Salon writer Amanda Marcotte laid out the psychology behind why Trump does what he does and why his MAGA base eats it up.
Marcotte joined ‘Daily Blast’ host Greg Sargent on Friday’s episode to examine what makes MAGA and Trump click, and it appears to be insecurity.
“So much of the MAGA movement really is driven by this jealousy that they can’t admit to themselves,” said Marcotte. “…I think you see that come up again and again with these fascist movements, right? They are full of mediocre people who are burning with resentment and grievance toward people that they call ‘the elites,’ who are often just people that are more excellent than they are, who are better at stuff than they are. They hate them and they just want to punish them.”
READ MORE: America could have avoided Trump’s reign of terror with one simple task
Marcotte cited recent news of FBI director Kash Patel hooking FBI agents up to polygraphs and was asking them “if they were making fun of him behind his back.”
“I think for the kinds of folks that listen to [‘Daily Blast’] that level of obsession is hard to wrap their minds around—but it really is obviously a huge part of the MAGA movement,” Marcotte said.
Trump reflects every inch of that bitterness as noted in a recent celebrity take-down by ‘The View’ host Joy Behar, who railed Trump’s recent accusations of “treason” against former President Barack Obama.
“So the thing about him is that he’s so jealous of Obama, because Obama is everything that he is not: trim, handsome, happily married, and can sing Al Green’s song “Let’s Stay Together” better than Al Green,” Behar said on ‘the View’ this week. “And Trump cannot stand that. It’s driving him crazy. Jealousy is not a … Green is not a good color.”
Read more: Trump gives big promotion to ‘dangerous’ official who said ‘white men must be in charge’
“This is where the cultural insecurities that drive the [MAGA] movement blend well with Trump’s actual personality disorders,” said Marcotte. “He’s a narcissist. He’s obsessed with the idea that he needs to be in people’s heads. But the problem is, he sucks. He’s not interesting. He’s not smart. He’s not anything. He’s just a mean, stupid, mediocre narcissist. So, the only way he can get what he wants—to be in our heads all the time— … is to just be extremely awful and annoying.”
“But getting attention from people by smacking them in the face over and over—it gets attention, but it doesn’t get the attention that he wants, which is admiration,” Marcotte added. “And so he’s just in this constant hamster wheel of trying to get people to admire him when all he can ever do is [insult]. … And the admiration he gets from his base is not enough because those people, in his view, suck too. He’s really in an interesting trap.”
Read and hear the full ‘Daily Blast’ podcast at this link.