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Psychology of Political Assassinations, Aftermath: Messianic Saviors (TalkTV with Trisha Goddard)

Uploaded 7/15/2024, approx. 12 minute read

You're about to watch an interview I granted to the inimitable Trisha Goddard of Talk TV.

I would like to summarize it for you.

The interview has dealt with the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

I explained the psychology of political assassins. Would-be assassins of political figures engage in what is known as dichotomous thinking.

Dichotomous thinking is when you divide the world, black versus white, good versus evil, with me or against me.

It is founded on a primitive, infantile, regressive defense mechanism known as splitting.

In the case of political assassination, the world is divided into the camp of evil versus the angels of good or the agents of good.

The politician is all evil. The assassin is on the side of good, on the side of history. It is a morality play.

The assassin's thinking is apocalyptic. The assassin catastrophizes.

He says to himself, the world as we know it is going to come to its end, should the wicked politician have his or her own way.

There is a sense of urgency, helplessness, anxiety, even panic. The assassin's cognitive processes are distorted and his reality testing is impaired.

The assassin becomes grandiose. His internal monologue is, only I have the power and courage that it takes to change the world in the course of history.

Should the politicians survive the assassination attempt, many of his followers and disciples would regard it as a sign of divine protection and an anointment.

When the assassination attempt succeeds, ensuing hagiography renders the politician an immaculate saint and a sacrificial limb for the cause.

Enjoy the interview.


I want to get on to my next guest because he's just brilliant. He's just brilliant and thought-provoking.

Sam Vaknin is a geopolitical analyst. He's also a professor of psychology, very renowned.

I want to talk about this Trump assassination attempt and who is it? What sort of person actually does something like this? And what is said in the aftermath?

Sam, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you. I pretty much said you lead and I follow.

What has said in the aftermath, everybody, I'm scrolling through, has been quite measured in what they say as far as world leaders are concerned.

Even Donald Trump himself.

It doesn't sound like normal Donald Trump, but doesn't matter. It sounds very statement-like.

People from Macron all around the world saying they're horrified.

Nigel Farage, I'm going to pick him out, and there's a few others, has said mainstream media have spread a narrative of hatred against my friend Donald Trump. I hope they're proud of themselves, disgusting people.

We've already got people saying this was staged. We've already got conspiracy theorists.

This isn't the first, sadly, time that guns and politics have collided in the US.

Talk me through the psychology from varying points of view.

Thank you for having me, Tricia. Good to see you again.

The typical political assassin is a loner, is a lone wolf. It's someone who is isolated, socially inept, and he's engaged in what is known as dichotomous thinking.

Dichotomous thinking is a fancy way of sayinghe sees the world as a morality play. Evil against good, black against white, with me or against me.

This is founded on a primitive defense mechanism known as splitting. And it's very common in narcissism.

So many of these assassins are actually narcissists. And they engage in this kind of thinking.

I am all good and I'm fighting the forces of evil. And these forces of evil are ratified by the politician I'm about to assassinate.

So I'm actually cleansing the world, I'm purifying the world, and I'm making the world a better place.

The second thing is apocalyptic thinking, also known as catastrophizing. And this raises feelings of helplessness, anxiety, panic, and urgency.

Apocalyptic thinking simply says, if I don't get rid of this politician, the world is going to end. An apocalypse is upon us. Tuesday is coming. This guy is the beast. This guy is, I don't know, the devil. This guy is, I need to get rid of him because the alternative is a destruction.

I was going to say so, even if they're the same politics, because, you know when you look back at Kennedy or you know everybody thought it would be some from the right of politics it ended up being a communist.

This guy was a 20 year old registers Republican and apparently there's latest investigators say that bomb making materials were found inside the suspect's vehicle in his home. Associated Press said two law enforcement officials told the news agency about that development on condition of anonymity.

So it doesn't even take someone from opposing politics.

Are the politics of the person irreverent in this?

It's more about that black, white, split thinking.

Exactly. This is a mistake commonly made in the media and even in Academe. It has nothing to do with politics.

This is highly personalized. It becomes a personal feud, a personal mission and a personal quest. It's mythologized. Both the opponent is mythologized and the assassin self-mythologizes.

So it's become a mythical battle between good and evil. And it involves a lot of grandiosity.

The person, the assassin, is no longer thinking straight. He is out to save the world, to change the course of history. And he convinces himself that he is the only one possessed of the courage and the qualities and the skills needed to effectuate the accomplishment of this goal.

We call this impaired reality testing. The person is delusional, lives in a fantasy bubble in which he's trapped all alone with his target. So it's him and the target and encased it and that's it.


Let me ask you about the, as the Americans use the word, the optics after.

Now, many of Donald Trump supporters are saying his defied, blood-spattered face will be a defining image and make him a hero.

