When the walls start closing in, Donald Trump doesn’t
lawyer up: he doubles down. With Epstein’s ghost rattling through the headlines
and the threat of explosive disclosures looming, Team Trump has rolled out its
most cynical, racially-charged distraction yet: accuse Barack Obama of treason.
It’s not about justice. It’s not about truth. It’s a deliberate psyop meant to hijack the news cycle, enrage the MAGA base, and erase Epstein’s name from every chyron in America. Which is why it appears that the Trump White House is closing in on the conclusion that the only story that could be “big enough” to blow Epstein off the front pages will be “Obama Committed Treason!”
They’re busily assigning investigators, FBI agents,
lawyers, and others in the Justice Department to find everything they can that
might implicate our first Black president in having committed High Crimes and
Misdemeanors.
Democrats and many in the media are essentially
ridiculing the effort, arguing that nobody is naïve enough — or malicious
enough — to believe such a story. But things that seem illogical or even
flat-out nuts to reporters and Democrats may, according to a scientific study
published in recent months, make perfect sense for Trump supporters.
Titled Malevolent vs. Benevolent Dispositions and Conservative
Political Ideology in the Trump Era and published last fall
in The Journal of Research in Personality, the authors
looked at the personality factors that showed up consistently among Trump
supporters versus the rest of the American population.
What they found is both shocking and absolutely
consistent with the observations and suspicions of those of us who have to
regularly interact with Trump followers: they’re sick, at least by the
standards of liberal democracy. They lack empathy and even get pleasure out of
watching other people in pain.
In the conclusions section of their published article, the University of North Texas Psychology Department researchers explain: “We examined the associations between broad dispositions with political ideology that included views of Trump. Malevolent (+) and benevolent (−) dispositions predicted this ideology. In aggregate, those favorable to Trump reported greater malevolent and lower benevolent propensities, less empathy, and more enjoyment of others’ suffering.”
Given that Trump is quickly moving America toward
autocracy, it shouldn’t be surprising that he himself displays the so-called
Dark Triad of personality characteristics that are so easily observed in
historical figures like Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and modern-day autocrats
like Putin, Orbán, and Erdoğon:
“Autocrats manifest socially aversive personality,
including malevolent traits in the Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathy, and
Machiavellianism, and the same has been found for Trump. Similar results have
been found for authoritarians’ loyal foot soldiers. … Thus, it is not
surprising perhaps that voters with aversive traits tend to prefer aversive
political figures.”
They point out that there are numerous studies that
have been done over the years showing that people with “malevolent”
dispositions tend toward conservatism while those with “benevolent”
personalities are more likely to be liberals. They define their terms in clear,
analytical language:
“A malevolent disposition reflects wishing ill will or
doing harm to others, while a benevolent disposition involves intending or
showing goodwill or kindness to others. …
“A malevolent disposition is measured via aversive
features of Machiavellian manipulativeness, psychopathic callousness, and
narcissistic self-absorption, all negatively associated with empathy and
positively associated with antisocial behavior.”
As they note, Trump rings all the malevolent bells,
but they wanted to know if his followers also had the same antisocial
personality traits:
“A political candidate who boasts about being able to
shoot someone can be understood in terms of a malevolent disposition. We seek
to understand the voters who embrace such a politician and propose that insight
may be gained by examining the links between malevolent dispositions and
political ideology.
“Taken together, we propose that more extreme
(malevolent) dispositions are necessary for understanding today’s modern
incarnation of conservatism that includes a positive view of Trump.”
What they found was that — among white men — the stronger
the constellation of antisocial personality characteristics a person carried,
the more likely they were to support Trump and support him with a fervor that
reflected the intensity of those qualities.
It was so vivid that even those on the extreme end of the
antisocial spectrum — psychopaths — were generally enthusiastic about Trump and
his policies, regardless (or perhaps because) of how many people those policies
hurt:
“Across two different samples, we found a positive
association between conservative ideology/positive view of Trump and malevolent
disposition. For white men, psychopathic propensities predicted conservative
ideology/positive view of Trump. …
“Thus, the current results add to a growing literature on
a link between malevolent (aversive) dispositions and conservative ideology.
