How Trump Won the 2020 Election. In His Brain.

 

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His grasp on reality is very weak. I think he has a problem with object permanence, and always hopes he can convince the facts to change. He's talking more to himself than to the interviewer.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) June 20, 2023

Object permanence—the understanding that if you're playing peek-a-boo with him and you hide his toy behind your back while his eyes are closed that the toy didn't really cease to exist—isn't really the right concept. Practically everybody gets that by the time they're 18 to 24 months old, and there's no reason to think Trump didn't. What I was after turns out to be something related, in a kind of metaphorical plane, "object constancy", the recognition that a thing remains the same thing under transformations. That a tree seen at a distance is the same as the one you see up close, not a different, smaller tree, in the simplest type of case. 

In the discussion of personality disorders of the kind I think of Trump as suffering from—Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder—object constancy is generally the recognition that a person remains the same person under what you might call a moral transformation. We've all experienced the feeling in a fight with someone we love that we don't "recognize" them, or they don't "recognize" us ("Honestly, I don't even recognize you!")—that's a metaphor for our or our partner's distress, but for the person with BPD or NPD it can be literally true.

Like children who worry that their mothers have abandoned them forever when they leave the room, BPD sufferers may fear their partner has really become an entirely different person, with whom they don't have a relationship, and for narcissists,

With a lack of object constancy, one may find it difficult to retain positive feelings about someone once they make mistakes or have disagreements within relationships.

“If you do something they don’t like or are unhappy with or they notice a flaw, you suddenly become all-bad, and they devalue you,” explains Schiff.

“They cannot see you as someone that they love and someone who has angered them at the same time.”

With NPD and without object constancy, you may only be able to see people as “high status and special or low status and worthless...” 

Thus, when Fox's Brett Baier asks Trump about the people in his entourage ("I hire the best people!") who seem to have abandoned him recently, all he can do is dismiss their existence—they really weren't even there, at least not in any significant numbers:

“Your Vice President Mike Pence is running against you, your Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, she’s running against you, your former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he’s not supporting you, you mention National Security Advisor John Bolton, he’s not supporting you either. You mentioned Attorney General Bill Barr, says you shouldn’t be president again, calls you the consummate narcissist and troubled man,” said Baier, going on to list other officials Trump has criticized. “So why did you hire all of them in the first place?”

“I hired 10 to one that were fantastic. We had a great economy, we had phenomenal people in charge of the economy, we had phenomenal people in the military. … I’m not a fan of certain of the television people,” Trump noted. “For every one you say, I had 10 that love us.”

We've seen him do it in the reverse direction too: faced with the most grievous insults from old supporters like Stephen Bannon or Roger Stone, Bannon in published interviews with Michael Wolfe, he seems to have cut them off

“When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating 17 candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.”

but all it takes is a phone call before he's happily taking advice from them again, and cheerfully pardons them for their crimes when he has a chance to do that.

It struck me, at long last, that this is a reason why he seems so certain he won the 2020 presidential election—that he lacks object constancy with the voters. Back in November 2020,  as we learned from the research of the House January 6 Committee, he really did realize that he'd lost, in what he must have experienced as an awful betrayal, but that's why he almost immediately started writing them off as "fake" and began focusing his attentions on some other voters, the "real" ones, who couldn't possibly have betrayed him. Culminating in the January 6 rioters—

 “You know the biggest crowd I have ever seen? January 6. And you never hear that. It was the biggest. And they were there largely to protest a corrupt and rigged and stolen election.” “It was the biggest crowd, I believe, I have ever spoken to,” he concluded.

He simply dismissed the 81 million Biden voters into the ether. They had never existed, in spite of the annoying claims of that fat loser Bill Barr. The 74 million who had voted for him ("the most votes of any sitting president in US history," as if the non-sitting candidate didn't exist either) were the real ones, manifested in the January 6 parade. Trump doesn't see any contradiction at all.

You think nobody's that stupid? Do a little reading. That's how NPD works.