Free Associations on Election 2020: What Politicians Mean to Us

My goal as a presidential psychobiographer since 1976 has always been to probe the family background, childhood, education, experience, defense mechanisms, personality, style of leadership, and traumas of the candidates to better understand how they would function in the presidency and to educate others in the process. In about 30 articles and chapters of books, I focused much more on the candidates and presidents than on the voters. Despite a hesitancy to make sweeping generalizations about what Americans wanted in choosing a president, I have reluctantly come to focus far more on American group fantasy and psychology than I did initially. In doing so as an Eriksonian participant observer in our experiment in American democracy, I always pay close attention to my own emotions as well as those of others.

Politicians evoke strong emotions. We Americans love them and hate them. Some think that they can do wonderful things for our democracy and others fear they will destroy it and hurt its people. Many try to ignore them and don’t vote. In researching politics, political personalities, and the political system as a graduate student in history and political science before becoming psychoanalytically trained, I became interested not only in presidents and the candidates for this position of commander in chief but also in the fantasies of the electorate.

Voters approach the subject candidates during the primaries and in the general election from many different perspectives. While the overwhelming majority of my colleagues and friends voted for Hillary Clinton, there were certainly many exceptions. A working-class friend who just died at age 92 patriotically dropped

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out of high school months before graduation so he could fight for America, spending his 18^th birthday being fired upon in Iwo Jima. He always favored outsider candidates like George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Donald Trump. A physician friend voted for Trump because he felt Obama’s Affordable Care Act had ruined American medicine and feared Clinton would make it even worse. A well-educated naturalized American voted for the Republican because he thought the Democrats were too favorable to illegals who, unlike him, had not earned the right to be here. A good friend of my wife, now living in Florida, voted for Trump because she is “a Republican,” declaring, “I only watch pro-Republican news.” It concerns me when my fellow professors and associates say they know no one who voted for Trump because that means they are missing out on the reality of such a large part of our society, even in blue states like New York and California.

I broke my 40-year commitment to a nonpartisan approach to the candidates in 2016 because after reading his 17 books and observing him, I became a never-Trumper. I feared that he was temperamentally a poor fit for the presidency for which he had no appropriate background and training; that he would, in fact, be a harmful leader of our country. I published “A Presidential Psychobiographer’s Countertransference to Trump” shortly before the 2016 election (Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 23, No. 1 Fall 2016: 1-8). In this, I spelled out my analysis of Trump and the commitment I made to voting and speaking against him based in part on a dream that I had, which depicted him as someone I had to stop from cheating. In the dream, he was taking a test with my students and I had to watch him like a hawk to prevent his dishonesty. In office, the President’s dishonesty is reflected in the incredible number of falsehoods he makes, many labeled by nonpartisan Politifact as “pants on fire” claims without any factual accuracy (Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, & Meg Kelly, “President Trump made 16,241 false or misleading claims in his first three years,” Washington Post, January 20, 2020). Although I disagree with Trump and what he stands for, I empathize with him as a small child in my search to understand the roots of his personality.

In addition, a powerful reason for voting for Clinton related to my strong desire for the United States to have women presidents, coupled with the fear that the first woman president would be pressured to prove that she was tougher than the men resulting in taking the United States to war (See “Elizabeth Dole and America’s Sec-

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ond Woman President,” Clio’s Psyche Vol. 7, No. 2, September 2000: 69-70). The appeal of Hillary was not simply that, unlike Trump, she has built up a political resume as an activist, governor’s wife, First Lady, leader in the struggle to reform health care, Secretary of State, and senator, but that she had an advisor husband who was a master of getting out of tight situations. This could help guide her when feeling pressure as the first woman leader of a militaristic country as demonstrated by the examples of India’s Indira Ganhdi, Sri Lanka’s Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, Israel’s Golda Maier, and Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. Thus my focus was not on the disgruntled workers of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—who turned out to be decisive in the Electoral College. Nor was my concentration on Russian interference, her “deplorables” comment, and other campaign missteps, or Comey as the head of the FBI bringing up Hillary’s non-governmental email server issue at an inopportune time in the electoral process.

As I talk to colleagues, I am struck by the extent to which we make our political choices based on our own emotions, fantasies, and political identifications. These were very much on my mind when I wrote my “A Presidential Psychobiographer’s Countertransference to Trump” article and spoke to psychoanalyst Susan Kavaler-Adler, encouraging her to write an article on Trump and Clinton as “bad objects.” She readily agreed, but in the end, focused only on Trump (see her article following this one).

