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The fairy tale, The Emperor's New Clothes (Andersen, 1837/2020) serves a useful way of capturing the experience of many who are bewildered by a friend's allegiance to Donald Trump. If we imagine ourselves in this tale, the experience is this: With a friend we join others awaiting the Emperor's march to display what his minions have advertised as his resplendent new clothes. Our friend is one who, in all our personal interactions, has shown us intelligence, kindness, and grace. The Emperor appears. He is proudly waving his hands to invite all to see his “new clothes.” A little child in the crowd yells, “But he hasn't got anything on.” The kid is right. But our friend is part of the crowd who with great passion seeks to censor the boy. We're dumbfounded. The friend we thought we knew well in the context of intimate association is a stranger to us in this public context. He wants to laud what we seek to decry.
What's going on here? In what follows we offer conjecture from a point of view that primarily reflects the clinical and developmental theories of psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1966/1977), as well as practitioners within the object relations field of psychoanalysis (e.g. Grotstein, 2007; Klein, 1975a, b; Ogden, 1986, 1989; Winnicott, 1975). What we hope to show is that Trump offers to our bewildering friends a powerfully seductive dynamic. He offers them an opportunity to sustain their wish that there is someone (an-Other) who Knows, who is the arbiter of Truth. He offers them relief from the developmental reckoning with aggression to which we all must reconcile ourselves to challenge authority and so find our own authority (self-authorization).
To accomplish this, however, Trump doesn't just offer himself singularly as someone to be idealized as, for instance, a “stable genius” (e.g., 6 January 2018, 12 July 2018). If he did, he might more rapidly in the natural course of things become the object of this aggression. Instead, he also offers “substitution.” In exchan