied to gain love, to store up his grandiose fantasies, to bolster his ever-wavering sense of identity. He lied in attacks, hoping to win. … And always he lied, and this most aggressively, to deny that he lied. … Finally, he enjoyed lying.” She gives examples of Nixon’s lying in matters large and small: He lied about his college major, about his wife’s first name and birth date, about his own secret slush fund in the 1952 Presidential campaign, and in the Watergate cover-up.208
Fantasy Crisis
Nixon ran for president in 1968, after serving as a congressman and a US senator from California. At the time, Americans were deeply concerned about—and deeply divided on—two major issues: civil rights and the Vietnam War. During the 1960s, the US was being torn apart by protests, marches, and riots. After major civil rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965, many state and local governments in the south refused to enforce them.
Meanwhile, in Vietnam, America was fighting a war for reasons that many people could not comprehend. Over 30,000 Americans had already died by 1968. Although the Vietnamese saw this as a civil war, many American politicians sold it to their countrymen as a fight against Communism.
As a law-and-order presidential candidate, Nixon was able to reassure Americans that he would push back against the forces of chaos and change what was happening in the country. For example, one essay he wrote in the lead-up to the election year was titled: “If Mob Rule Takes Hold in America—A Warning from Richard Nixon.”209
Fantasy Villains
Nixon’s law-and-order platform was a brilliant catch-all for numerous villains. Depending on what scared a particular person, “chaos” could be a reference to protestors, especially students; to civil rights activists and advocates; to non-white people in general; or to Communists. (Recall Nixon’s earlier support of McCarthy.)
Fantasy Hero
Nixon’s implied stance against civil rights also enabled him to win the votes of many southerners, who felt betrayed by the prior president’s (Lyndon Johnson’s) “concessions” to racial equality with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also, there had been riots in the inner cities in the 1960s and the war in Vietnam was gaining protesters. In 1968, Nixon ran as a Republican antiwar candidate, stealing the Democrats issue. He showed ads with war footage and “Nixon’s calm voice promising to end the war and correct the mistakes of the old set of leaders who were responsible.”210 Of course, Nixon didn’t end the Vietnam war, he even expanded it secretly into Cambodia.211
But Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972. As president, Nixon proved lawless and paranoid. He illegally wiretapped and spied on his perceived enemies and hired a group of thugs to break into Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington.
In 1973, when federal investigators began looking into his crimes, he fired independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Nine months later, the US House of Representatives filed articles of impeachment against Nixon who resigned from office less than two weeks afterward.
High-Emotion Media
Nixon had an adversarial relationship with the news media before he even ran for the office of president. He blamed the media for his loss to John F. Kennedy in his run for president in 1960.
However, in January 1968, before his comeback presidential election campaign got going, he met Roger Ailes when he appeared on The Mike Douglas Show, a television variety show, which was watched by seven million housewives. Ailes was the show’s producer and Nixon soon hired Ailes to teach him how to appear warmer and more human on screen. But that was not enough for Nixon. His battle with the media continued.
Nixon, like Lyndon Johnson before him, realized the political value of prime-time speeches carried free by the networks. Faced with an increasing number of presidential addresses, the networks started to seek balance to this powerful White House platform by following them with commentary. So while the networks carried the speech, to Nixon’s great chagrin, they followed it with analysis and criticism.
Nixon would not stand for this. Within two weeks, the administration dispatched Vice President Spiro Agnew to deliver a withering assault on the networks in front of a Republican audience in Des Moines. The networks dutifully carried the speech live after the White House instructed them that it was in their best interest to do so.212
Nixon went on to look into ways that he could attack the networks by using the Federal Communications Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Justice. He did succeed in winning some concessions from them, for instance, CBS agreed to drop its immediate analysis after presidential and vice-presidential speeches.213
Nixon used the media to get his emotionally repetitive message out about law and order. But he also tried to get his message out in isolation, by blocking any responses to his speeches (and those of his vice president) by the media.
Donald Trump
At the time of this writing (January 2019), Donald J. Trump is president of the United States. It’s unknown how long he will stay in office as there are many investigations going on about his possible election collusion with the Russian government in 2016 and other possibly fraudulent financial matters. Yet his political base sticks with him, he has a Republican majority in the Senate, and the Supreme Court is majority conservative, including two of his own appointees. And he has already filed for his re-election bid in 2020.
Regardless of the outcome of these investigations, his election stirred up a heated national debate over whether he is dangerous or good for America; whether he is a pathological liar or authentic; and whether democracy has been harmed or strengthened by his presidency.