Our Presidential Gerontocracy

American voters are taking a real chance on the good mental and physical health of our president this election year. The odds of suffering Alzheimer’s, dementia, cancer, heart disease, influenza, stroke, or another malady, increase with age. There is also the question of life expectancy. It should be noted that 76 years is the typical life expectancy of a U.S. white male (this is before the advent of COVID-19, which impacts the old, unlike the Spanish Flu, more than the young). Joseph Robinette Biden and Donald John Trump would be 78 and 74 respectively upon inauguration on January 20, 2021, and 82 and 78 at the end of the term. The title, 70 is the New 40 (2012), may sell books, but it is not reality. The presidency is in itself a killing job even without the bullets that took Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy. Eight of our 44 commanders in chief have died in office (a death rate of 18.2% in office) and Reagan survived an assassin’s bullet in 1981 but did not

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die until he was 93 years of age from the Alzheimer’s disease he contracted while president. During his presidency, Reagan suffered hearing auditory loss sufficient to require special hearing aids, as well as underwent operations to remove cancerous colon cancer polyps, skin cancer, and another for an enlarged prostate. He took naps during Cabinet meetings.

Trump was the only president to be inaugurated at age 70. Other than Reagan, the only other leader starting his presidency at 66 years of age or older died in a month. Consequently, there is a 33.3% death rate in office of those elected at this age and one of the three is only three and a half years into his presidency. Fifty-five years and three months is the medium age of U.S. presidents upon election.

Throughout the campaign, I have wondered about the appeal of two angry and mostly grumpy old men—Sanders and Trump. At age 78 Bernie Sanders’ outrage drew enormously enthusiastic crowds (before COVID-19 social distancing) and Donald Trump mostly comes across on the campaign trail as scowling, although less so when fed by the adoration of his followers at his rallies. In trying to understand the roots of the democratic socialist’s appeal, what comes to mind is that he sounds like an Old Testament prophet delivering his Jeremiads against inequality in America and offering a clear path to the promised land. Sander’s popularity among young people leads me to speculate that in our era of comparatively permissive childrearing and political correctness, young voters are drawn to a grandfather-like figure who promises to pay for their college education, student loans, health care, and prescription drugs while promising to throw the money lenders out of the Temple. Although the youth as a group are not put off by his democratic socialism, Trump and Fox News commentators favor him as an opponent since they equate Sanders’ beliefs with communism, making him an easy target, especially in red states and among those who lived through the Cold War.

Did Trump Help Make Biden the Likely Democratic Nominee?

The media loves declaring a candidate to be the frontrunner to be glorified and then made the target for attack. In observing this process, I am always reminded of the king of the mountain game we 10 and 11-year-old kids played on small hills and boulders. When someone knocked the reigning king off the top, the victor was declared to be the new king, prompting others to knock him off the mountain so one of them could assume the royal title.

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An adult political version of this game has been played out with Biden, Harris, Warren, Buttigieg, and most recently Sanders. After not taking Sanders very seriously, despite his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, in late February he was declared the “frontrunner.” I was then reading headlines depicting Sanders as “mighty,” “surging past the competition,” and “rising above the field.” In politics projection, idealization, and denigration are commonplace. So is denial, as witnessed by the Democratic insistence on impeaching Trump, which raised his public approval numbers to a new height (49%).

The pundits were then declaring Joe Biden’s campaign to be dead since he did so poorly in the first three contests and was running out of money—the lifeblood of campaigns. The former Vice President’s rise from the political burial grounds started on the last day of February with a resounding win in South Carolina. African American voters played a crucial role, but there were many other factors at work. Insufficient numbers of young voters turned out for Sanders while older voters and party stalwarts came out in sufficient numbers for the former Senator from Delaware, who had been running for the presidency since 1987, to win. To avert a Sanders nomination and the resulting likely reelection of Trump, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar suspended their campaigns, throwing their support to Biden who was left as the figurative king of the political mountain. I contend that an additional factor is the Democrats, who had enjoyed being politically correct in supporting women (Warren, Harris, Klobuchar), a young gay man, and a democratic socialist, now largely as a group came strongly together behind the candidate President Trump did not want to run against. They had failed to drive Trump out of office through impeachment for attempting to use Ukraine to disgrace Biden, but they could nominate the candidate Trump least wanted to run against.

I hope that you will, whichever candidate ultimately gains your vote, carefully probe your electoral hopes, fears, and defense mechanisms. Susan Kavaler-Adler’s Kleinian companion article on Trump as the ultimate unconscious container for that which we detest in others and perhaps ourselves, should help some think about the psychodynamics at work.

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