Why Trump's Lies Stick
Rationality, Irrationality, and the Power of Storytelling (Vol. 4; Issue 29)
Some months ago, a Pasadena pulmonologist asked me this challenging question:
Why would intelligent people vote for Trump?
In an earlier newsletter, I responded by explaining the concept of dissociation. People unconsciously ignore the serious problems another Trump presidency will bring. Instead, they focus on certain categories like “I appreciate his policies” or “He’ll lower our taxes.” They utilize denial—a form of dissociation—to blind themselves to the broader implications of Trump’s rising to power again.
Just last week, I described how such defensive maneuvers protect us. In the way of a brief review, Sigmund Freud first used the phrase, “defense mechanisms” in his 1894 paper, The Neuro-psychoses of Defense. His daughter Anna Freud (1936) expanded upon the concept, delineating how these maneuvers offer protection. Ergo, some Trump followers simply utilize denial to fall in line.
Today, I address another reason why seemingly smart people might support Trump:
When under stress, we humans unconsciously seek a narrative to explain the disquieting situation.
Duke University social psychologist Dan Ariely (2023) has validated the phenomenon. Stress makes persons vulnerable to attacks on their belief systems. Just like how exposure to prolonged stress weakens immune systems, it also breaks down ego defenses. Stressed persons become receptive to irrational tales they would otherwise dismiss. Professor Ariely, who coins the phrase “tunnel of misbelief,” identifies two additional factors causing persons to believe the unbelievable:
Narratives with “the illusion of explanatory depth” and;
Social reinforcement.
For some years now, we Americans have been unquestionably stressed. As I draft this newsletter, news of Joe Biden quitting the presidential race spreads like wildfire. Hot wars rage in Israel and Ukraine. People worry about inflation (even though prices have not risen excessively). Thousands of immigrants pour into our country from the southern border. Medical bills remain the primary reason for bankruptcies. The list of stressful crises seems endless.
As noted, these stressful situations invite our need for narratives, stories, legends, myths, and tales. The Trump team promotes narratives containing the kind of explanatory depth to which Ariely refers. They include villains and heroes; they are fairly complicated. The villains range from Biden himself, to Harris “covering” for him, to murderous immigrants, and to the “swamp dwellers” in Washington.
My friend and colleague, Daniel Goldin (2019) often writes of the powers of storytelling from a psychoanalytic perspective. He validates the centrality of myths and stories to our psychology. I have also proposed that the unconscious mind is structured like a drama (Karbelnig, 2020). In truth, we are psycho-physiologically attracted to stories and tales.
In the longest nomination acceptance speech in American history, Trump made no specific policy proposals. His talk, instead, consisted of sets of stories intended to soothe. For example, Trump converted the assassination attempt into divine intervention, saying:
I stand before you in this arena only by the grace of almighty God. And watching the reports over the last few days, many people say it was a providential moment.
Trump displays as much religiosity as a monkey wrench. However, he sells some persons, particularly susceptible evangelical Christians, on his newly found spirituality. Trump’s references to the “grace” of the “almighty God” could not be more insincere and hypocritical.
Trump went on to tell the story of his term as president. It was a legend paradoxically mixing grandiosity with victimhood:
We got hit with Covid. We did a great job. Nobody knew what it was. But nobody’s ever seen an economy pre-Covid, and then we handed over a stock market that was substantially higher than just prior to Covid. Coming in, did a great job. Never got credit for that. We got credit for the war and defeating ISIS and so many things. The great economy. The biggest tax cuts ever. The biggest regulation cuts ever. The creation of Space Force, the rebuilding of our military. We did so much. We do so much.
What actually occurred was that Trump made the pandemic worse by delaying a meaningful response. Notice the exaggerations characteristic of his storytelling, like the “biggest” this and “biggest” that. “Did a great job,” he proclaims. No mention of how his tax policies mostly affected the middle class, reduced taxation of the rich, and raised the Federal deficit to unprecedented levels. The Space Force? “Rebuilding” the military? Had it been dismantled before him?
Counseled to promote unity among Americans, Trump veered off script in a way guaranteeing greater divisions. He attempted to seduce vulnerable Americans to believe he will initiate the miraculous. Trump said:
I will end the devastating inflation crisis immediately, bring down interest rates and lower the cost of energy. We will drill, baby, drill.
How will he achieve these financial goals? His promises illustrate magical thinking par excellence. And, what about the empirically validated climate change reversed by his “drill, baby, drill?”
Trump next sowed irrational, arguably racist fear—all part of a seemingly cogent narrative—regarding the immigration problem. It is a real problem, in need of a real solution. But Trump paints these desperate persons in an inaccurate, villainous manner—to say the least. In the past few years, Trump has categorized immigrants as “rapists, "animals," and "not human." Using rhetorical devices reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany, he has also said, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” In his nomination speech, Trump said of the immigrants:
They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums… Has anyone seen “The Silence of the Lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’d love to have you for dinner. That’s insane asylums. They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before.
No evidence exists of thousands of Hannibal Lecters entering our country. Trump’s narrative elicits images of a systematic transfer of inmates of prisons and patients of mental institutions into our country. Completely untrue, but it makes for a frightening tale.
