Projection

One of the most common psychological mechanisms of our perilous time is projection. Simply Psychology defines it as a “psychological defense mechanism proposed by Anna Freud in which an individual attributes unwanted thoughts, feelings and motives onto another person” (www.simplypsychology.org).  A simpler way of putting this is: 

“It’s not me that has the problem or quirk or nasty habit, it’s you.” 

It should come as no surprise that the current President of the United States uses this mechanism routinely, almost automatically. His constant criticism and ridicule of others can usually be seen as stemming from attitudes or actions that he himself is guilty of. For example, just recently he criticized his opponent, Joe Biden, as a “stupid person.” One can easily see that he has projected the almost universal criticism of himself onto Joe Biden. We can see the same mechanism operating in his endless tirades against mail-in ballots as hopelessly corrupt; for it is clear that Donald Trump himself, given the chance, would cheat on a mail-in ballot; which, in this case, is demonstrated by his having recently recommended that his voters should, in fact, use mail-in ballots, and then go to their polling stations and vote again. Voting twice is clearly illegal, but the point is that it demonstrates how Trump thinks everyone will act if given the opportunity—everyone with his limited ethical sense, that is. And how about his excoriating of Joe Biden for nepotism in procuring a board membership for his son Hunter in Ukraine, while Trump has long since set up Ivanka and the rest of them in the White House as “advisors.” Or lambasting Black Lives Matter protesters as “violent thugs,” when his supporters, at his urging, openly carry AR15s—one of whom actually shot three protesters, killing two of them?  Or hinting that QAnon-generated conspiracies are believable, and that only he, the president, the savior, can save children from the satanic ‘Hollywood liberals’ who seek to sexually abuse them (this from the man who openly describes his daughter as a juicy piece, and who hung out with notorious teen enslaver Jeffrey Epstein) and even eat them? The list about the president is endless, but we don’t have to remain with him. We can go further afield to look with the same lens at the scandals involving fundamentalist icons. How many famous (or infamous) preachers have we now discovered committing the very sins of the flesh which they routinely inveigh against? Take Ted Haggard, founder and former pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs CO, who also served as president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 2003, and has preached repeatedly against sexual sins, especially same-sex marriage. In 2006, Haggard was accused by a male prostitute and masseuse of paying him for sex for three years running, whereupon Haggard was removed from most of his official posts. The same, of course, could be said of countless Roman Catholic priests, who preach on Sunday about avoiding the sins of the flesh, and then sexually abuse their altar boys, whenever they get the chance, which turns out to be quite often. In each case, we have a projection of what is interior (usually hidden), to an exterior target that can be vilified.

            We might even say that the basic mechanism of projection forms the main strategy of the whole right-wing movement. Right-wing conservatives are generally people who have a suspicious attitude toward human nature. That is, they perceive most humans as weak animals who are generally inclined to do bad things; brutish and nasty things. This being the case, societies, according to them, must enact all kinds of laws and prohibitions to keep these damaging human impulses in check, for without them, the “law of the jungle” would prevail: the strong would dominate the weak and anyone else they could overpower. And the pattern would prevail up and down the chain of society. Men would abuse women and children; leaders would abuse their subjects; anyone in power would abuse their underlings; all would engage in illicit activities run riot—sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. And, to be fair, there is a grain of truth in this. But the main motivator of this attitude is not the truth, not real knowledge of human nature, but projection. Those who espouse this view, either overtly or covertly, are usually projecting the subconscious impulses that they can hardly admit into their consciousness, onto others whom they castigate as libertines and liberals and amoral socialists. It seems especially satisfying to do this with marginalized populations. ‘Jews steal babies and use them for their sacred blood rituals.’ ‘African Americans are by nature libidinous and lust after all women, white ones in particular.’ ‘Southern Italians ditto. Latin Americans double ditto.’ ‘All of them are prone to disobedience of the law, and hence inherently criminals, because it’s in their blood.’ The truth is that, pre-Civil War, it was the white southern slave masters who were truly libidinous, witness the commonplace result—millions of their mixed-race progeny who also became slaves. And witness the widespread lawlessness of corporate heads and their insider deals, which the wealthiest of these corporate bigs exploit without a backward glance, while demanding law and order and the merciless incarceration of petty thieves and small debtors and drug addicts (except when the addicts are white; then they require our understanding). The truth is that such morally righteous defenders of the status quo are the biggest violators of all, for it is their own impulses, sometimes known, often unknown, that drives them to project them outward onto convenient scapegoats. 

            The interesting thing about Trump, though, is that, unlike with common projection, where the aim of attributing an impulse to others is to keep the act or tendency suppressed from one’s own consciousness, his projection involves actions that he has committed already, or intends to commit. In other words, the president often seems not to be hiding these impulses to protect his ego (which is the classic reason for projection in the first place), but rather knows what he has done or wants to do, and consciously shifts the blame onto someone else, usually an opponent or rival. This appears to be the case, for example, in his mail-in ballot diatribes. He knows that Republicans have used every trick available to suppress the vote, to discard ballots from urban dwellers on flimsy grounds—to cheat, as journalist Greg Palast has insisted they cheated in 2016. Trump has even admitted that his party could not win if everyone (especially those untrustworthy minorities) got to vote. So it’s not that he wants to keep the cheating impulse from becoming conscious; it already is conscious. The same is true of his comment that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged” (said at a campaign rally in Oshkosh, WI, August 17, 2020). He seems to know instinctively that what he really means to say is that he, Donald Trump, will rig the election if he possibly can. 

            Of course, one can never really know whether a person consciously knows that he or she is being truthful or dishonest or self-protective when employing projection. And it is clear that Trump’s narcissistic ego is so fragile, so childlike, that it needs a great deal of protection—which accords with the observation that “projection is considered ‘primitive,’ because, being an easy defense to do, it happens early in childhood development first” (Grant Hillary Brenner, Psychology Today, 9/9/2018). But it is also clear that, in the president’s case, at least, his ego consciously deflects blame as a primary impulse for an action he knows full well he is already guilty of—as for instance, his recent determination to defend his early lies about the deadly dangers of Covid-19, insisting that the lies were presidential attempts to shield the American people from the despair they’d feel if he told them the truth. The president, that is, seems constitutionally unable to take responsibility (much less blame) for anything that does not reinforce his sense of himself as exceptional, as a genius who never makes mistakes. While the truth is that he has made some doozies—constantly downplaying the risks of Covid-19, as the death toll among Americans has risen to nearly 200,000 as of early September. But he cannot accept that mistake (even though it was recorded on tape by Bob Woodward) and, therefore, cannot reverse the course he has set for himself and the nation. No, like the habitual liar and projector he is, the president prefers instead to blame China, or the now-sidelined Dr. Anthony Fauci for his own failures, all while bragging about his administration’s performance (actually the worst in the world), and predicting an imminent vaccine that will rescue him from the infamy that will surely be his legacy. 

            This constitutes the real toll that a nation pays for having narcissists, who habitually use the mechanism of projection, in charge of the affairs of state. The toll is mass death, the toll is the crippling of the most important functions of the nation, all of which are meant to protect the public, not the ego of its leader. And we are soon going to see if enough Americans wake up to this mortal peril before it is too late.

 

Lawrence DiStasi