Unpacking the Trump Cult

of net worth that wasn't actually there. And so you know, this case is going to go to trial, and I think that currently there are sanctions that are being put on the business operations that are in Donald Trump's name.

And I just, you know, folks, the fact that the Republican front runner, and I know that this is said, and I know that it's stated over and over again, but it's just like, what the fuck is it going to really seep in that the front runner for the Republican Party has been found guilty of sexual assault, has been found guilty of defamation, has been found guilty now of fraud, has had his university shut down, is having his organizations shut down because he is a lying, serial,

fucking criminal, on top of which he is facing four indictments ninety one charges. And this is the stand by their man candidate. What the fuck does that say about you and your values and your morals? By contrast, the only thing that the Republican Party has been able to find over five years of investigation, mind you, because I want folks to understand the timeline here. These investigations around Donald Trump have been going on for roughly two years, and this is the type of hot shit that it

is produced. In five years. What we have against Hunter Biden, a man that has never run for political office, is not elected by anyone, has been battled his own demons, and just happens to bear the last name Biden, is some lying on a form to get it done because he had a drug addiction problem. That's it. And all of their investigations right into Hillary Clinton, what did they come up with, zero investigations for years into Joe Biden?

What did Republicans come up with zero two years worth of investigations into Donald Trump, you got four indictments, ninety one charges and counting. It's absolutely fucking batshit crazy. And it is for that reason, dear friends, that I am chatting today with doctor Suzanne Lachman on her diagnoses, her thoughts that she is shared in documentaries and in articles

on unpacking support for Donald Trump. The psychology behind the movement, the socio psychological dynamics at play behind Trump's enduring popularity is what doctor Lackman and I will discuss today. Now, for me, this is different than the ways that cable news roll up into these white ass towns and sit down and want to understand why white rural Americans are just so upset right and why they need to be coddled. No, no,

that's not this conversation. This conversation is essentially and I am not a doctor, so I am at liberty to say what it is that I think this is the psychology of how with all the information in front of that is factual, How with everything that we have known and discovered and are continuing to find out about Donald Trump and all of his criminal ass associates, whether you are looking at Cassidy Hutchinson's new book Enough and more of the crazies and Looney Tunes characters that were in

and out of the Oval Office doing their best to undermine the Constitution. Who had the ear of the President of the United States, who retired, General Mark Millie has in an interview basically said, is unstable and incapable of doing the job. How is it that you have tens of millions of Americans that are willing to lay down and die for this man that gave up liberty and freedom because he told them to go take their country back. So this conversation is to really unpack, essentially the inner

workings and inner doings and thinkings of a cult. What would make people write in Jonestown and other places, line up behind some leader and take their own lives, separate themselves from their families, from everything that they know, to follow a person. Because that's where we are, and the mainstream media, corporate media continues to do America a disservice

by showcasing and platforming this extraordinarily dangerous call leader. What we need is disruption to the fantasy that Donald Trump is created around himself and that this Republican Party has created around white grievance. So coming up next, my conversation with doctor Lockman. Folks, I am very happy to welcome

to OKF Daily for the very first time. Doctor Suzanne Lachman a celebrated clinical psychologist and an unparalleled voice in the realm of self esteem, relationships, and breakups, and is one of the three most read writers at Psychology Today and also has been featured in the critically acclaimed documentary Unfit The Psychology of Donald Trump. Doctor Lockman, you know,

there's so much. There is so much that I want to dig into with you, because I think that the moment, the years that we've been living inside of for the last seven years, since Donald Trump came down that escalator, since our political norms were turned on their head, and what many of us believed to be true about America, about democracy have been the challenged is not even the world have been pushed to their breaking point, and for many of us, watching this country be degraded and contorted

into a shell of itself is traumatizing, right, And I just think about you know, let's harken back to the images on January sixth, twenty twenty one, of watching our Capitol building that did not even manage to get to be put under siege in the Civil War, watch plumes of smoke and people climb over buildings, and just the

visual of what we saw is trauma. So I just want you to, you know, give us your thoughts on where you see this moment as as psychologists looking at what we've been facing and dealing with as a society for almost a decade at this point.

swept up in it. So I've spent a good amount of time trying to make sense of what I think are a bunch of types of people that remain to this day Trump supporters, despite all the evidence to the contrary, want there. So I think there's some character traits and I don't think anyone would disagree. That's pretty obvious. But

but they so one of them. The first one is in many you can tell that there is a profound difficulty admitting that they're wrong apologizing there is there are a lot of people out there who see admitting they're wrong or apologizing as a form of weakness, right, and of reflecting not just the event, but their entire character. So to admit they're wrong, to say they're sorry, means that they're weak.

own up to your mistakes. Right. When you think about what the president signified prior to Donald Trump was in many ways a moral leader as well, right, not just a not ideally not just a political leader, but a moral leader, somebody that can provide example, right of compromise, of diplomacy, of all of these things. And so when you see these characteristics, is it that because they have been modeled Doctor Lackman for so many years in such a bad way that people then have have begun to

mimic or was this latent? Was it always there?