Trump’s Early Years
Donald Trump was born into a wealthy real estate family in New York City. Apparently, he was brash and difficult to manage, even from an early age. He was known as a bully who wanted to overpower people. If he made a false statement, he would simply defend it and repeat it several times to make others believe it was true.
In elementary school, Donny impressed classmates with his athleticism, shenanigans and refusal to acknowledge mistakes, even one so trivial as misidentifying a popular professional wrestler. …
“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” the 70-year-old presumptive Republican nominee once told a biographer. “The temperament is not that different.”214
Trump’s father taught him that there were winners and losers in life, and that Trumps had to be winners. “Be a killer,” his father told his sons, as if training them to develop narcissistic traits.215
High-Conflict Personality
Trump appears to have numerous Targets of Blame, a lot of all-or-nothing thinking and solutions, frequent unmanaged emotions and extreme behavior, and threats of extreme behavior.
When the younger Trump became a Manhattan real estate developer, he was extremely demanding and inconsistent with his employees. He blamed them for his own decisions.
“Who said to make this ceiling so low?”
“You knew about this, Donald,” Hyde replied. “We talked about it, if you remember, and the plans—”
Abruptly Donald leaped up and punched his fist through the tile. Then he turned on Hyde in a rage. … The tirade went on at great length as Trump “humiliated [Hyde] in front of twenty people, colleagues and professionals.”216
Over the course of the first two years of his presidency, it was common for me to hear people of both political parties discussing his narcissistic traits. Little was said about sociopathic traits; however, this too started becoming a topic of discussion after several of his cohorts were convicted of crimes committed while working for him. Does he have a personality disorder? I won’t answer that question because it is a mental health diagnosis. You will have to decide for yourself.
Fantasy Crisis
There are so many examples of Trump’s use of Fantasy Crisis Triads to gain power that I will only focus on one in detail here, Mexican immigrants. I will mention several others briefly, but how he has handled the immigration issue is a good example of how he has promoted and handled all the rest.
In 2010, after years of donating to both Democratic and Republican political candidates (80 percent to Democrats at that time), he spoke with consultants and consciously decided to run for President as a conservative Republican.217
In 2011, perhaps as a campaign warm-up, he widely promoted the extreme view of some Republicans that President Barack Obama (an African-American elected president in 2008) was born in Africa and therefore not allowed to be president. This apparently resonated with a majority of Republicans. In 2016, he admitted that Obama was born in the US (in Hawaii), but he was so successful with his repetition of this fantasy crisis about Obama that even a year later 51 percent of Republicans still believed Obama was born in Africa.218
Trump then focused on Mexican immigration:
In preparation for his presidential bid, he instructed his aides to listen to thousands of hours of conservative talk radio. They reported back to Trump that “the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues,” one of which was immigration.219
For this crisis, Trump claimed that Mexicans were illegally pouring across the southern United States border, hurting unemployed citizens’ job prospects and creating terrible danger for US citizens. He didn’t mention that the number of Mexicans coming north into the United States was the lowest it had been since 2009.
There are more Mexicans leaving the United States than coming in. According to the Pew Research Center, there was a net outflow of 140,000 from 2009 to 2014. If Trump builds his wall, he’ll lock more Mexican immigrants in than he’ll keep out. …
One study of 103 cities between 1994 and 2004 found that violent crime rates decreased as the concentration of immigrants increased. Numerous studies have shown that a big share of the drop in crime rates in the 1990s is a result of the surge in immigration.220
Fantasy Villains
Despite these facts, Trump went ahead and made Mexican immigrants into his fantasy villains. In his very first speech when he announced his candidacy, he said this:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.221
Fantasy Hero
In the same speech, he went on to say that he would be the incredible hero, saving America and making it great again.
I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I tell you that. I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money.222
And of course, at his presidential inauguration he famously said: “I alone can fix it.”223 The fantasy hero.
Looking back on his “Mexican rapists” announcement speech, we realize that it’s very similar to the speeches he has continued to make throughout his time in office. He is brilliant at using emotional repetition, even repeating his own phrases on a regular basis.
And his solution to the fantasy crisis of Mexicans pouring in?
I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.224
Of course, this too was a fantasy and Mexico was never going to pay for it. By January 2019, almost two years into his presidency, his overwhelmingly Republican congress had still refused to provide the funding for his great wall. Putting up this wall would be humiliating for Mexico, but making them pay for it would be doubly so, and totally unrealistic.
