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I received these two books reflecting on the Trump era with deep ambivalence. They have a newfound relevance now that Trump is running again for the presidency, just as the fall-out from his last reign is finally addressed in the courts. The Trump era, whether Trump wins or loses this next election, is not behind us. Attempting to process and make sense of his last victory may be the best way to prepare for what might come our way.
In this spirit, both Karyne E. Messina’s (2022) “Resurgence of Global Populism” and Michael J. Diamond’s (2022) “Ruptures in the American Psyche” bring a psychoanalytic lens to our understanding of how and why Trump rose to power. Both authors – while differing in significant ways – found the Kleinian and Bionian traditions especially useful in this regard.
Messina focuses on the concept of projective identification almost exclusively and demonstrates in tremendous detail how various individual populist leaders around the world – Trump being one of them – operate through projective identification in the political arena. In a nutshell, she contends that these charismatic leaders, due to their own personal pathologies, split people and qualities into good and bad along the lines of attributes that they cannot tolerate in themselves. Then they project the bad parts onto various minority or disenfranchized groups who thus
become the enemy and are pronounced to be the source of most problems in the country.
In addition, using the more conscious process of blame-shifting, these leaders exploit their followers’ real or perceived grievances and psychological vulnerabilities: first they deepen their followers’ anxieties and resentment, then “feed” them the idea of a simple solution that involve expelling or controlling these scapegoated and villainized groups. In Messina’s description, the masses are essentially the victims of the leaders’ expert manipulation that mirrors these leaders’ own pathology. Their position of power and especially their a