Promising a factually unattainable solution, Trump proclaimed:
I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall, most of which I’ve already built…
In truth, the border, just shy of 2,000 miles, traverses difficult, varied terrains including urban areas, deserts, and vast swaths of uninhabited land. No way exists to close that border. And, closing it won’t solve the immigration problem anyway. The wall Trump built runs 400 miles. “Most of which I’ve already built” comes out to less than 20 percent. Another lie, but all part of the complex story Trump tells of failed government (the villains) and inaccurate, even delusional promises of solutions (the hero).
Despite his advisors urging him to avoid the topic, Trump surprisingly repeated the fantasy that the last election was stolen. He said:
And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat.
As Trump’s own 50 plus failed lawsuits confirmed, the 2020 election was a properly, professionally run contest. Trump returned to the assassination attempt towards the end of his rambling speech, proclaiming that:
The attacker in Pennsylvania wanted to stop our movement, but the truth is, the movement has never been about me. It has always been about you. It’s your movement. It’s the biggest movement in the history of our country by far. It can’t be stopped. It has always been about the hardworking, patriotic citizens of America.
Even for intelligent, well-educated citizens, Trump’s story has both the complexity, and the black-and-white simplicity, needed to comfort stressed-out citizens. He complains of being cheated of the presidency in 2020, of the villains in the White House, and of mentally deranged murderers invading our country. He brags of heroic possibilities for the future offered by the “hardworking, patriotic citizens of America.” It’s not complicated. Don’t bother yourself with policy details (of which, again, there were none). Defer all agency to Trump, repeat and exaggerate the narrative, and you can relax.
Because Americans live in information silos like never before, they will obtain ongoing support for whatever narration offers comfort. If Trump supporters, they’ll read more stories of alien invasion and the heroic, rescuing, God-fearing Trump. As Ariely notes, such social reinforcement strengthens these tales. The triadic social psychological process is consolidated: Stress, compelling narration, and social validation.
Social media not only accelerates beliefs in such unbelievable tales, it aggravates the already-extant polarization. Many complain of missing the capacity to converse, to dialogue. People make proclamations instead of statements. They insist rather than question. In a sense, we Americans have regressed to what Melanie Klein (1946) calls the paranoid-schizoid position, meaning we tend to see the world in shades of black and white. No shades of gray; no color; no complexity.
The other speakers at the convention confirmed Trump’s tale while completely contradicting themselves. J.D. Vance, a reborn Trump supplicant, once called Trump “America’s Hitler.” Nikki Haley described him as “just toxic” and lacking in moral clarity, adding, that “chaos follows him.” Americans witness rationality vanishing as as, one by one, former critics line up to worship Trump.
Finally, and speaking of rationality, consider two data points confirming the disaster posed by another Trump presidency. First, in February 2024, professors from South Carolina’s Coastal Carolina University and the University of Houston surveyed 154 historians and political scientists who were Republican, Democratic, and Independent. These respected scholars ranked Donald Trump as America’s worst president (Edwards, 2024).
Second, Trump endorses the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Authored and sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 promotes right-wing policy proposals intending to radically reshape the United States federal government. The Project reads as a blueprint for autocracy. It promotes a federal abortion ban. It proposes placing control of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under the direct control of the president. Trump has already announced his plans to dismantle the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), eliminating climate change regulations to favor fossil fuel production. Has no one paid attention to the already-present climate crisis? (Karbelnig, 2025).
In fairness, Harris has already begun weaving her own story, highlighting a central plot line of “the prosecutor versus the felon.” It will have the same stress-reducing-narration-followed-by-social-reinforcement pattern. However, this election is not about fictional tales. It’s about an incompetent man who openly seeks dictatorship and promises to usher in the regressive Project 2025.
Donald Trump, narcissistic if not psychopathic, is an impulsive, power-hungry man solely interested in himself. He lacks the competency to address the national and international crises facing Americans today. As a result, we Americans face the most important election in our history. Readers now comprehend that, in addition to denial and dissociation, they may be vulnerable to manipulation by appealing, if wildly untrue, Trump tales. Beware the seduction of a good story. They make for compelling novels; they make for excellent cinema. Trump’s myths, in contrast, represent a lethal danger for the future of American democracy.
Enjoying this newsletter?
And check out my book, Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy, available on Amazon.
References
Ariely, D. (2023). Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things. New York: Harper.
Edwards, L. (2024). Why did republican scholars rank Trump worst president. The Post And Courier, published February 28, 2024. https://www.postandcourier.com/news/scholars-rank-trump-worst-president-presidential-greatness-survey/article_8c775052-d025-11ee-9dad-17697b0ca965.html.
Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. London: Routledge.
Freud, S. (1894). The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense. Standard Edition, 3:41-61.
Goldin, D. (2019). Storylines. Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 14(2), 161–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/24720038.2019.1582233.
Karbelnig, A. M. (2020). The theater of the unconscious mind. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 37(4):273–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000251
Karbelnig, A.M. (2025). Lethal Psychic Blindness. In S. Akhtar and N. Savelle-Rocklin (Eds), Varieties of Human Denial. In production by Karnac Press.
Klein, M. (1946). Notes on some schizoid mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27:99-110.