This statement fits with a personality that is into dominating and humiliating others without empathy or remorse, with a bit of paranoia and a touch of sadism thrown in. These are the characteristics of a malignant narcissist. Could his first speech indicate that Trump is one? He certainly has Targets of Blame. From the first day of his presidential campaign, the signs of an extreme Wannabe King were already there for those who knew what to look for.
More Fantasy Crises
Trump has had many other fantasy crises. He put a lot of energy into trying to eliminate Obamacare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare expansion that was promoted by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. But a funny thing happened on the way to Obamacare (ACA) repeal. After the election, polls showed that the majority of Americans actually supported the ACA and didn’t want it repealed.225
The Republican Congress did not fall in line with the new president on this issue after all, and Trump’s efforts to end it failed when the Senate gave the repeal thumbs down six months into his presidency in July 2017.
Since Trump became president, his promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is nowhere close to being fulfilled, despite his repeated, confident assertions on the campaign trail that it could be done in just a day. The failure of health-care legislation in the Senate this week shows Trump still has not learned how to navigate Congress—and how much he is struggling to be the dealmaker, fighter and winner he portrayed himself to be to voters.226
Another fantasy crisis for Trump was his claim that scientific reports on climate change were a liberal plot against business and he did not believe in it. So early in his administration he cancelled the participation of the United States in the Paris Climate Accord, which had been painstakingly negotiated among many countries.227
He decided that trade wars were “easy to win” and attacked Canada and European allies, along with China. Although some politicians and economists agree that the United States needed to address trade issues with China, Trump’s eager pursuit of wide-ranging trade wars was his idea and his alone—another demonstration of his all-or-nothing thinking. He even lost his own appointed chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, over it.228
With Canada, he said there was a terrible trade deficit, but he only mentioned goods. When services were taken into account, the US actually had a positive balance in trade with Canada. Even though this was the case, Trump forced the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada. Although only minor changes were made (to the relief of most politicians and economists), Trump claimed a huge victory.229
This surprised almost no one, as his grandiose claims are growing quite familiar to most Americans. After the Democrats won back control of the House of Representatives in the November 2018 congressional elections, indications are that Trump is starting to lose his grip, even with his base of white working-class men. “[I]t is no surprise that more than half of white working class men now believe that Mr. Trump is ‘self-dealing’ and corrupt.”230 Reality is beginning to set in.
US Presidential Election 2016
Donald Trump decided to base his campaign on Mexican immigrants, Muslims, journalists, China, and many other fantasy crises. Figure 5 is a summary of how his Fantasy Crisis Triads worked in emotionally splitting the voters four ways, resulting in his election win in 2016. Although his percentage of votes was slightly less than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, he won in the Electoral College, which gives states with smaller populations an advantage over more populous states.
Trump won nearly 63 million votes, which is 28 percent of the total possible votes. Hillary Clinton won nearly 66 million votes, which is 29 percent. Third parties won nearly 8 million votes, which is 4 percent.231 This leaves 39 percent of eligible adults who didn’t vote at all in the 2016 election.232
Most of the voter information I use here comes from a detailed analysis by three political science researchers published late in 2018 in a book titled Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. The 4-Way Voter Split group analysis is my own.
LOYALISTS
Trump’s support included Republicans who shared his negative views of his various Targets of Blame. For example, according to polls, “68 percent of Republican primary voters believed that Trump’s statements about Mexican immigrants being rapists who bring drugs and crime into the country was ‘basically right.’”233 But approximately one-third of Republicans did not agree with those statements and didn’t vote for him in the primary election. “Among Republicans who did not support Trump in the primary, nearly seven in ten (69%) voted for him in the general election.” They stayed loyal to the Republican Party candidate.
FIGURE 5. US presidential election 2016—4-way voter split. Copyright © 2019 Bill Eddy, All Rights Reserved, Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop, Berrrett-Koehler Publishers
MODERATES
Moderates are the emotionally mild group of voters, which includes many Republican moderates, Democratic moderates, and most Independents. This is typically the largest group of voters and it decides most elections. Moderates generally are not the energized party bases. In many ways they are comfortable with the “establishment” and don’t like a lot of intense political conflict. In this election, Moderates went in four directions, some into each of the four split groups.
In my analysis the Moderate candidate in this fundamentally two-party system was Hillary Clinton in 2016. The majority of the country voted for her by almost 3 million votes more than Trump. They remained Moderate.
