A life isn’t significant except for its effect on other lives.
~Jackie Robinson
I’ll say this about one of us living in an all-white suburb: crabgrass isn’t our biggest problem.
~Dick Gregory
I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.” So said Donald Trump to reporters after word got out that he had referred to African and Caribbean nations as “shithole countries” and lamented that more immigrants didn’t come to the US from countries “like Norway.” Within two months, an AP poll revealed just how unconvincing Trump’s denial had been, reporting that 57 percent of Americans believed him to be racist, despite his protestations. His denials after the “shithole” incident were widely enough reported that a good portion of that majority believed not only that Trump is a racist but that he lied—and felt compelled to lie—about it too. Even as Trump’s denials go, his “least racist” claim was especially audacious.
The Trump campaign officially began with an unapologetic and categorical denunciation of Mexicans, which was clearly designed to resonate with voters who felt similarly. His first serious test of the presidential campaign waters arguably began with his spearheading the birther movement challenging Obama’s citizenship. Although it was widely criticized for its racist intent and appeal, and was the catalyst for Trump’s unprecedented public humiliation at the 2011 White House Correspondents Association dinner, Trump’s birther campaign—and by extension his racism in general—has in some respects been affirmed by his receiving the ultimate reward, the presidency of the United States.
Though he felt compelled to lie about it, Trump has a history of racism and experiences such impulses on a deep psychological level as having enormous power. Racism also connects him to his personal history and to a generational legacy of bigotry that has characterized the Trump family’s approach to business and the world. These attitudes clearly connect him to his supporters as well. As we’ll see, the nature of the racist mind-set provides some very specific outlines of complex dynamics between the individual and both his inner and outer worlds. What emerges when we look at racism from a psychoanalytic perspective—both in general and Trump’s in particular—is that Trump uses racism not simply as a weapon but as an offensive defense, if you will, defending against his own terror that he is, at his core, a compromised human being.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, racism is best understood as an attitude toward people whom the individual considers or experiences as different, or “other.” The racist position is dominated by the defense mechanism we know as projection, in which the individual externalizes unwanted characteristics about the self and perceives them in others—or in groups of others that are experienced as being different—whose difference catalyzes a range of irrational fears and obsessions about otherness and dangerous unknowns. When these fears and doubts make the individual feel insecure, and he can project his self-doubts and self-hatred onto a group of others, his insecurity is assuaged; he feels more secure by remaining loyal to his own particular group, and hating and fearing others. The “otherness” of the targeted groups makes it easier to dehumanize them, allowing the racist an avenue to express his hatred—hatred that most likely has its roots in his family of origin. Thus it is safer to express hatred through racist attacks rather than direct hate at one’s primary objects of love—one or both parents.
What we know of the parenting that young Donald received in the Trump household makes it likely that it felt less safe for him to express his vulnerabilities than to disavow them and project his feared weakness onto others. By projecting that weakness onto people of color, young Donald was mirroring the model established by his father, who was arrested in a Queens KKK melee in 1927, and who in subsequent decades built a real estate empire that had been well known in Brooklyn and Queens as developments mainly for whites. In fact, decades before “Trump Tower” became identified—through Donald’s relentless media engineering and high-end real estate development prowess, legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie, a resident of Fred Trump’s all-white Beach Haven complex, excoriated Fred Trump’s discriminatory policies in a journal:
I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
Singer-songwriter and activist Ryan Harvey later set these words to music to create the song “Old Man Trump,” with an updated lyric, “Beach Haven is Trump’s tower / Where no black folks come to roam.”
The firm’s racist policies got a considerably more high-profile and extended public airing in the early 1970s, soon after Fred Trump brought his son into leadership of the family business. Suddenly an ongoing investigation by the New York City Commission on Human Rights, in which undercover testers tried to rent Trump apartments, became public. The white applicant was offered housing right away, but the black applicant was told nothing was available. The city shut down rentals, and the Justice Department picked up the case, filing suit in 1973 against father and son, accusing them of “refusing to rent and negotiate rentals with blacks.” Trump employees stated that they had been instructed to mark rental applications from blacks with the letter C for “colored.”
Donald Trump, then twenty-seven, took the lead in defending the family. Under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, the attorney who had formerly worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, Donald pushed back hard, countersuing the government and accusing the prosecutor, who was Jewish, of conducting a “Gestapo-like interrogation.” The judge summarily rejected Trump’s claims. After years of court battles, Donald Trump sought a settlement, agreeing to buy ads in local newspapers assuring the public that his company would not discriminate—a far lesser penalty than he was initially facing.
The entire episode had a profound and lasting impact on the way Donald Trump would conduct his career. From Cohn, he learned the potential rewards of defending against an attack through the counterattack, a strategy that he continues to this day to deploy. And the relatively mild penalty confirmed that any punishment for the racism that was baked into the family organization’s policies could be averted through denial, disavowal, and counterattack.
