Projection may feel good, but does it work?

Before he disappears into well-deserved oblivion, let’s spare a moment for William Barr. Remember him? You probably won’t for long. He’s soon to be Donald Trump’s former Attorney General. 

Within the bunch of obsequious sycophants Trump surrounded himself with, Barr was one of the most obsequious and sycophantish. But then he made a mistake. He briefly allowed reality to intrude on his stream of flattery to his lord and master, and admitted that there was no evidence of any significant fraud in the 2020 Presidential election. He told AP on 1 December:

To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.

“So what?” you might say. “That’s blindingly obvious and Trump’s the thing he most hates, a loser.”

Ah, yes. It’s obvious for all who have eyes to see. But that doesn’t include Trump. Indeed, he’s not prepared to allow others to see the self-evident truth, even for an instant. Barr had to go.

Barr and Trump, before their ways parted

Gone he has. But his contact with reality has proved brief indeed, lasting just under two weeks, before he reverted to full throttle sycophancy. In his resignation letter of 14 December, he told Trump:

Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds.

Now that’s a fascinating statement. Because when it comes to being abusive it’s hard to think of any politician who has outperformed Trump. Take his 7 September 2020 tweet about John Bolton, the man Trump appointed as UN Ambassador and then National Security Adviser before falling out with him catastrophically, as he has with so many of the staff he’s brought on board:

Just heard that Wacko John Bolton was talking of the fact that I discussed “love letters from Kim Jong Un” as though I viewed them as just that. Obviously, was just being sarcastic. Bolton was such a jerk! 

“Wacko” and “jerk” hardly seem to be terms of endearment. Nor do they seem to be the terms of adult political discourse. But at least it’s not as bad as what he said about a man whose election he celebrated two years ago, Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State in Georgia. 

On 26 November, he suggested to reporters that Raffensperger had reached an agreement with the Democrat and voter registration activist, Stacey Abrahams, on “harvesting”. This is where a person completes an absentee ballot and it’s delivered by another. In reality, Abrahams has merely been registering huge numbers of voters – which is both legal and highly democratic.

Trump saw things differently:

You're not allowed to harvest, but I understand the secretary of state, who is really an enemy of the people, the secretary of state, and whether he's Republican or not, this man, what he's done, supposedly he made a deal and you'll have to check this, where she is allowed to harvest but in other areas they're not allowed.

An enemy of the people? That’s far worse than “Wacko” and “jerk”. It invites “people” to take action against their “enemy” – in other words, it’s an incitement to violence.

But this comment takes us into another area too. The reality is that there was no such agreement between Abrahams and Raffensperger. What Trump was doing was sowing the seed of a lie. He said “you’ll have to check this”, but those are weasel words, because the idea is now out there.

Abuse and deceit. They’re Trump’s hallmarks. So what does Barr mean by denouncing “a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds”?

Well, what he’s doing is projecting. He’s accusing his opponents of precisely the offences which his side repeatedly committed. And still is.

Perhaps the most striking of the examples of this projection is the most recent campaign being run by Trump and his supporters. The slogan is “Stop the Steal”. And it’s a slogan I wholly support: it’s nothing short of unconscionable to allow a defeated candidate to try to steal an election that he didn’t in reality win.

Which is exactly what Trump has been trying to do.

I can imagine that projecting in this way must give the Trumpians a sense of comfort. The problem is that it hasn’t really worked, has it? Trump has thrown abuse and lies around for four years, but it hasn’t delivered the election he wanted to win. It has, in fact, left him as what he most hates to be, a loser. And why was that?

The problem is that those lies and that abuse worked, but only with a minority of the electorate. A worryingly large minority, but still only a minority. However good it may have made Trump feel, it failed in its main objective, which was to sweep him back into office. Far too many people just saw him as untrustworthy and brutal.

What he has done, in fact, is take an approach that appealed only to the people who were already his convinced supporters. And that’s part of a wider and ineffective strategy, of preaching to the choir. That’s an approach not limited to Trump – it’s happening in Britain too, with Boris Johnson and the Brexiter movement.

Nor is it limited to the right. On the left, Britain saw the same delusion being pursued by the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. Trump, Johnson, Corbyn. They couldn’t see the need to reach out beyond their base.

But that’s something I’m going to look at in my next post.