Double Negatives
Double Negatives is the term given by the Identity Crisis researchers to those voters who had equally unfavorable views of both Clinton and Trump. I believe that this is because of the effect of Trump’s intense emotional splitting or dividing of groups as he attacked Clinton and other targets in almost every one of his public announcements or Twitter commentaries.
The effect of emotional splitting is that it triggers an equally distasteful feeling about both people, even though one (the HCP) is usually acting extremely badly while the other (the Target of Blame) is being fairly normal or simply defending himself or herself. The result of repeatedly hearing very bad things about a normal person from a very badly behaving HCP is that both are perceived as equally very bad. I’ve seen this over and over again, in high-conflict divorcing families, workplace conflicts, and legal disputes. People turn away from both the HCP and their Target of Blame.
By consistently attacking Clinton about having a private email server when she was Secretary of State (a potentially illegal set-up because of the risk of releasing government secrets, but this didn’t happen, and she was cleared), Trump was able to make her seem involved in a scandal and dishonest. This turned out to be a fantasy crisis. Ironically, she was unable to pin any one scandal on him, because there were so many and she didn’t effectively focus on one the way he did.
In an early October YouGov poll, almost 80 percent of respondents said that they had “heard a lot” about the Clinton email story—more than any other story about Clinton or Trump. (For example, only 51% said they had heard a lot about Trump’s calling Alicia Machado “Miss Piggy.”)… Meanwhile, no single idea or theme dominated perceptions of Trump.234
In this election, more double-negative voters were Republican: 45 percent to 35 percent Democrat. “Trump did better among those with unfavorable views of both candidates. They appeared to be holding their nose and voting their partisanship.”235 Those double-negative Moderate Republicans voted with the Loyalists. Most of the double-negative Moderate Democrats stayed put and voted for Clinton. But some voted against both and went with the Resisters by voting for third-party candidates, and some went with the Dropouts and did not vote at all.
Independent Voters
Independent voters are a growing part of the electorate and generally are Moderates. However, 75 percent of these voters lean toward one party or the other, while the remaining 25 percent are likely to drop out and not vote at all.236 If they mostly vote with their parties, then why do they register as Independents? Surveys and interviews have shown that they basically “don’t like political parties,” “are tired of the fighting between both the Republican and Democratic political parties,” and “ … think that there is a need for balance and compromise, and so … [they are] independent[s].”237
In my view, they essentially don’t like the fighting and therefore fit my category of emotionally-mild Moderates. In 2016, 68 percent of Independents who lean Republican voted for Trump, and 65 percent of Independents who lean Democratic voted for Clinton. But as pollsters have noticed, “The characteristic anger and vitriol of partisan politics are turning them away from party membership. … In the wake of the 2016 election, we see mounting evidence of this connection between political dissatisfaction and independent identification.”238
RESISTERS
Resisters can be the riled-up opponents of an HCP politician and they can be on the left or on the right, and sometimes both. But they also often attack the Moderates, which helps allow the HCP to be elected. In the case of Hitler, they were the Communists who often fought against the Social Democrats (the Moderate establishment), which weakened the Social Democrats and helped them lose power. In the case of Stalin’s drive for collectivization in the Soviet Union, they were the small capitalist farmers who hid grain and equipment and mostly operated in the shadows. In Putin’s Russia, they were the street protesters and others opposed to his policies. Every HCP inspires a resistance because of their extreme positions and extreme emotions.
In the 2016 election, Bernie Sanders represented the Resisters fighting against the Democratic establishment by running in the Democratic primaries against Hillary Clinton. However, he insisted that he remained an Independent. “Throughout the campaign, Sanders touted his independence, vowed to take on the political establishment, and railed against the Democratic National Committee.”239
Clinton criticized Sanders for focusing on a few issues (free higher education, healthcare for all, and attacking big banks) with simplistic answers, while she had position papers and knowledge on just about every possible issue that could be raised.
On the other hand, Sanders’ criticisms of Clinton and the Democratic Party were emotionally engaging to many of his followers. She became a Target of Blame for Sanders in an emotional way that mirrored Trump’s attacks on her, although during most of the campaign Sanders and Clinton remained friendly.
However, late in the primaries, the release of emails hacked from the Democratic Party office revealed behind-the-scenes manipulations that added to the Resisters’ anger at the establishment. As the primary campaign intensified, Sanders’ followers’ once generally favorable opinions of Clinton deteriorated significantly.
