How can one not feel sorry and ashamed today for having believed in Trump? I’ll be honest: although I hold no responsibility in Trump’s election, I feel ashamed for having placed any hope in him.
The Trump phenomenon resembles a form of collective hypnosis. It has a religious dimension that makes it unique in American political history. For the believer, every failure, every scandal, every lie is proof that Trump is fighting against the Deep State, the Fake News, the Swamp, the Washington elite, the Democrats, the New World Order, the FBI, and who knows what else. The Q psy-op was particularly successful in tapping into the religious imagination of Americans who were distrustful of the government. This is well explained by Marjorie Taylor Green, who admits she “fell for that in late 2017 and 2018”:
it’s basically a cult. … What it does, it takes a layer of truth and then it twists it into a lie. … Q was very successful. It was probably one of the most successful psychological operations I’ve ever seen because it did use the layer of truth and the things that people were most passionate about and was able to use that and twist their belief to pull their full faith and trust into … an anonymous person or an anonymous entity.
What is also clear in Trump’s books is his narcissism. Every sentence comes down to: “I’m the best and I know everything about everything.” Trump isn’t just a salesman; he’s also the product.
Following the opening of Trump Tower in Manhattan in 1983, the massive promotion of his book The Art of the Deal turned Trump into a celebrity. Tony Schwartz, the book’s co-author—who, according to Schwartz, actually wrote the entire book (with Trump’s contribution limited to deleting the least flattering passages)—has said since 2016 that he is haunted by guilt for having helped Trump become president. Trump, he says, lies constantly without the slightest inhibition or guilt. “There is an emptiness inside Trump. There’s an absence of a soul. There’s an absence of a heart.”
The third element that helped craft Trump’s image as a billionaire hero—the equivalent of a saint in the religion of money—is the reality TV show The Apprentice, co-produced by Trump himself and airing since 2004, in which Trump essentially sells himself.
