Projection as a Political Weapon: From Unconscious Defense to Conscious Offense

Donald Trump's penchant for attacking his opponents by projecting onto them his own disavowed personal attributes and apparent self-assessments has been a consistent feature of his rhetorical style and remarked upon by many observers. For instance, in her recent book The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, Michiko Kakutani (2019) observes, “Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: ‘Lyin’ Ted,’ ‘Crooked Hillary,’ ‘Crazy Bernie.’ He accused Clinton of being ‘a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,’ and he has asserted that ‘there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats’” (p. 95). In a recent NYTimes opinion article, Michelle Goldberg referred to Trump as a “Master of Projection” and noted that many instances of Trump's projections were uncannily predictive of his future actions as president, thus properly constituting themselves as projections only in retrospect.

Examples include roundly criticizing Mitt Romney for failing to release his tax returns and berating Barack Obama for watching too much TV in the White House, playing too much golf, overusing Air Force One for “politics and play”, and potentially leading America into WWIII (Goldberg, 2020). Further examples of Trump's projections include accusing Joe Biden of nepotism, referring to Joe Biden as “Plugs Biden” when Trump is so clearly the product of massive cosmetic work, and saying there is no way Nancy Pelosi prays for him, since she only prays for herself. Recently, in an interview with MSNBC, the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Lance Dodes noted, “[Trump] tells other people that they are what he is. It's a common enough [defense] mechanism in early childhood, but as an adult, using it all the time, it is what we would call primitive.” Dr. Dodes contends that Trump's predilection for the defense mechanism of projection is “primitive,” since it bypasses en