By the general election, after Sanders swung his support to Clinton, only 79 percent of his supporters voted for her, an estimated 12 percent voted for Trump, and the remainder continued resisting and voted for small third parties, or dropped out and didn’t vote at all.240
With Sanders’ more emotional relationship with his followers and his focus on simple, us-against-them anti-establishment messages, one wonders whether he might have been able to actually win the general election if he had been the Democratic candidate rather than Clinton. Sanders seemed to demonstrate the importance of an emotional bond with his followers, but without the emotional hostility toward Targets of Blame that Trump displayed.
DROPOUTS
In this election, the largest group of potential voters were the Dropouts at 39 percent. Dropouts have many reasons (or excuses) for not voting. I have often heard from those who believe there’s no real difference between the parties or the candidates, or they are really busy, or they can’t really get away from work on election day (even when they’re self-employed).
One of the more recent reasons may be new “voter suppression” laws in several states that limit hours and locations and require limited forms of identification for voting. However, although such laws appear targeted at minority populations, such as African-Americans and Native Americans, these new laws do not appear to have changed the historical trend away from voting.
However, African-Americans did vote less in 2016 for the first time in twenty years, even in states that had no changes in voter laws. Millennials and Generation X (18- to 35-year-olds) turned out more voters in 2016 than 2012, but still slightly less than 50 percent.241
A Fantasy Crisis Triad Overreach?
To help his party win the midterm congressional election in November 2018, Trump aggressively pursued the idea that a caravan of barefoot refugees from Central America was an “invasion of our country.” He made the unfounded claim that it included “Middle Easterners” who were likely terrorists. So he ordered the Army to defend the border.242
More than 5,000 active-duty military troops will deploy to the southern border by the end of this week, Defense Department officials said on Monday. … But the caravan, which has shrunk from 7,000 people to less than 3,500, is still weeks away from reaching the United States.243
It is not insignificant that immediately after the election, Trump stopped talking about this threat.
“Now that the political utility of troops on the southern border to face a fictitious caravan invasion threat is over,” said Adm. James G. Stavridis, a former commander of the military’s Southern Command, “let’s hope the president will stand down the troops so they can be with their families—especially over the holidays.”244
It seemed that this fantasy crisis became obvious to a significant portion of the country, with the “fictitious caravan invasion” being openly discussed in major media outlets. In addition, the issue of immigration appears to be shifting all together in the eyes of the public, as revealed in November 2018.
On Election Day, a stunning 54 percent of those who voted said immigrants “strengthen our country.” Mr. Trump’s party lost the national popular vote by seven points, but he lost the debate over whether immigrants are a strength or a burden by 20 points. Mr. Trump got more than half of Republicans to believe immigrants were a burden, but three quarters of Democrats and a large majority of independents concluded that America gains from immigration.245
When reality sets in enough, an HCP’s fantasy crises seem to lose their power. But of course, with the use of high-emotion media, they often can keep covering up reality with more Fantasy Crisis Triads.
High-Emotion Media
When Trump campaigned for office, his way of speaking was far more emotional than all the other candidates, Democrat or Republican. This caught the attention of the Director of Content at dictionary.com, who said this about the words the presidential candidates were using during 2016:
“Bernie [Sanders] and Hillary [Clinton] tend to use concrete language,” she explained, “whereas the Republican contenders—with the possible exception of Kasich—tend to use descriptive language. I think that’s partly why Trump’s speech is so resonant with his supporters: he’s speaking to them on an emotional plane.”246
This fits very well with the theory of this book—that potentially high-conflict politicians use language that goes under everyone’s radar and emotionally triggers them. Logically, none of these fantasy crises make any sense. But they make sense to narcissists, sociopaths, and high-conflict personalities who want to identify as many people as possible as villains so that voters view them as heroes by comparison. All of this works only on the emotional plane.
Trump also used emotional repetition in the names he chose to call people. He openly laughed and said he was adding a name to each of his opponents, just as Newt Gingrich taught Republican congressional candidates in the 1990s (see Chapter 4).
What he didn’t say openly (and may or may not have even realized himself) was that he was tagging them with an emotional label. Our brains can’t resist absorbing such labels, even without conscious processing. This is an extremely simple and emotional way to promote sales that advertisers learned decades ago but that most politicians are unwilling to use.
Also, these emotions triggered each voting group’s own type of emotional responses; for instance, Loyalists might have felt joy, Resisters anger, Moderates fear and frustration, and Dropouts helplessness and/or avoidance. This further created division among all of these groups. “How can they (Loyalists, Resisters, Moderates, Dropouts) be so (stupid, overreactive, powerless, indifferent)?”
