Trump’s Persecution Projection: the Tyranny Escalates

According to the website www.simplypsychology.org, projection is a “psychological defence mechanism that involves attributing one’s undesirable traits, feelings, or impulses to other people. For instance, someone who is dishonest might accuse others of being dishonest, thereby shifting attention away from their dishonesty”.

Projection works as a defence mechanism by helping to protect the ego from anxiety-provoking thoughts or feelings. “By attributing these unwanted aspects to someone or something else, the individual distances themselves from what they find unacceptable within themselves”.

I am not a psychologist, but Donald Trump strikes me as a classic case of someone “suffering” (if that is the right word, since in fact it is everyone else who suffers from his behaviour) from projection.

Trump launched his tariff wars because he believes other countries are “ripping off” America with their allegedly unfair trade practices. This, from the man who, throughout his business career, routinely stiffed others – whether by defaulting on bank loans, defrauding investors, failing to reimburse building contractors for their services, or duping students into paying thousands in tuition for fake courses at his now-defunct Trump University.

Trump launched his war on “woke,” targeting “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiatives, because these allegedly discriminate on the basis of race and gender. Yet this is the administration that is now quite deliberately eradicating the record of prominent African American people, Native American people and women from the nation’s museums and institutions, pushing for schools and colleges to stop teaching the history of race relations, threatening to cut funding or cooperation with private businesses and organisations that maintain DEI programmes, while celebrating the “achievements” of known racists, such as former President Andrew Jackson.

An executive order issued in late March cites the National Museum of African American History and Culture by name and argues that the Smithsonian Institution as a whole is engaging in a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.” It empowers Vice President JD Vance to review all properties, programmes and presentations to prohibit programmes that “degrade shared American values” or “divide Americans based on race,” and orders Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to determine if any monuments since January 2020 “have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.” Trump has long criticised the removal of Confederate monuments – a movement that gained steam after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd.

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Critics argue that the cumulative impact of these actions will be to sanitize America’s history of racism, including slavery, and roll back decades of advances in racial and gender equality.

Trump has also claimed to be a champion of free speech, signing on day one of his new Presidency an executive order decreeing that “no federal officer, employee or agent may unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

Yet, in practice, his administration has been busy intimidating opponents into silence – including by threatening Democratic members of Congress with investigation for criticising conservatives, withdrawing federal funding from universities that fail to clamp down on student protests supporting Palestinians, sanctioning law firms that represent Trump’s political opponents, and arresting, detaining or deporting students, academics and green card holders who allegedly hold anti-Semitic or anti-American views.

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According to Will Creeley, Legal Director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – a non-partisan First Amendment group – “our right to say something depends on what the administration thinks of it, which is no free speech at all.”

Trump has also regularly lambasted the Democrats for being weak and feckless on foreign policy, citing Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan as a humiliating example of American retreat. Trump’s administration has asserted the need to restore deterrence. Yet his bullying of Ukraine to sign a hasty and probably unsustainable peace deal with Russia, his plans to withdraw troops from Europe, his uncertain commitment to defend allies in Europe and Asia, and the rolling back of American soft power all undermine America’s own security and open space for adversaries such as China to exploit.

Making it Personal

Perhaps the most egregious example of Trump’s projection tendencies is in the legal arena. He has regularly claimed that he is a victim of “politicised justice” and that the numerous investigations launched against him during Biden’s administration were evidence of a political witch-hunt designed to stop him from running for office again. Yet if anyone is guilty of weaponising the judicial system, it is Trump himself.

He has attacked federal judges who have ruled against him, directed his Attorney General to seek sanctions against lawyers and law firms that “engage in frivolous, unreasonable, and vexatious litigation against the United States,” and filed lawsuits against media outlets whose coverage he dislikes.

In March, he delivered a speech at the Justice Department in which he suggested that it should be “illegal” to criticise judges or to say that he lost the 2020 election. He also called for his political enemies to be jailed.

Now, he appears to be making good on that threat. On 9 April, Trump signed a pair of memoranda directing the Department of Justice to investigate two individuals who pushed back against him in his first administration.

One is Chris Krebs, the former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), who in 2020 rejected Trump’s claims that the election was fraudulent and insisted that the nation’s elections were not compromised.

The other is Miles Taylor, who served as a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security during the first Trump administration and wrote a New York Times op-ed, and later a book, under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” about the internal dysfunction of Trump’s administration and the dangers of allowing him to be re-elected.

Trump went so far as to accuse Taylor of treason – an offence that notionally carries the death penalty, though only around 40 people have ever been charged with treason in the US, 13 found guilty, and only three executed, none since the Second World War.

In response, Taylor tweeted on X that “dissent isn’t unlawful” and it “certainly isn’t treasonous. America is headed down a dark path. Never has a man so inelegantly proved another man’s point.”

It seems hard to imagine that, even in Trump’s America, any court will actually find these two men guilty. Nevertheless, both may struggle to secure legal representation, given the administration’s bullying of law firms that take up cases against it. They are also likely to face vicious attacks on social media – and possibly even physical threats of violence – from Trump’s most extreme supporters. After Taylor’s identity was first revealed as the author of “Anonymous,” he had to go into hiding for many months and lost his marriage, his house and his life savings.

This is a blatant case of the Government weaponising the judicial system to go after its political enemies. With this action, the Trump administration takes one more step towards authoritarianism, with devastating implications for American democracy. All Americans of good conscience should be worried by it. Yet, so far, the silence from Republicans on Capitol Hill is deafening.

The one flaw in my theory that Trump suffers from projection syndrome is that the condition implies the “sufferer” has some sort of awareness of right and wrong – hence the desire to displace negative sentiments onto others. But the more I observe Trump’s petty spite, meanness and delight in others’ suffering, the more it becomes apparent that he has no moral compass at all.

The worry is that no one around him appears willing to rein in or call out his worst impulses – even when they threaten American democracy itself.