Post Valentine Thoughts on Breaking Up with Trump

Feb 16th, week 4 of The Great Shattering

There is a question that bedevils me this morning. Why is it that millions of people who snuggled up next to Trump last November and drew a heart next to his name in the voting booth haven’t reacted to the lawless havoc he’s strewn across the country and the world in the last month and thrown his MAGA hat on the ground and broken up with him? His approval ratings have gone down but by a mere 4 or 5 points.

As a couples’ therapist, I know something about break ups. I know there are certain kinds of relationships that are very hard to leave. And very hard to change.

When I began doing couples therapy forty years ago, I was clumsy and inexpert. I stayed too long in the details of who said what to whom, and who was right and who was wrong. But soon I learned how to listen differently. I helped them devise whole new ways to talk to each other and ask for what they needed. I got good at it and enjoyed the lively drama of our sessions–with one very big exception.

In the space of that exception, I could be transported from feeling grounded, insightful, in touch with reality, to feeling as if my mind was hijacked by evil spirits that rendered reality specious and my agency useless. I recall those experiences now because they match the experience I have today when I think about the Trump-Musk relationship to America.

The trait that bewitched my mind as a couples’ therapist is called projection. In projection an individual manages uncomfortable feelings or aspects of one’s personality by denying they belong to themselves, then projecting those traits onto another person. In this projective system, the partner (often with the word narcissist flashing like a dying star from their insincere smile) points their finger at their partner, and accuses that partner of being all the nasty things that they themselves are guilty of.

In a couple’s system characterized by a strong projective defensive mechanism, pushing back on that projection is met with fierce resistance. The projector points his finger at his partner again, this time the finger looking more like a gun than a digit on a hand. These attacks provoke the partner on the receiving end of the projection to withdraw further or declaim the accusation even louder. “See”, he’d turn to me and declare, “she (or sometimes he) is critical and unloving. If it weren’t for her attitude, I would be a perfect spouse. She doesn’t deserve my love.”

I am not, by disposition, thrown off by tough guys. But any attempt on my part to alter the attacks, to get under that defense mechanism by addressing it in even the most subtle way, was met by a finger being pointed at me. The ammunition that finger fired was shame.

In these sessions, my superpower, the shaping of words and sentences that make up a therapeutic intervention, totally failed me. In fact, using any kind of language, making any counter argument made things worse because the skilled projector would take my language and turn it into a mud ball and throw it back at me. Instead of feeling competent, I felt useless and confused. Shame sprinkled down on me like a light dusting of snow.

Eventually I quit even trying to help couples with this dynamic. What I came to understand is that this kind of defense mechanism is impervious to any attempt to alter it, that it grows stronger in the face of even the slightest suggestion of culpability. My only intervention in these cases was to model for the partner on the receiving end of this projective system the one move that was critical for wellbeing – to name the abusive projection and walk out the door.

I believe that Trump is a genius at this projective system. And being a genius at this, he has made it very difficult for all the people who voted for him in hopes that their relationship to him would make their lives better to walk out the door.

Illustration by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

From this perspective, I have great empathy for how difficult it is for so many people to break up with him. Make no mistake, I know there are two additional reasons why politicians, corporate execs, tech bros don’t break up with him: money and power, the great corruptors.

What are the ways Trump makes this break up difficult beyond the money and power factors? First there is the intimidation and shame which anyone who disagrees with either of these men will have to endure. Then there is the barrage of words turned against them. When America doesn’t become so Great Again, they will be the one accused of its failure. With one’s mind scrambled, with reality turned on its head, with shame and fear running around one’s mind like little kittens, leaving is hard. Very hard.

How can people like me, or you reader, help make this break-up safer, less painful, less confusing?

Let me say what we shouldn’t do. Don’t try to reason with or dispute Trump directly or anyone identified with his projective systems. It won’t work. It will just come back and bite you. You can’t win in a projective system.

But you can tell stories. You can call out the greed, the destruction, the cruelty, the harm.

Like the story of a friend of mine whose care at a famous Boston research hospital was just terminated. Five years ago, after a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer she was given a year to live. But she was fortunate to be put into a research trial and has been spared that death ever since. But, just last week, she was notified that because of a cut to government funding the research program has been suspended. She is on her own.

Stories are important because it’s easier to break up with someone like Trump if you can see how they have tricked other people by their false promises and caused them so much hurt and pain.

Providing education to victims of emotional abuse, and I believe this is what we can call the relationship Trump supporters have with this man, is one way to help people walk out the door. Assuring them that they weren’t a fool to fall for the lies of the abuser is also important. Trump is, as I said, a genius at manipulation.

Above all, it is important for us as family members or neighbors of people in a relationship with Trump not to shame them for falling for his deceptions.

Lastly, It is important to remember why many people entered this relationship with Trump to begin with. If we understand that we will have a much better chance of assisting in the breakup. I found it helpful to go back and re-read what I wrote in my November 17^th essay, “The Dark Times”, which helped me just after the election understand and have empathy for why people voted for the Trump ticket:

Even before the elections this world was fraught with deep anxiety. Climate change is one of those hooded terrors running around our psyches at night when we sleep. I think it is there even for the deniers. In order to survive, mankind evolved to be exquisitely connected to the seasons, to heat, cold, sources of water and food, and all of us, even privileged me sitting here with a full fridge and a backup generator, are unsettled by the 80 degree weather in November, the droughts, the hurricanes hundreds of miles from the coast. Climate breakdown and ecosystem decline are background threats to our security. It’s like having a mother who presents a brave face, but whom you know is sick, tired, struggling.

On top of having a sick mother we have a massively fraught economic system which, before Biden made significant changes that never registered with the populace, embraced “neoliberalism” to move about $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. What this looks like on the ground is high unemployment and job insecurity in rural parts of America and no sense of agency for how to dig out of this hole. Then we have AI, crypto currency, boys coming home from school telling their parents to call them girls, women gaining unprecedented power, Native Americans still here and gaining respect, a Black woman running for President and social media that plays on fear, the war in Gaza. Add to those massive shifts in cultural expectations of male identity, white identity, shifts which shake one’s sense of self to the core.

Trump offered a pathway out of the many fears latent in our society. As it becomes clear that none of his policies are the answer to these fears and instead increase them exponentially, we must be there with recognition of those fears, we must speak to them and open our arms to those who are on the threshold of leaving. We must fashion a new dream, a new set of priorities with new language for this moment. Is now the time for the Great Turning?