Trump is like an energy vampire — sucking the life force out of his followers

Donald Trump has a vast emptiness inside him.

It cannot be filled with money, power, attention, or love.

Trump is the most powerful person in the world. He has billions of dollars. He has dominated an era. Yet the need, the hunger, the drive cannot be satisfied. This must be a torturous existence.

His niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and longtime critic, put it this way in a video last year:

“The one thing Donald most desperately needs and has never gotten and will never get, because of how damaged and depraved his own father made him, is love. That is why he needs more of anything else. Thinking that will fill the void. More money, more power, a bigger ballroom, more fake medals and fake prizes and fake honors.”

For the past few weeks, Trump has been barnstorming red-state America, rallying his MAGA followers for the midterm elections.

Leading political analysts and pollsters expect that the Republican Party will be soundly defeated, almost certainly losing the House and possibly the Senate as well.

The rallies serve no obvious political purpose. His unpopularity makes him toxic to the candidates he is campaigning for. Many would do much better if he stayed home. His motives are almost wholly personal: the rallies are his emotional safe space, a home where he can soak up love and attention from his MAGA followers.

But Trump’s idea of love often looks like abuse.

At a rally in Clarksville, Tennessee, on October 10, Trump mocked his own followers: “I could say the stupidest things, and you’d clap.” The crowd laughed.

A few days later in Bullhead City, Arizona, he bragged about passing multiple cognitive tests ("I aced them…. Because I'm a freaking genius, that’s why.”) and implied that few of his followers could do the same.

These resemble humiliation rituals, a standard practice in cults and other coercive groups, designed to psychologically bind the followers to the leader and to one another.

Trump uses the same techniques on his Cabinet and inner circle when he gifts them painfully ill-fitting shoes that they are expected to wear and praise.

Too much of the commentary, especially from liberal, progressive, and Never-Trump voices, is fixated on the mockery as more proof that his followers are stupid and marks for the con.

But the deeper and far more dangerous story is that these rallies are love festivals for Trump, feeding him the narcissistic fuel that drives his authoritarian project.

Trump must be loved, and when he isn’t, he must be obeyed. He cannot accept rejection or criticism.

During his speech in Clarksville, Trump said “love” 37 times, by my count. That is not a coincidence. It is a way of conditioning his followers.

“There is such love in these rooms… I mean, it’s amazing. When you stand up here, it’s like, the love.”

The crowd chanted Trump’s name, and someone in the crowd shouted back, “We love you!”

A recent taxpayer-funded propaganda video reinforced the same theme: dozens of images of Trump set to an R&B song that repeats, “Love me… love me… love me…”

His fundraising emails read like a jilted lover’s texts, with subject lines such as “I cannot afford to be rejected by you today!” and “Don’t reject me!” and “This is heartbreaking…”

With the midterms imminent and polls plummeting, the emails are becoming even more desperate.

In another email on Friday, October 16, Trump begged for prayers and sympathy.

At the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, on September 10, Trump led his followers in a loyalty oath to himself that included a pledge to “cheat like hell.”

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe that I will go out with my family, my friends, I will do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do….I am going to go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3.

Trump is extracting love and obedience in the same breath.

I asked Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump, why Trump’s crowds respond the way they do:

Trump followers have been conditioned to expect Trump to be politically incorrect to get a reaction. But these people are not thinking for themselves; they are being affected by the authority figure and reinforced by all the other believers.

Pundits make the mistake of saying brainwashed people are stupid and that they would never fall for a mind controller. In more than 50 years of doing this work full time, I can honestly say it isn't true for the vast and overwhelming majority. Anyone can be deceived, especially at a vulnerable moment of their lives, or fall in love with their cult recruiter, not yet understanding it is a cult.

People are emotional, social beings. It is a myth that we are logical and independent.

Words work because they elicit responses and create associations in our minds. In many people, talking about love and using the hypnotic tone of being in love elicits a projection of the love they have for him. The followers wish that Trump loved them back.

People don’t believe in Donald Trump. They believe in the model programmed in their minds of Donald Trump.

The love survives hunger. NBC News recently interviewed Trump followers in rural West Virginia who are starving because of his administration’s cuts to food assistance and other social safety programs.

One retiree among them, who is struggling to afford groceries, and worried about heating her home with winter almost here, had a message for Trump: “I love you, but I think you can do a better job than what you’re doing.”

If Trump and the MAGA Republicans lose the midterms, he faces what clinicians call a “narcissistic collapse.” It will be very ugly. Trump will likely lash out in a fit of destruction and revenge.

In a new essay, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman looks to one of the darkest chapters of modern history for a precedent:

By the middle of March 1945 even Adolf Hitler knew that the war was lost. Soviet forces were within 45 miles of Berlin. American forces had crossed the Rhine and were well on their way to encircling the remaining German defenders. But Hitler didn’t believe that he had failed. He believed that he had been failed by the German people.

So, on March 19 he issued the “Decree concerning demolitions in the Reich territory,” which has come to be known as the Nerobefehl or Nero decree. It ordered the destruction of Germany’s own infrastructure — supposedly to deny that infrastructure to the Allies, but the obvious purpose was to punish his own country.

Trump’s own Nero decree would be quieter. If he gets his way, it would be just as total.

Trump is like an energy vampire, sucking the life force out of his followers and, ultimately, the nation as a whole.

Many of his MAGA followers would gladly make the sacrifice for their Dear Leader. This is what clinicians call “identification with the aggressor” on a massive scale. In the end, Trump will leave his followers as discarded, empty husks, useless to him.

This is a very nervous time in America. I worry for the innocent, and for the rest of us who resisted this thing.