How are monsters created, and how does evil arise as a shaping force which grants them the power to change the topography of human souls and the course of history?
While sorting through Trump’s tweets and speeches by keyword looking for answers, I was reminded of another such project, the now-classic study of Adolf Hitler from his speeches and writings, The Psychopathic God by Robert G. L. Waite, which I read enthusiastically the year of its publication while a junior in high school. I had just finished reading Jerzy Kosinski’s novel The Painted Bird, which led me to an interest in the origins and consequences of evil, the route by which I developed a serious interest in psychology and its intersections with history, philosophy, and literature.
The parallels between Hitler and Trump are amazing and instructive, both in terms of the personal and political origins, shaping forces, and consequences of madness and evil.
Dr Justin Frank’s book Trump on the Couch is an excellent resource, particularly illuminating on Trump’s erotic relationship with his daughter, the fantasies of violence and power which are rooted in his childhood relationship with his tyrannical and abusive father, and his inability to love or empathize with others as a result of his abandonment by his mother.
Pathological lies, poor impulse control, and grandiose fantasies and delusions complete the picture of a narcissistic personality and psychopathic predator.
I’ve said it as a joke, but its quite true; how do you spell Trump? Treason, Racism, Untruth, Misogyny, Predator.
Actually, Donald Trump is very easy to understand, because literature provides a ready portrait of him in Frankenstein’s monster, which I have described in my celebration of Mary Shelly and her luminous novel as the figure of an abandoned and tormented child, “a vessel of rage and vengeance, with the merciless iron will to enact subjugation of others in their turn, terrible and pathetic and with the grandeur of a tortured defiant beast trapped in the same flesh as the innocent who needs to be loved and cannot understand why he seems monstrous to others.”
How Trump’s particular madness is expressed in our national policy is a horror which can described with precision; his fear of contamination and faecal fixation translate into his signature campaign against nonwhite others and a policy of ethnic cleansing and racist state terror, his misogyny into a patriarchal wave of legal disempowerment of women’s reproductive rights, his fragile ego, identity confusion, and need for attention into a governance of Nuremburg-like rallies, the cultivation of despicable autocrats, and the obsessive vengeance against anyone who refuses to offer adoration and submission.
Above all what unites Trump and Hitler as parallel figures and historical forces is the theory of politics as theatre of cruelty and government as performance art.
Torch of Liberty 