Performing as a Firefighter: Reconstruction of Donald Trump's Speech on the Storming of the Capitol Through Depth Hermeneutics

Abstract

TRUMP's speech of January 2021, by which he moved his supporters to storm the Capitol, caused wide-spread concern. However, the psychological mechanisms that enabled him to mobilize the audience in the service of his agenda are not sufficiently understood. Employing depth hermeneutics, a psychoanalytic method based on examining the effects of the speech on a group of researchers, I reconstruct TRUMP's address to reveal tensions between its manifest and latent meanings and account for its effects. I argue that his systematic use of falsehoods results in a reversal of the everyday relationship between manifest and latent meaning: In everyday life, socially acceptable wishes and fantasies are given voice and reprehensible ones are relegated to a latent level. TRUMP, conversely, relies on falsehoods to fire up his supporters by evoking socially objectionable concepts of life and to make fact- and reason-based objections to his claims unconscious. The fears and aggression fueled by the dramatization of the current political situation affect particularly, though not exclusively, those listeners who, due to traumas experienced in childhood, are susceptible to TRUMP's coping strategy of authoritarian conformity.

Keywords

• Donald J. Trump
• Sigmund Freud
• psychoanalysis
• Frankfurt School
• Alfred Lorenzer
• depth hermeneutics