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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 9/16/17

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: Robert Jay Lifton and Bill Moyers on "A Duty to Warn"

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Moyers: Where?

Lifton: For instance, when I was studying Chinese communist thought reform, one priest was falsely accused of being a spy, and was under physical duress -- really tortured with chains and in other intolerable ways. As he was tortured and the interrogator kept insisting that he was a spy, he began to imagine himself in the role of a spy, with spy radios in all the houses of his order. In his conversations with other missionaries he began to think he was revealing military data to the enemy in some way. These thoughts became real to him because he had entered into them and convinced the interrogator that he believed them in order to remove the chains and the torture. He told me it seemed like someone creating a novel and the novelist building a story with characters which become real and believable. Something like that could happen to Trump, in which the false beliefs become part of a panorama, all of which is fantasy and very often bound up with conspiracy theory, so that he immerses himself in it and believing in it even as at the same time recognizing in another part of his mind that none of this exists. The human mind can do that.

Moyers: It's as if he believes the truth is defined by his words.

Lifton: Yes, that's right. Trump has a mind that in many ways is always under duress, because he's always seeking to be accepted, loved. He sees himself as constantly victimized by others and by the society, from which he sees himself as fighting back. So there's always an intensity to his destructive behavior that could contribute to his false beliefs.

Moyers: Do you remember when he tweeted that President Obama had him wiretapped, despite the fact that the intelligence community couldn't find any evidence to support his claim? And when he spoke to a CIA gathering, with the television cameras running, he said he was "a thousand percent behind the CIA," despite the fact that everyone watching had to know he had repeatedly denounced the "incompetence and dishonesty" of that same intelligence community.

Lifton: Yes, that's an extraordinary situation. And one has to invoke here this notion of a self-determined truth, this inner need for the situation to take shape in the form that the falsehood claims. In a sense this takes precedence over any other criteria for what is true.

Moyers: What other hazardous patterns do you see in his behavior? For example, what do you make of the admiration that he has expressed for brutal dictators -- Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq, even Kim Jong Un of North Korea -- yes, him -- and President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who turned vigilantes loose to kill thousands of drug users, and of course his admiration for Vladimir Putin. In the book Michael Tansey says, "There's considerable evidence to suggest that absolute tyranny is Donald Trump's wet dream."

Lifton: Yes. Well, while Trump doesn't have any systematic ideology, he does have a narrative, and in that narrative, America was once a great country, it's been weakened by poor leadership, and only he can make it great again by taking over. And that's an image of himself as a strongman, a dictator. It isn't the clear ideology of being a fascist or some other clear-cut ideological figure. Rather, it's a narrative of himself as being unique and all-powerful. He believes it, though I'm sure he's got doubts about it. But his narrative in a sense calls forth other strongmen, other dictators who run their country in an absolute way and don't have to bother with legislative division or legal issues.

Moyers: I suspect some elected officials sometimes dream of doing what an unopposed autocrat or strongman is able to do, and that's demand adulation on the one hand, and on the other hand, eradicate all of your perceived enemies just by turning your thumb down to the crowd. No need to worry about "fake media" -- you've had them done away with. No protesters. No confounding lawsuits against you. Nothing stands in your way.

Lifton: That's exactly right. Trump gives the impression that he would like to govern by decree. And of course, who governs by decree but dictators or strongmen? He has that impulse in him and he wants to be a savior, so he says, in his famous phrase, "Only I can fix it!" That's a strange and weird statement for anybody to make, but it's central to Trump's sense of self and self-presentation. And I think that has a lot to do with his identification with dictators. No matter how many they kill and no matter what else they do, they have this capacity to rule by decree without any interference by legislators or courts.

In the case of Putin, I think Trump does have involvements in Russia that are in some way determinative. I think they'll be important in his removal from office. I think he's aware of collusion on his part and his campaign's, some of which has been brought out, a lot more of which will be brought out in the future. He appears to have had some kind of involvement with the Russians in which they've rescued him financially and maybe continue to do so, so that he's beholden to them in ways for which there's already lots of evidence. So I think his fierce impulse to cover up any kind of Russian connections, which is prone to obstruction of justice, will do him in.

Moyers: I want to ask you about another side of him that is taken up in the book. It involves the much-discussed video that appeared during the campaign last year which had been made a decade or so ago when Trump was newly married. He sees this actress outside his bus and he says, "I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her," and then we hear sounds of Tic Tacs before Trump continues. "You know," he says, "I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet, just kiss, I don't even wait." And then you can hear him boasting off camera, "When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the... You can do anything."

Lifton: In addition to being a strongman and a dictator, there's a pervasive sense of entitlement. Whatever he wants, whatever he needs in his own mind, he can have. It's a kind of American celebrity gone wild, but it's also a vicious anti-female perspective and a caricature of male macho. That's all present in Trump as well as the solipsism that I mentioned earlier, and that's why when people speak of him as all-pervasive on many different levels of destructiveness, they're absolutely right.

Moyers: And it seems to extend deeply into his relationship with his own family. There's a chapter in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump with the heading, "Trump's Daddy Issues." There's several of his quotes about his daughter, Ivanka. He said, "You know who's one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody, and I helped create her? Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She's 6 feet tall. She's got the best body."

Again: "I said that if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her." Ivanka was 22 at the time. To a reporter he said: "Yeah, she's really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren't happily married -- and, you know, her father..."

When Howard Stern, the radio host, started to say, "By the way, your daughter --" Trump interrupted him with "She's beautiful." Stern continued, "Can I say this? A piece of ass." To which Trump replied, "Yeah." What's going on here?

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Bill Moyers is President of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

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