Furthermore, this emotional repetition was in isolation for many of Trump’s followers who only got their news from Trump-favorable sources, such as Fox News. One analysis of Trump’s electoral success clearly concluded that those who got their news from television and not from newspaper subscriptions were more susceptible to his emotional, but false, messages.
The findings cover more than 1,000 mainstream news publications in more than 2,900 counties out of 3,100 nationwide from every state except Alaska, which does not hold elections at the county level.
The results show a clear correlation between low subscription rates and Trump’s success in the 2016 election, both against Hillary Clinton and when compared to Romney in 2012. Those links were statistically significant even when accounting for other factors that likely influenced voter choices, such as college education and employment, suggesting that the decline of local media sources by itself may have played a role in the election results. POLITICO’s analysis suggests that Trump did, indeed, do worse overall in places where independent media could check his claims.247
Trump also directly attacked the media from the start of his campaign and trained his followers to do so too. At his rallies, he placed the media in a compact area where he could point at reporters and have the crowd jeer them. In this manner, he was able to cast doubt on their reporting, and he quickly adopted the phrase “fake news” when others reported accurately about him.
Rather than attempt to put news media out of business, as we have seen that other Wannabe Kings have done in other countries, Trump found great success in constantly criticizing them. Social media was also an important key to his success, but it was not necessarily the biggest factor. By using Twitter, Trump was able to communicate directly with his followers, but having his tweets emotionally repeated on cable and network television was far more important.
It’s also clear—as the economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro wrote in these pages last year—that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news. And indeed, the three economists noted, for all the talk about Breitbart’s influence and Russian meddling and dark web advertising, Trump only improved on Mitt Romney’s showing among Americans who don’t use the internet, and he “actually lost support among internet-using voters.” In a sense, you could argue, all those tweets mattered mainly because they kept being quoted on TV.248
To put the power of the high-emotion media into perspective, the election researchers just mentioned reached three conclusions that really stood out to me:
1. The 2016 election was not really about economic anger or change. People were doing economically better than during the prior eight years when they elected an African-American president two times. The state of the economy helped Clinton win a majority of the national vote.
2. It really was about personality—the personality of the candidate and whether he or she wanted to unify or divide the nation. A nation can go either way. Barack Obama didn’t make an issue of race, so people didn’t vote based on that. Donald Trump did make an issue of race, so it “activated” people’s residual racism more than their residual tolerance, and it helped him more.249
What gave us the 2016 election, then, was not changes among voters. It was changes in the candidates…. [w]hat the candidates chose to do and say.250
And Wannabe Kings will do and say anything because they lack empathy or a conscience. Trump frequently said things such as “illegal immigrants are treated better in America than many of our vets,”251 which isn’t true but created a feeling of crisis—a fantasy crisis.
3. And it really was about the media repetition of emotional messages. “The news media value things that make for ‘good stories’—interesting characters, novelty, drama, conflict, and controversy—and Trump supplied those in spades.”252 He received the most coverage.
Conclusion: Who’s Next?
Joe McCarthy had a history of lying in politics that began by the time he was in his twenties. He certainly had Targets of Blame and showed no empathy or remorse in falsely accusing them in public on television. He eventually had his downfall, but he still had a lot of support. McCarthyism is named after him.
Richard Nixon also lied a lot. He promoted an illegal scheme to break into the office of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel during the election of 1972. He also had an enemies list, which was written down for him by his staff.
Donald Trump has been a good example of an HCP using Fantasy Crisis Triads to divide voters and win. This appears to be because today’s high-emotion media, in all its forms, emphasizes faces, voices, and emotional messages. This ultimately favors high-conflict politicians (and all high-conflict personalities) who have far less self-restraint and ability to solve problems in the gray areas of real life.
Yet it seems that elections are no longer about good government, but about “good stories.” In the all-or-nothing world of heroes and villains, Trump won.
But who will be next? Will it be someone on the far right or the far left? In Russia, the far-left Stalin was replaced (with a period of democracy in between) by a far-right Putin. In Hungary, pro-democracy Orban became far-right Orban.
Today’s high-emotion media in America has helped create an environment in which a high-conflict personality can succeed with fantasy crises when real daily life is actually going okay for most people, including his followers. Yes, there are problems to be solved, but they don’t compare to the problems that a Wannabe King can create in their endless quest for unlimited power.