The Trump Death Cult, Part 1, Section 1/2

https://www.reddit.com/r/zeronarcissists/comments/1gv4t3h/the_trump_death_cult_part_1_section_12/

created by theconstellinguist on 19/11/2024 at 18:54 UTC*

1 upvotes, 0 top-level comments (showing 0)

The Trump Death Cult, Part 1, Section 1/2

1: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer

2: https://narcissismresearch.miraheze.org/wiki/AIReactiveCodependencyRageDisclaimer

3: https://www.proquest.com/openview/c5d4601ebe8dcb232f9ab2965e900d70/1?cbl=35407&pq-origsite=gscholar

4: https://www.proquest.com/openview/c5d4601ebe8dcb232f9ab2965e900d70/1?cbl=35407&pq-origsite=gscholar

1. White evangelical religion and its advocacy of patriarchy, combat parenting, corporal punishment, and chauvinism—and the resulting fear induced in children— are assessed, as are the results—a personality primed for the group-fantasy of Racist Nationalism and for restaging childhood trauma by cleansing the homeland of Evil Others at national borders—the Central Purification Ritual of Trumpism.

1. The malefactors responsible are an unindicted co-conspirator, his co-conspirators and enablers, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.2 The country is facing the most daunting circumstances since the Civil War: the worst health emergency in over 100 years—with more than 400,000 coronavirus-related deaths projected by January;3 and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—with more than 100,000 small businesses permanently closed,4 and millions of Americans filing for unemployment,5 fearing the loss of their homes,6 concerned about their next meal,7 and cities and states on the brink of financial ruin.8 In the midst of such turmoil, the country confronts a reckoning with White racism centuries in the making,9 and an ecosystem threatened by existential calamity.

1. Mary L. Trump as “the most dangerous man in the world;”11 a president who, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward reports, deliberately misled the American people about the severity of the coronavirus,12 who, according to a bipartisan Senate report, colluded with Russia in the 2016 election13—and some believe may be a Russian agent14—and who twice solicited interference in the 2020 election.15 Can America contain the poison16 loosed by the cult of Trump?

1. In 2016, the Trump cult was already a topic in the media.23 Peter Wehner, a columnist for the New York Times, has astutely characterized this spectacle as a charade. “Donald Trump’s supporters have been looking only at phantoms,” he writes. Trump’s goal has always been “to annihilate the distinction between truth and falsity,” to “overwhelm people with misinformation and disinformation,” so as to induce “epistemological vertigo on a mass scale,”24 in short—to create a spellbinding, mesmerizing, ever-changing, but somehow always-the-same group-fantasy:25 “I am the chosen one.”26 Trump the performer enthralls his audience, and audience and leader feed off of each other. Fueled by “a near-existential fear” of Democrats in power and “resentments and grievances over being the object of the left’s contempt,” the base views the president “not just as their defender,” but as “their avenging angel” against the Evil Other, and hypnotically follows the dear leader,27 even when his policies hurt them the most.2

1. “There is,” according to deMause, “a direct correlation between traumatic childhood and the ability to go into a trance.”31 White evangelical adherents are the core of Trumpism, a group of devotees who constitute the majority of his support in the South, Midwest and small towns across the country. In the 2016 election, 81 percent of White evangelicals voted for Trump,32 constituting “one-third of GOP voters”33—which translated into over 20 million of the nearly 63 million votes for Trump.34 Their backing is fueled by childhood trauma.3

1. In the words of columnists Mark Egan and Richard North Patterson, Trump has “made America hate again,”39 but the developmental origins of the animosity he ignites lie in the subordination of females, intense feelings of persecution, reactive rage, and loathing for modernity that animate religious homes and small-town life in rural America.

1. Given this volatile environment, consider how Christian childrearing is described by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. From his perspective, rearing your child is going to war. “Christian parenting is combat.” Childrearing involves “combat parenting” to instill the “glory of God” in the young.40 Mohler warns believers that they must be ever on guard:

1. Combat parenting and spiritual warfare justify the use of corporal punishment in rearing the young, who are not seen as innocents, but as inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—God’s children, who have fallen into iniquity—and therefore, must be disciplined in the ways of righteousness.42 The emotional environment of White evangelical homes is rife with fear. Describing the reality of her childhood experience, Julia Scheeres confessed, “My religious fundamentalist childhood was built around the fear of sin.”43

1. That tiny word still makes me cringe with residual fear. Fear of being judged unworthy. Fear of the eternal torture of hell. Fear of my father’s belt.

1. Fear is an inevitable and appropriate feeling when faced with the probability of pain. … The pain generates fear … and the fear never disappears entirely.49 Greven has also described the extent to which the fears and anxieties of evangelical childhood are embedded within Christian doctrine. Incalculable suffering and pain have been inflicted on children because of the belief in the physical reality of hell. … The threat of eternal punishment remains one of the greatest sources of anxiety and terror even known, and must be recognized as a primary basis for the rationales for painful physical discipline and punishment …

1. Southern Baptists believe the Bible is divinely inspired and without error.56 They are solidly Republican in their politics57— and Trumpian in particular. The denomination denies science and critical thinking,58 opposes equal rights for women,59 abortion,60 and supports patriarchal leadership;61 it backs gender inequality—a wife should “submit herself graciously” to her husband and has the responsibility to “respect her husband and serve as his helper;”62 and it discourages homosexuality63—teaching that only heterosexual marriage is permissible.64

1. “ I want to come home to a home cooked dinner at six every night, one that … [my wife] fixes and one that I expect … to have my daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives … I don’t want them [to] grow up into career-obsessed banshees who forego home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they think they could have leaped over in a single bound—had men not [been] suppressing them.69 (emphasis in original)”

1. President Trump’s appeals to suburban housewives echo the same myopic view of women’s potential.70 For girls, life as a wife and homemaker, but no career. Girls must suppress their sexuality until marriage, submit to their husbands, even if they are abused,71 and, according to the Gospel Coalition, be baby machines: “Here’s a culture war strategy conservative Christians should get behind: have more children and discipline them like crazy. Strongly consider having more children than you think you can handle.”72 For girls, the message is clear: Autonomy is forbidden. Conform. Live for others—in a life prescribed by male authority. As deMause has said, girls have “worse childhoods than boys.”73

Comments

There's nothing here!