Despite the rough press he endured during that dispute, Donald Trump waded into numerous racial controversies throughout his career. In 1989, after five teenage boys—four black and one Hispanic—were arrested for raping and beating a young white female investment banker on a jog through Central Park, Trump bought a full-page ad in the New York Times urging swift punishment. Although DNA evidence later exonerated the “Central Park Five,” Trump continued to enforce his original position.
Around the same time, Trump offered a telling glimpse of the fears that his racism defends. In a 1989 speech, he said, “A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. And I think that sometimes a black may think that they don’t really have the advantage, or this or that, but in actuality today, currently, it’s a great [sic]. I said on occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today I would love to be a well-educated black because I really do believe they do have an actual advantage today.”
Those who’ve worked with Trump for many years say he also has a history of making rough, stereotyping comments about racial minorities. John O’Donnell, who was president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, said Trump blamed blacks for his financial problems. “I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza—black guys counting my money!” O’Donnell quoted Trump as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. . . . Laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is; I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump has denied making that remark but has also said, “The stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
Trump’s personal and family histories shed revealing new light on his response to the white supremacists’ demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017—his presidency’s first call for leadership in response to an emergency crisis caused by an overt act of racism. Following a disingenuous initial attempt to bring the nation together after the protest turned into a deadly confrontation, Trump surprised some observers when he insisted that there were “good people” among the white supremacists whose angry rally instigated the conflict. Political-minded observers interpreted his clearly unscripted defense of the white supremacists as a concession to the more extreme elements of his base. While there were no doubt some political gains to be made from sending his voters the message that they could be “good” racists, the racist he likely and unconsciously had in mind in his impassioned remarks was his father.
Trump’s role as torch carrier for his father’s racism is complicated; although he is clearly mirroring a mind-set that he witnessed in his father, we can also understand Donald’s racism as a defense against his father. An expression of paranoid anxiety, adult racism is often an outgrowth of childhood feelings of helplessness. It can also be a response to narcissistic injuries in childhood—either being mocked or threatened at home. When normal childhood needs often go unmet, they ultimately thwart emotional growth.
The child of a tyrannical father like Fred Trump may unconsciously wish to attack back. The impulse to attack one’s father, however, can cause guilt and fear of punishment—feelings that the undeveloped individual will (again unconsciously) want to shift outside rather than acknowledge and internalize. Similarly, the anger of a middle child who “loses” his mother to a younger sibling may also induce angry feelings that he can’t acknowledge and must project externally. To a white child who entertains compensatory or retaliatory fantasies of being powerful, people with dark skin can present ready-made targets for such projections.
All of us have had unacceptable feelings that we’ve had to consciously ignore. We may have hated the birth of a sibling and wanted to kill him or her—a wish that clearly was so unacceptable we couldn’t even tell our parents. As young children we repress such feelings, pushing them deep into our unconscious until we see a person who might be doing what we had once wanted to do—or thought we did do. Both racism and its psychic cousin xenophobia—a fear of foreigners—are at their hearts driven by a fear of the outsider within—the unfamiliar that lurks inside each of us and at times presents itself in dreams and in sudden realizations about other people.
At a fundamental level, racist feelings are part of the mental process children go through as they develop—that of labeling, defining, differentiating self from other—whether it be girls from boys, tall from short, or brown skin from white skin. It’s no accident that students are asked to “compare and contrast” in literature and history classes: it’s what we learn to do as part of defining ourselves and the environments in which we live—or don’t live. Sorting out categories helps organize the mind and gives the person things to think about without having them spill over into potentially indefinable chaotic emotions. Over time, however, categories risk becoming substitutes for thought. They serve as comforting resources of certainty that help a person manage anxiety about the unknown or undefined.
Certainty is a defense against anxiety. And categories are defenses against having to think. When I was in third grade, a playground bully once asked me, “What are you?” When I said, “American,” the questioner repeated, “Yes, but what are you?” I could have said a boy, but that would have been obvious. So I asked what he meant. “Where did you come from?” When I said Los Angeles, he said, “No, where are your parents from?” When I said Chicago, he said what he wanted to know was where my grandparents were from, and I again said Chicago. Clearly we were getting nowhere. It turned out that what he really wanted to know was if I was Jewish. When I said I was, the kid yelled, “Christ killer!” Obviously that upset me, though I didn’t even know what it meant, other than it sounded bad. I barely knew what being Jewish even meant.
Whatever our categories are based on, we need them to sort things out, sometimes in extreme ways. Children need internal absolutes to help them order their minds, before they tackle the complexity of feeling both love and hate toward the same person. But some people age into adulthood without ever learning how to handle that much complexity; racism offers these adults an opportunity to hold on to those primitive divisions in order to defend against anxiety that might become emotionally paralyzing.
