“‘There is typically a developmental arrest caused by early trauma or abandonment,’ Lee says. ‘As adults, they still act like children in the playground; convinced that might makes right, they often can’t stop bullying others.’ “
This article by Joshua Kendall has been published in Mother Jones. It begins:
“On the afternoon of February 1, 2016, as Iowa voters prepared for that evening’s caucuses, Bandy Lee sat by the bedside of her mother, who was terminally ill with cancer. An assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Yale, Lee had been too preoccupied with her mother’s condition to pay attention to the nascent presidential race, so she was taken aback when she saw footage of a Donald Trump rally airing on the hospital room’s small TV. What shocked her was the way Trump interacted with the crowd. ‘He said something about how his supporters should knock the crap out of hecklers,’ she recalls, ‘and that if they did, he would pay their legal bills.’
His belligerent behavior meant more to Lee than it might to a casual viewer. As part of her clinical work in prison settings, she had evaluated and treated hundreds of violent offenders, including leaders of prison gangs. A native New Yorker, she had assumed that Trump ‘was just a shady businessman,’ Lee told me, but ‘I suddenly realized that he had a lot in common’ with those patients. ‘Trump was engaging in the predatory manipulation of his vulnerable followers.’ In some cases, gang leaders might ‘ask their members to engage in violence and then issue bogus promises of protection. Like Trump, these leaders also often project extreme self-confidence, and that appeals to their followers, who tend to feel a deep emotional need for protection, connection, and identity.’ …”
You can read more from here.
