The Solipsistic Reality of Donald Trump

Steve Hassan recently put a twenty one minute video on YouTube entitled The Solipsistic Reality of President Trump: A Discussion with Dr. Robert Jay Lifton.

I found this to be very informative regarding the opinion of Doctor Lifton regarding Trump, his followers, political and religious cults and several other subjects. I tried to write a tough transcript and not every word is perfect so take this as paraphrased. I started a little after the first few statements.



Robert Jay Lifton described solipsistic reality meaning Trump has as his only reality that which is required by the self.
To paraphrase Lifton said roughly:
The only crisis is his wildly destructive immigration program.

Trump is getting more and more entrapped by his own solipsism and he is trying to enforce it more and more on the society. Even those who support him are resisting this privately and there is lots of evidence for this. People see him as a little mad perhaps not crazy. It is paranoid with an attacking quality.

Trump may be in his endgame and can be deposed. Certainly he has gotten more grandiose.

Steve Hassan responded roughly: I colonel but notice that you described that as a king; deposed.

Lifton: one scenario as various forces turn against him as he won't sustain authority, he might not be impeached as that is very difficult. He might resign and declare victory. He might say he has done a lot for the country. His enemies are pervasive and this is a good time to resign and to do what good He can through his business. We might not be at that point now and we might not be close. We are at a point where his solipsistic and self created reality is less supportable. Gerry Bruener the great psychologist talked about how lies and problematic statements are required because narrative requires them. His followers may stick with him based on that.

Perhaps I can say something about the cultic qualities of the Trump followers and the Trump movement.


Hassan: I want to listen to you. I don't want to talk. I have a million questions pop into my head.

Lifton: I thought as I am sure you have that there is something cultic about the Trump movement. It's not an actual cult as the Moonies were when you studied it and Aum Shinrikyo was when I studied it. It's not actual community controlled by a totalizing guru that creates reality that the cult lives in. But it is cult-like and you get a sense of that even in the chanting, even at the meetings "build the wall", "lock her up" , "who is going to build it" it is a back and forth from guru to followers.

And there is some evidence that many of those followers have a sense of Trump as an all powerful omnipotent guru and many of his followers have staked their lives on his guruism. It is not all of his followers but there is a group of them of some size of which that is probably true. As he is failing in his authority he is failing them as a guru. They can no longer in a sense get from him what they need, his absolute truth, absolute virtue. And their sense of his being all powerful.

As as he loses this from many sides there them is a political and psychological element of his decline. We are seeing a certain amount of the political decline as various republicans are contesting him though not enough and the cultic decline is not recognized as much. People say with only partial truth that that  is all covered by cognitive dissonance. Now Festinger did very good work in cognitive dissonance. And as you know it is about a cult with the moment in which the world is supposed to end they are supposed to be picked up by a UFO and taken to some kind of safety didn't happen and many of those followers when it didn't happen and many of those followers when Festinger and his team looked at what happened they reasserted their belief in the guru's vision and they said well we picked the wrong time. Reasserting that belief in order to sustain their cognitive beliefs.

Hassan: Because they had faith Then the world was granted an extension of survival.

Lifton: And that is an interesting and very important finding but it doesn't cover everything. And that was a single expectation and image of being carried off to safety. With Trump it is a gradual loss of psychic power and power for disciples. And there I turn to my experience in studying Aum Shinrikyo,  the fanatical Japanese cult that released sarin gas in Japanese subways in Tokyo 1995.

When you follow them especially in the trials and court proceedings a number of the leading disciples were outraged at him, denounced him, said he was a false guru, had misled them, denounced him as a criminal. These were people who had staked their whole existence in him. When they turn they really turn. So, I don't know it is quite possible we are even beginning to see that even now. The situation is very confused because we have people who say they speak for him or for his base who are denouncing any compromise he makes. Compromises will upset some of his base. And in a sense not remaining strong and worthy of worship will affect some of his base.

Now we seem to see more agitation around him and some of that is in people that were fiercely loyal. And it is not too much to expect that some of that fierce emotion which was directed at him that he as a guru took them, and remember that is an immortalizing path. That same kind of emotion can be transformed into angry resentment for failing them.