Even if the division is not absolute, the racist individual unconsciously requires the creation and maintenance of an “other” to contain disavowed elements of the self. Racism demands that these projective mechanisms operate continually, keeping the unwanted parts of the self close by, an ever-present reminder to the racist of who he is not. Projection also deprives the self of the possibility to recognize and think about those unwanted internal elements. Instead of looking within, the individual focuses on the recipients of his projections and imagines them as creatively devising new ways to attack, which only further exacerbates the debilitating effects of excessive projection.
Successful projection leaves the racist confident that he is a righteous person, his self-hate transformed into object-hate. He can openly express contempt without guilt, as well as push otherwise painful, narcissistic wounds into people of a different color or nationality. Projection helps one manage anxiety by externalizing onto others what were once experienced as internal threats—unacceptable character traits or emotions including murderousness, delinquency, perversions, and fears of shame, helplessness, or impotence. It results often in blaming or fearing. A liar, for instance, suddenly experiences other people as lying, or a destructive person fears other people as dangerous. Fears of parents can also be displaced onto other authority figures, such as the government or police officers.
Everyone has internal “hooks” on which to hang the unconsciously rejected parts of the self that require projection—dependency, envy, narcissistic injury, castration anxiety, and even hatred. For example, we often see that white people assume that people of color must have menial jobs. When African American reporter April Ryan asked President Trump at a February 2017 press conference about when he would meet with the Congressional Black Caucus, he memorably asked her to schedule a meeting for him. The exchange deservedly raised red flags for its unvarnished glimpse of Trump’s racism and sexism; not only had he made the assumption that the CBC members were “friends of [hers]”—betraying the dehumanizing oversimplification of the “other” that makes racism possible—but he had projected onto her the menial role of arranging meetings, an early sign that he would consider meeting with black leaders of Congress as something beneath him. The sexism involved in his assumption about who does scheduling is also palpable. At a deeper level, Trump was likely projecting his own childhood menial roles of picking up after his father on construction sites. For Trump, less than a month in office at the time, the prospect of serving or answering to African American constituents was likely an aspect of his new presidential self that he could not embrace.
Racism was of course at the heart of the speech with which he launched his campaign. Also at its heart were his promises to keep America free from immigrants who had brown skin and spoke Spanish. Tapping into the fears of his followers, he proposed the Mexican border wall, which was a concrete symbol of his deep unconscious need to keep diversity out of his brain as much as out of America. In Trump’s psyche, Latin Americans need to be kept separate to protect him from internal conflict that might challenge his self-esteem. Having a split worldview helps him guarantee that he won’t have to think about complexity and will be free simply to react as a way to manage his anxiety. Letting in unfamiliar ideas is exceedingly dangerous to him; the promise of building a wall along the Mexican border is really an externalization of a deeply powerful internal need—to keep his father out, or to block out any potential danger, so it never emanates from within.
Trump’s unintegrated split worldview helps him maintain a simplified perspective that is a psychological requisite for racist thinking. Another simplification tool is the mind’s ability to equate a part with the whole when assessing another person. Racists are able to see only the part of the individual they fear or dislike, rather than seeing the “other” as a whole person or as a member of a group of complex, real people. Racism—like sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other kinds of biases—depends upon the individual defining an entire person by a single attribute. A similar kind of thinking informs—or at least infuses—the “lock her up” attacks on Hillary Clinton: her email practices have come to define her among a lot of her opponents, who can more easily demonize and dehumanize her by psychically substituting that part for the whole.
Trump’s racism can be detected in his sadistic use of nicknames, even when they are not overtly racist, as they reveal his comfort at destroying an entire person by mocking one trait. Calling Jeb Bush “low energy” created a label that nobody forgets, like “Mexican rapists” or “lazy” blacks. His ability to generalize, whether about one person or an entire group, reminds us that his capacity to use the part for the whole is essential to his comfort with racism. As a psychoanalyst I try not to diagnose my patients—though insurance forms demand it—because using labels restricts my clinical openness and diminishes my abilities to experience each person individually.
Once the racist individual starts simplifying his thinking in this fashion, some predictable consequences can be expected. The racist resists information that doesn’t fit the narrow set of beliefs and assumptions he has embraced, any challenge to which is taken as something to be annihilated or eliminated; the humanity of the immigrant whose family is split up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for example, can thus be overlooked so the racist feels no pain associated with the recognizable heartbreak that ensues. Over time, defining whole groups of people as “others” who are equated with their single damning characteristic restricts the racist’s ability to think, feel empathy, or face anxiety—all challenges that Trump appears to be facing unsuccessfully in his presidency.
