Trump’s “Big Lie”—that voter fraud in at least seven states cheated him of reelection in 2020—is perhaps the epitome of what I have come to call Trump’s “Pee-wee Herman Syndrome.” This collection of symptoms, ultimately sociopathic in consequence, manifests itself in a repeating pattern of responses all akin to “I know you are, but what am I.” This retort was made famous by Pee-wee when he verbally turned the tables on his opponents in the movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. In other words, Trump’s Big Lie has become simply a continuing attempt to hurl back criticisms of his treasonous efforts to subvert a legitimate election. We have seen him try every desperate ploy he could find, including, tragically for our democracy, a violent assault by his followers on our Capitol Building. The irony of Trump’s slogan “Stop the Steal” is that, like Pee-wee, he is accusing his adversaries of precisely what he himself is guilty. Parents and teachers should recognize this classic pattern of “projection,” as psychologists call it, both in the home and in the classroom, when a petulant child projects their own bad behavior onto a convenient target, usually another child but sometimes even an adult.
Trump’s rebuke of Nancy Pelosi for ripping in half her copy of his State of the Union speech is another example. Several witnesses have reported Trump himself obsessively, and illegally in the case of official national records, tearing up documents and correspondence into small pieces. One report claimed he often flushed the pieces down a commode and another claimed he even burned documents. A third claimed he chewed up, and I suppose swallowed, memos and documents. One has to wonder what, specifically, he was trying to hide with such paranoid behavior. I’d guess he’s been deleting, trashing, tearing up, flushing, burning, and swallowing business, public, and personal records that either threaten or offend him his entire adult life.
Trump’s supposed concern, in election year 2016, for national security—that Hillary Clinton’s stolen emails contained classified info—is a third example. When he publicly called upon Russia to find those emails, someone quickly obliged. This helped set in motion a chain of events that led to Clinton’s demise and Trump’s victory in the November national election. After becoming President in 2017, he refused to give up his private cell phone—the first President in American history to be allowed such a breach of security. And he repeatedly discussed classified matters publicly, alarming security officials to the point of wringing their hands. Recently fifteen boxes of classified documents, some of which likely relate to the January 6 Insurrection, were found at Mar-a-Lago. Apparently Trump considered them his personal property but had not found the time to destroy them.
When viewers first saw Trump on national tv shows like Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show in the 1970s and 80s, they were inclined, as I remember, to perceive him as just another wealthy, entitled celebrity-tycoon who was “full of himself.” But Trump’s obvious narcissism began to show itself as full-blown megalomania, a psychotic disorder that should have been apparent to anyone who had taken an introductory course in psychology. Somehow, however, Republicans missed that, I believe because of their own tendency to admire and kowtow to bullies, in this case a Mussolini-like “strongman” who would back them in their culture wars, promise law and order, and rescue them from their perceived financial victimhood. So when Trump declared for the Presidency, they were eager to support his bullying tactics and quite ready to overlook his suspected ties to the mob (much like the Vatican in 1930’s Italy). There were just too many cultural changes going on all around them, too many of those “others” taking over their society, too few “rights” (entitlements) left to them—in short, they were slowly but inexorably being replaced. This led, of course, to the paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory known as “Replacement Theory” and led many traditional Republicans to look the other way, with the rationale that “the ends justify the means.” Often the ends don’t justify immoral means at all, as was finally concluded by many German citizens at the end of World War II and Hitler’s Third Reich, but only after the loss of tens of millions of human lives and the permanent scarring of millions more who did survive.
In an earlier essay I described six periods in American history that involve Conservative “flirtations with fascism,” beginning with Republican reactions, mostly red-baiting, to the partly socialistic policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. These flirtations resurface about every ten to twenty years, and illustrate the fact that many Americans in the generations following World War II simply did not learn the cruel lessons of fascism. This last flirtation, which some have called “Trump’s Cult of Personality,” has turned into a sordid full-blown affair and brought democracy to its knees. Luckily, Trump’s attempts at a coup d’etat—using false voting-fraud claims, all sixty or so dismissed in federal courts, putting pressure on state election officials and legislatures to wantonly cheat, pressuring Pence to decertify the election itself, throwing it into a Republican-controlled Senate for determination, and lastly recruiting illegitimate state electors to replace the legitimate ones—all these efforts failed because of our sacred Rule of Law. In other words, Trump’s Beer Hall Putsch, like Hitler’s in November 1923, failed because of those heroes—from state and local election officials and federal judges to Mike Pence himself—who refused to overthrow democracy for fascism.
Our modern Republican Party has been hijacked, gradually over the last twenty years, by the Tea Party, created and financed by billionaire industrialists like the Koch Brothers to squeeze out the remaining financial assets of our lower and middle classes. The goal, of course, is to maintain control over rural and working class people so they can be fleeced in both the workplace and the marketplace. If you want to know who the real “Deep State” is, who actually orchestrates the constant siphoning of resources from the lower classes to the upper five percent, simply look up the GOP celebration party that occurred immediately after Trump’s second impeachment (for inciting the January 6 Insurrection). If you really want to know, you will find it.
The seduction of neo-fascism, in the person of a wannabe authoritarian despot like Trump, is appealing to Missouri’s Senator Josh Hawley and our own 18th Congressional District’s Representative Jason Smith for obvious reasons. Hawley, fist pumping in support of the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy nonsense, is eyeing a future bid for the Presidency, hoping for Trump’s blessing. Posing as a rural conservative populist and nationalist, he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing—a Far-Right, intellectual autocrat, graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, lawyer and former professor, with some of Trump’s skills in hoodwinking the public. Smith, on the other hand, likely has more benevolent though misguided intentions, but his constituents need to convince him that the great majority of them are simply not farmers nor business owners.
The absurdism of the GOP’s desperate attempts to defend the indefensible reminds me again of Pee-wee and “I know you are but what am I.” A few nights ago I had a dream about the Capitol Insurrection. Instead of Pee-wee calling Dottie from a phone booth, evading her proposals for a real date when he gets home, Trump is in the White House Oval Office, feet propped up on his desk, talking to Pence on his unprotected cell phone. It is the afternoon of January 6, Trump is watching the events on his big-screen tv, and Trump rioters have just broken into the Capitol Building, forcing their way toward Pence’s office with a rope noose and screaming “Hang Mike Pence!” Pence is pleading with Trump to tell his supporters to stand down, but Trump has other intentions:
“Krii… krii… krii… krii….” (Trump making fake phone-interference sounds into his cell). “I can’t hear you, Mike, can’t hear you at all. Sorry. You just go on now and make sure you decertify those election results.”
Sam J Duckworth
Feb 17, 2022
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