After the attempt on Reagan, the fact that he took off his mask in hospital and joked with the doctors, pushed his popularity up for a nanosecond and then it dived.

But what is said and the reactions and the photographs taken, let's talk about the psychological impact on people, the conspiracy theorist who said it was faked and what have you.

And it's not the first time these things have come out.

I mean, you know, look at Lee Harvey Oswald. It can't have been just one guy. It must have been the Russians.

And that picture of Jackie Kennedy leaning over the back of the car, those images and the impact it has on, I guess, entrenched thinking is, you know, it's a really interesting topic.

Yes.

The reactions of people, especially the disciples and followers and accolades and fans of the target, of the assassination talk.

The reactions of these people depend crucially on whether the assassination has succeeded or failed from the point of view of the assassin, whether the target has been eliminated or whether the target has survived.

If the target survives, when the target survives, there is an immediate assumption that he is under God's protection or history is protection. He has a historic mission to complete. And until he does complete this mission, he is invulnerable even to bullets. He is protected by history or by God.

Indeed, Donald Trump's first official reaction was, it was God who saved me today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Ronald Reagan said the same. Ronald Reagan said, God must have saved me for a purpose.

But then that speaks. What does that message give to those acolytes and those followers and believers, etc?

It fits well with a victimhood narrative.

The politician is perceived as self-sacrificial. He is even willing to risk his life in order to accomplish his mission. And evil is out to get him, but he is insulated with divine grace.

So there's an element of victimhood, an element of conspiracy, of course, because when you say evil, it is a very diffuse notion. You could say that Democrats are evil. You could say the FBI, actually, or this Secret Service conspired in this somehow. Evil is such a diffuse label that it fits anyone and everyone within any given conspiracy.

So the reactions to the survival of the politician, the politician survives an assassination, is, number one, he's protected by God. Number two, he has a historical mission to complete. Number three, he is a victim and is self-sacrificial, and we should adulate and admire him for his willingness to sacrifice himself. And number four, there must be a conspiracy somewhere because these are the forces of evil. And the forces of evil are unitary. They are systemic. It's a system, it's not just an individual.

And so this is when the assassination fails.

When the assassination succeeds, what happens is the target of the assassination, we can think about Martin Luther King, we can think about Robert F. Kennedy.

So the target of the assassination is converted into a secular saint. There's an element of beatification. He becomes a saint. There's a hagiography. There's people write about the person as if he were impeccable and immaculate and sinless and perfect in every which way.

In Hebrew, there is a saying, after someone dies, you should always say that he was a saint. It's in the Hebrew Talmud.

So this is what happens.

The second thing that happens is that in many cases, the assassinated politician is presented as a sacrificial lamb and therefore equated actually with Jesus Christ, although not expressly, not explicitly, not overtly, but, you know, he died for our sins. He died for us. His death is a kind of purification or cleansing experience that either is going to bring all of us together or is going to agglomerate the forces of good and send them on a crusade against the forces of evil.

So this is a moral crusade and a morality play. It's very, very ancient.

The reaction, yeah, it's been done.

It's beenvery ancient. The reaction...

Oh yes, it's been done. It's been done before.


And just on a final note as well, what people say, and I picked out some of those things, you know, they all seem, are all world leaders. They know what you're talking about. They know that history will focus on what it is they said.

And for the people who don't know and haven't thought about it, it would probably come back to bite them in the seat of their pants.

But how important is it that message that most world leaders seem to think, now is not the time to start saying, these people are disgusting, these people are nasty, because those words have far more potency in the aftermath of something like this than they would normally.

Political violence inhibits honest communication, inhibits the ability to criticize your opponent. Political violence has a chilling effect on political discourse and gives advantage to the party or to the camp that are disinhibited and are willing to do anything, to the camp that there's no rules, no restrictions, no inhibitions, and essentially no morality or ethics.

So when you are inhibited, for example, in the wake of an assassination attempt or an actual assassination, it's not nice to criticize the other camp. It's not nice to. So when you're inhibited by these politically correct kind of behavioral modes, you relinquish the race.

You relinquish the race.

So I'm very afraid that this self-imposed inhibition of speech, these things we shouldn't say right now, it's too fresh. We're going to give Donald Trump a huge advantage.

Assassination and violence are never justified, but we should never forget who is Donald Trump and the threat and menace that he represents to American democracy and to the world at large.

So I don't think, I think the race and the campaign should continue as normal. Of course, there should be no incitement to violence or anything like that, but also there should be no self-imposed inhibition on saying the right thing and campaigning along the lines of protecting democracy.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sam. You always give us so much to think about. I really thank your comment and your expertise.

Sam Vaknin, geopolitical analyst and a professor of psychology, digging beneath the headlines. That's what we like to do on this program.

We're going to take a break. We'll be back with more in a moment.

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