To the racist, the survival of the self depends on the elimination of the place for shared humanity. Psychoanalytically, it is clear that the more we project and hold firm our beliefs, the less room there is for thought. By defining the “other,” the racist not only projects and defines “not me,” but also sinks the “other” without a trace, without needing to give that particular group any additional thought. In that respect, racism is a social version of that very human wish not to have to think. Thus we see Donald Trump evacuating his disavowed feelings rather than having to recognize and examine them, because to do so would risk creating room for certainty-threatening doubt.
Unexamined feelings resist evacuation, however, and the racist is left with the emotion at the heart of racism—hate. Deep, passionate emotions drive racist behaviors and sensibilities, and the most pervasive and powerful of these is hatred. It’s hard to discover one’s own hatred, let alone accept it; it’s much easier to see hatred in others, particularly in other groups. But hatred is very powerful and real, and anyone who questions whether it is a driving force in Trump’s racism needs only look for it, especially in front of a rally audience. To see Trump almost insisting that team owners fire their kneeling NFL players, for example, is to see the adult version of the toddler throwing rocks at a neighbor in a playpen. Hate must be called by its name, for it is an impediment to any hope for understanding, discussion, or self-reflection.
Hatred is magnified when racism expands from the individual to the group level. Groups are notorious for offering individuals a collective opportunity to escape the restraints imposed by superego or conscience, conferring a shared identity—or “we-ness”—that facilitates expressions of hate and violence more extreme than individuals might feel comfortably committing on their own. That group hate then gets re-introjected by individuals who can act out their violent fantasies and impulses with more impunity, because they have an internal source of support in the form of identification with the group.
As toxic and debilitating as Trump’s racism is on an individual, it is even more damaging when he exports it to forge connections with and among his followers. Trump is masterful at manipulating their racist feelings to induce their coming together in their shared projections and hatred. Football star Michael Bennett, in Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, wrote that Trump’s speech at an Alabama rally “attacked us for protesting and went after the NFL for not firing us. He also described any player who took a knee as a ‘son of a bitch.’” Suggesting at times that he can see in his followers the conscious or unconscious memories of childhood traumas like his own, Trump is uncannily effective at activating racist responses to the wounds—real and imagined—that they have in common, and at surfacing memories of racist influences from their pasts. Trump uses his speeches to cut through repression and grab people by their fantasies, without their permission. While memory is fundamental to belonging to history, society, and to one’s family, it’s also important not to have one’s face rubbed in those memories against one’s will.
Trump understands racists’ instinctive needs to stay in their own identity group—white, bitter, resentful—and then promotes those needs to his own advantage. In his campaign, Trump was able to generalize and share the experience of outrage at being forgotten, as well as the fury his supporters felt when black and brown men and women—both American citizens and aspiring immigrants—seemed to be encouraged to cut in front of the line, whatever that line was. Thanks to Twitter, Trump is able to export his inner chaos and rage—his racism—with unprecedented speed and reach. For example, when he re-tweeted in the wake of the Charlottesville tragedy an animation of a train smashing into a CNN logo, he not only revealed his petty rage but also offered a glimpse of his own unconscious wish to excuse and even embrace the Charlottesville killer’s method of murder by vehicle. For a moment, he betrayed his excitement at running people down as a method of killing—something he previewed by his childlike glee at sitting behind the wheel in big rigs and fire trucks. Having a big engine at his disposal increases his bravery and feelings of potency, as well as the kind of anonymity afforded by road rage.
The way Trump expresses his racism is both consistent and consistently jarring. When he says or tweets some unfiltered appeal to the racist impulses of his followers, it knocks people loose from their underpinnings of reason, conscience, and self-control, and undermines expectations that are part of normal life. Psychoanalysis has given the term “average expectable environment” to the predictable elements of daily life that are so ingrained that they are part of everyone’s psyche. We require predictable expectations to help us get through the day and manage the various challenges in our lives. Trump gets through his day, however, by throwing others off balance, in a way that induces his followers to reach out to him to restore their equilibrium.
His claims of “very stable genius” notwithstanding, Trump may strike the disapproving observer—including a majority of American voters—as an unlikely source of stability. By uniting his supporters in a shared projection of opposition to a reviled other, and reuniting them with the lifelong impulses that can give free expression to their racist impulses, Trump is creating a new “average expectable environment” among his supporters that is unacceptable and even threatening to those who don’t share it. Trump appeals to his base’s collective impulse to define and dehumanize an opposing group as the “other,” whether the otherness is defined by difference of race, nationality, or simply difference of beliefs. He offers them the chance to come together against a common foe and feel better about themselves for doing so. In this respect, the psychodynamics behind his and others’ racism represent an even bigger threat. Hate begets hate, whether the object of that hatred is people who look different or people who simply think different.