If even a - and this won't happen to a majority of his base - but if even a small portion we are used to describing as his loyal followers were to turn on him it would be fatal to his presidency. Or it would fit in with many other things that undermine his presidency. In that way the cultic dimension of Trump works both ways. It has been his source of power and influence.

And the strange phenomenon we witness of thirty, thirty five percent of Americans going along with him including his lies and falsehoods but the other side of the coin is the potential source of great danger to him. Should more of them actively and publicly turn against him which is quite possible it will also have this effect on him it will also have this effect on him. I make the point that Shoko Asahara the guru of Aum Shinrikyo quickly moved into psychosis when this happened to him,  a couple of his leading disciples denounced him. He had moved in and out of psychosis anyhow, as some gurus do. And I don't necessarily expect Trump to do that but certainly his capacity to feel powerful which he is constantly struggling to sustain could be strongly interrupted and undermined.

Hassan: Right, I would just like to insert for people listening that your book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism which came out in 1961 about Chinese Communist Brainwashing was just one of many studies you have done including the one you are referencing Destroying the World in Order to Save It about apocalyptic cults and Shoko Asahara was hanged in jail after twenty years and he claimed to Jesus and Buddha and he claimed according to former members I interviewed was trying to bring about the apocalypse. And prove that  his prophecies were accurate and that was the rational behind the gassing of five thousand Japanese in 1995.

Lifton: Yes, uh, he in that sense was an activist in his apocalyptisism. As you know many cults are very responsive to nuclear weapons and that in a sense confirms and intensifies their apocalyptic feelings. But with Asahara he embraced what the ancient Jews called forcing the end. Forcing the end which would be taking an active part in the violence which is known to necessarily proceed the end. Or in the case of the ancient Jews the messiah.

The ancient Rabbis were wise enough to reject forcing the end or so I read in gorsht and cholem. But some of the present cult leaders may not have that restraint or wisdom and Asahara certainty didn't.

Hassan: There is a difference between religious cults like Aum Shinrikyo or the Moonies. What about political cults like Lyndon LaRouche who just died do you want to say anything about him and his conspiracy theories.

Lifton: I never studied him particularly but I started this as you said with my study of Chinese thought reform that is a group of political extremism and really that chapter twenty two that people who have been in cults have used to recognize what they have been put through came from a claim to spiritual perfection and what I have found is these seemingly separate tendencies political and religious can be psychologically virtually the same.

There was a guru in Mao himself and a great majority of the Chinese population looked up to him. And in that sense the vast Chinese population became cult like. Now I call it cultish or I speak of cultism to combine these in an all embracing idea. The subtitle of the book I am working on now it has the subtitle of it has the title of Losing Reality, subtitle On Cults, Cultism and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry.

Well here is the sequence in my work, thought reform was a kind of political purification apocalyptic, and I bring out the apocalyptic side of Mao, Aum Shinrikyo was ostensibly a religious purification or apocalyptic movement, the Nazis were a biological purification.

Hassan: You wrote The Nazi Doctors for anyone unfamiliar with that work.

Lifton: I did and as I look back on it I didn't call it cult like but even as I write it I called it milleniarial, and I spoke of a mystical bio medical vision and a biological mysticism. So there was a cult like aspect to the Nazis as well. All of this has to do with claims of absolute purification both the political and the  ostensibly religious groups embrace they as you yourself discovered personally they are psychologically so close as to be virtually inseparable the political and spiritual apocalyptisism and extremism.


Hassan: And in your book Death in Life about the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the victims of a nuclear bomb you also talked about this the nuclear weapons changed the fundamental structure of how humans relate to reality because it created for the first time a tangible scene of the utter annihilation of everything.

Lifton: Absolutely, In that sense, the nuclear weapons were immediately technologically apocalyptic. They could do what in the past only God could do - destroy the world. And for many they became something close to an object of worship themselves. We call that nuclearism. And in nuclear weapons can also take on a cult like quality and we recognize that when we speak of the nuclear priesthood. Or the arcane aspects of nuclear weapons there are just a relatively few people...(interview trails off)