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| Editorial cartoon created by Stuart K. Hayashi, finished on September 8, 2018. |
Folie à plusieurs is a “shared madness of several” — a whole group of people sharing in the same psychosis. President Donald J. Trump doesn’t have ideological convictions about immigration, but he craves narcissistic supply — attention and especially adulation. There are many old, desperate people who share in — and mutually reinforce — one another’s belief that “George Soros” is “importing the Third World” to “replace us.”
As with many delusions, the delusions of this crowd began with some small grains of truth. Some destitute immigrants do resort to violent crime, and our police should address that. Soros does donate millions of dollars to many activist groups whose tactics and ideological goals I consider unethical. And the Clintons have engaged in unsavory machinations. But the Trump fan base has embellished these ideas to the point where they’re unrecognizable: the Clintons are defamed as running a ring of child molesters, and Soros is caricatured as a James Bond supervillain. Caution about interacting with destitute immigrants has been replaced with a witch hunt against them.
When someone fervently believes such a delusion and stakes his self-concept and identity upon it, the expression of doubt in that delusion from others can be especially upsetting. Hence, the people bedeviled by their own paranoia about immigrants have come to resent smug, upper-crust intellectual-types denying the veracity of their paranoia. This is why they found relief in Donald Trump’s political rhetoric as he ran for President in 2015 and 2016. Finally — FINALLY! — a famous and relatively prominent person came along and assured them that their morbid obsessions were necessary and proper. This was the validation that such fearful people had long sought. In turn, they reciprocate Trump’s reinforcement of their paranoid delusions by reinforcing Trump’s narcissism. They do so by becoming his political sycophants, cheering him on and denying his guilt and pathology as these problems only grow more publicly apparent.
On April 11, 2019, I added the editorial cartoon of Trump and the witch hunt he participates in.
