The Lyncher's Mentality

 In a recent run-down of Trump's meandering interview before the Economic Club of Chicago, two writers for Rolling Stone describe a uniquely bizarre moment. It should go down in the history books as perhaps quintessential Trump. Rarely has there been an episode of his rhetorical bombast that so completely encapsulated his character and combined so many of his most disturbing obsessions. 

The conversation was supposed to be about Trump's economic policies, but of course, he seized every chance to instead redirect the discussion to his pet topics: crime and immigration. At one point, according to the reporters, he suddenly pointed to a woman seated in the audience. Trump said she was a "beautiful" woman, and added that immigrants coming across the border "will kill you." 

There's so much to say about the psychology of that moment. Trump's use of the concocted sexual threat from some ill-defined racial "other" echoes the rhetoric of lynchers throughout history. It is these same lurid, baseless accusations of sexual menace, falsely ascribed to ethnic out-groups, that have been used to gin up racial violence, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism for centuries. 

But what strikes me about this episode especially, in contrast to Trump's other constant references to invented tales of "migrant crime," is how charged the moment was with Trump's own barely-disguised sexual menace. He points to a woman in the audience. He reduces her to her appearance. He fantasizes about violence being committed against her. Is it a warning—or a threat? 

It doesn't take a psychoanalyst to see that Trump is projecting here. He is exteriorizing his own fantasies of violence, not the acts of others. One is reminded of an anecdote Jean-Paul Sartre once told, in Saint Genet, about a man who kept repeating the same verbal error, then lashed out at his listener: "'Why do you keep making that exasperating mistake?'" (Frechtman trans.)

But this too is part of the stock-in-trade of the lyncher's mentality. The "ginned up" posse that rode out to avenge outraged "white womanhood" were always—at the same time—projecting their own sadistic fantasies. Their concocted narrative that they were punishing sexual violence was always tinged with an element of unmistakable prurience, which gave the real game away. 

No one has expressed this so neatly as William Faulkner, that great diagnostician of the southern mind. In his novel Sanctuary—in which a man is falsely accused and strung up for a rape he didn't commit—one of the lynchers who gather for the murder remarks to a fellow-executioner: "We got to protect our girls. Might need them ourselves." That's it—that's the heart of Trump's mentality. 

Trump jabs at a woman who merely happens to be seated in his presence; he objectifies her appearance and starts verbalizing his lurid inner fantasies of sadistic violence. It's not a stretch to attribute to him the same thoughts that were running through the mind of Faulkner's lyncher: "We have to protect 'our' women from 'them'—because we want to commit the same acts first." 

For all Trump's invented stories of immigrants committing sexual violence, after all—for all his bogus scapegoating of immigrants—the truth remains that Trump himself has been credibly accused on multiple occasions of committing sexual violence. And, from moments like this one from the stage in Chicago, it's clear he does not even keep the threat of this violence far from the surface.