Is it nature and nurture? Probably that would probably take way too much time for us to parse out right, But you kind of you're helping me springboard into another area, which is Donald Trump appeals to people who have no impulse control or who are barely able to maintain their impulses. Now he is idealized, idolized, deified, et cetera, because he's been walking around exercising his impulses everywhere and not getting There's been no ramifications for his actions, nothing has caught

up to him. Whereas the common everyday person, they have to if they did any of the things grab somebody by the pussy, or any of the things that we know Trump has done, they get in trouble for it. Right, So here's this guy who's able to do all of these things that they are not able to do, that they're barely containing themselves from doing. So they get to live vicariously through him in a way, and it makes

him rise above. There's no consequences, or there have been no consequences, and he's continuing to find ways to make it appear to those people who are very willing to believe because they don't want to be wrong or they don't know how to be wrong. I mean, there's so many people in Congress that applies to you know, Matt Gates comes willing to as somebody who, in your wildest dreams would never admit he was wrong, even Kevin McCarthy.

They'll just talk over themselves instead. Uh yeah, And it's maddening. So there's these these two subgroups that are intertwined as well,

but we can also sort of see them differently. Then there are people who have a much higher threshold for a use of talk, for being insulted, for dishing out insult, for being bullies, for calling somebody crooked whatever, or name call the kind of name calling, that kind of childish It comes along with impulsivity way that we've seen him conduct himself to them, that's sort of like, oh, that's

familiar to me. There's something comforting about that he's normalizing what I didn't always I thought was bad or people told me was bad. But look at this, I can get on board with this.

me the difference. Tell me, tell me the difference of not being able to take responsibility for your actions and choosing not to take responsibility for your actions.

the law, or perpetually on the edge. So I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I do think there are people out there that kind of consciously know that no matter who's following him, you have to be shirking your responsibilities. You cannot be a conscious person with with a with a moral and ethical middle uh or time out, it's a better word for that, like internal compass, with uh a moral compass. Who wouldn't recognize that there's something seriously wrong here?

this character? And I I it's but it's it's thirty percent of the population, doctor Lackman. So I'm like, it is there are we all just banging our heads against the wall then trying to have this thirty percent try and wake up to reality?

gonna that's that's what they'll do. They don't really know any other way, And because to hint to them, to many of them, he's he's magical and he's managed to get out of circumstances so often himself. I mean, think about how many people went into the Capitol with the promise that they would be pardoned right that and especially if he if he is still the president and or

becomes the president or somehow is both. There's also many many mentally ill people in that contingent, in that thirty percent. Not to say that there there aren't mentally ill people in the other seventy, but there's less When with with with COVID, it certainly heightened and kind of pressurized a lot of mental illness that may have been more latent exactly, and venom and hatred and all these other emotions, and since a good portion of those groups that we're describing

don't have impulse control. I mean, even if we think about how many Republicans in particular are are found to be pedophiles, are it's it's it's insane, the lack of impulse control, and it's it's it's really that that kind of in many ways separates them from the rest of us. Uh, even if they know they're not controlling their impulses. Again, he's giving them an excuse.

I guess that it is important to understand the psychology of the people that follow Trump, Yes, but I also find myself and with a couple of minutes that we have left, I want you to be able to weigh in on the trauma that is being inflicted on the rest of us and how we are to manage and move and move through that, because again, I don't think that we have paused long enough to reflect on the damage that has been done emotionally, spiritually, basically over the last seven years.

all of that. They are literally crying out. Whether they know it or not, they are crying out because they cannot handle the control that they have. Wow, that's why it's so crazy out there, and we as sane adults, are going there's nothing that's going to stop us from

getting to the polls. And thankfully, I think because of the extent to the lengths the Republicans have gone to with with taking away women's rights and messing with civil rights and education, et cetera, it's going to get a lot of other people out there too who might not have otherwise been involved because this touches losing Roe v. Wade, as evidenced by some of the other some of the elections that we've seen that are there any indication of

what's to come, Even in the most conservative states, it's they're they're a cruising for us to take over and we will, we will, that's our job.

and the word consequential is so overused. But the the fact is that we have been an are at our break at our breaking point, and I think that the next you know, twelve months, you know, or so are really going to be a pressure cooker whether America survives And I don't even you know, And I guess the last question for you, I'll say, I'll ask is this is, even if democracy comes out the other side of this, does America, how we've understood it, come out the other

side of this? Or are we in a I don't know, a burned down moment, phoenix rising moment regardless, because so much has been torched.

as equal. And so hopefully there are more and more amendments that are past. But what we are seeing is that there is legal recourse and so this kind of anger that you're describing, or people being at their wits end it's there's two types of anger, in my opinion. There's the blamey kind, which you can only get stuck in, like, oh, I can't believe you know that, I can't believe that all these people are still into him, like you know,

the stuff that you can't do anything about. And then there's the I am so sick of being sick of this that that I'm not going to crawl under a rock. I'm gonna vote, and I'm gonna get as many other people out there as I can to vote because the system has not failed us. There. We've called constitutional crises a couple of times, but here we are, and there's ninety one counts against him. Proud boys are being thrown in jail. The problem is the wheels of justice grind slowly,

so it's a matter of being patient. But the more patient you are, the more relief you will find. It certainly will not detract from all the pain and suffering that people have gone through, but to feel be able to feel safer in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our own skin, that's that's the goal. So yeah, that's what we all have to move towards. Don't get mad get even.