He has this disease because he’s more afraid of not being seen as a man than dying… I don’t think he’s afraid of killing himself if the price would be to avoid what he feels is the humiliation of wearing a mask and submitting to common sense and care for others…
Didn’t take much time for UD to find a commentator who agrees with her about DJT’s suicidality. Giridharadas’s theory of the president’s self-destruction tracks precisely with theories about why so many macho men in Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana (America’s BIG suicide states) kill themselves. (This blog has covered our suicidal macho/nihilist states forever.) Angry, isolated, obsessed with projecting strength, these are men who, like Trump, can look back on sordid personal lives that make unavoidably graphic the lovelessness they feel and inspire. Care for others, in Giridharadas’s words, is felt as a humiliating depletion of their strength; rage at others for … for obscure reasons, I guess having to do with others trying to draw love out of these men… ? … eventually finds its way inside the man himself and attacks him. As Andrew Sullivan notes, Trump is “dead inside apart from regular swoons of rage and resentment.”
Goes without saying that these same presuicides in our reddest states represent the very heart of Trump’s voting bloc, his demographic par excellence. Everyone noticed, during the last campaign, that Trump’s most solid support unerringly came from America’s most pilled-up, ginned-up, gunned-up, nihilistic counties and states (see, for instance, West Virginia).
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Look at it this way: These guys really need their guns, since they’re probably going to want to use them on themselves. They really need a president who supports the NRA.
A New Republic writer identifies Trump as the leader of the “Flailing Masculinity Death Cult.”
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And Trump’s other high-profile, 80% support demographic? Self-destructive ultraorthodox Jews – many of whom, by the way, share the heartland presuicide’s love of violence (this group spent last night rioting, burning masks, and assaulting people on the streets of New York) – cultish enclaves seemingly unmoved by the many covid infections and deaths among them.
How unsurprising that these two morbid, isolated constituencies are viscerally drawn to our nihilist in chief, whose “psychotic unraveling [is there] for all to see.”