Moreover, our results are in line with Barber and Pope (2019) who found those
tied to a Trumpian symbolic ideology were most inclined to be uncivil to
others. The results from both samples found that latent psychopathic and
malevolent disposition means were significantly elevated among individuals who
viewed Trump favorably.”
Interestingly, they noted that among racial minorities
and women carrying many of these same personality characteristics, there wasn’t
the same strong correlation between antisocial personalities and support for
Trump; they mused that “sociocultural factors must be at play as well.”
This was because, they concluded, discrimination and the
violence often associated with it had shaped even the authoritarians among
minorities and women to be more liberal, more accepting of others, and less
willing to go along with policies that hurt other people:
“Longitudinal research suggests that race/ethnicity may
moderate the associations of RWA (Right Wing Authoritarianism) and SDO (Social
Dominance Orientation) with conservative political behavior and gender might
moderate the association between personality and conservatism with a stronger
association for males than females. These moderation effects may be due in part
to the fact that RWA and SDO are linked with racism and sexism.”
Which brings us to the big question they must be
debating right now in the White House: Will indicting or even trying Obama for
treason be enough to cause even “liberal” college-educated reporters and media
executives to decide that it’s a big enough story to eclipse their
now-nearly-constant coverage of Trump’s association with Epstein and the young
women and girls they are widely believed to have exploited?
Trump and his people already know that going after our
nation’s only Black president is good politics when it comes to their base, and
right now that’s the group they’re most freaked out about losing. If the base
goes, Trump won’t be far behind; it wasn’t until Nixon’s public approval
ratings had collapsed among the GOP base in 1974 that Barry Goldwater felt safe
visiting the White House and telling him it was time to leave.
That suggests that they’ll go all in on attacking
Obama, perhaps even manufacturing information or — like Tulsi Gabbard is now
doing — coming up with straw man arguments that are close enough to truth to
confuse the majority of Americans. The strategy seems to be working over on Fox
“News” and on rightwing hate radio, which have been pounding on the Obama
“treason” story for several days now with few signs of letting up.
I’m skeptical, however, that mainstream media outlets
will go along with this unless they’re subjected to overwhelming pressure from
the Trump White House. And until those news and opinion operations have a
change of focus, Trump is going to find it very hard to put Epstein and his
victims behind him.
Their second bet on this, being acted on by House
Speaker Mike Johnson, is to assume that if they can shut down Congress for a
month it’ll put a halt to all political conversations during the August summer
vacation season, leading to a recess of sorts on the Epstein issue.
Historically — as I’ve learned from doing political talk radio for 23 years now
— the summer is pretty dead when it comes to politics.
This is probably wishful thinking in the Epstein/Trump
case, however, because Trump can’t keep himself off the TV. He has a deep,
neurotic need for attention and approval (which he interprets as love) that, as
I lay out in detail in my new book The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and
a World on the Brink, drives him to constantly draw attention to
himself.
Also, when Congress reconvenes in September it’s likely
the discharge petition requiring a full confidential disclosure to members of
Congress of the Epstein files — that will have “ripened” by then and thus be
subject to a vote — will still be there.
Nonetheless, because Trump and the people around him
all suffer from the same collection of personality disorders and assume that
most other people think the same way they do, I’d bet that they’ll still go
after Obama in as big a way as they can.
This isn’t just a political maneuver: it’s a
scorched-earth strategy born of desperation and malevolence. Trump and his
enablers know their only way out is down, dragging the country with them into a
pit of conspiracy, vengeance, and manufactured outrage.
If the media blinks, if Democrats shrug, if the public
falls for the bait, the damage won’t just be another headline. It’ll be a
rupture in the fabric of truth itself.
The only question now is:
Will America call the bluff, or
fall for the con?
Will it succeed?
Will it backfire?
Will Obama finally get up on his hind legs and start
fighting (unlike when the GOP stole his nomination of Garland to the Supreme
Court and he didn’t say much at all)?
Will JD Vance finally get the shot at the presidency that he so clearly seems to crave?
-Thom Hartmann: My daily work depends on readers like you. Subscribe for
free to stay in the loop or become a paid subscriber to power the fight for
democracy!
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