John Catanzara, et al. and the defense mechanisms of Trumpist narcissistic injury
Watch Trump supporters very closely in the coming days. The majority will bashfully engage in the banal cowardice of silence or faux-polite general disapproval of yesterday’s insurrectionary riots. However, many others, having been sufficiently conditioned to experience criticism of President Trump as narcissistic injury, will respond through a series of limited and predictable defense mechanisms.
First, and most commonly, they will remain willfully ignorant of the obvious facts of the riot while continuing to make inaccurate factual claims about it that minimize its importance or violence. Despite the entire event being recorded and published by thousands of cameras in real time, they will not seek out any this or any other meaningful critical information on the riot. They will work tirelessly to preserve their self-perception as a “good person” and shelter their ego from the obvious and foreseeable immoral consequences of their political decisions by, essentially, avoiding information to the contrary. Despite this, they will speak with authority on the topic.
John Catanzara, the leader of the Chicago Police Department’s union and remarkably vocal Trump supporter, is an excellent example of this.[1] He stated this morning, inter alia, the following concerning the insurrectionary riot:
“There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property […] There’s no fights. There’s no, obviously, violence in this crowd. They pushed past security and made their way to the Senate chamber. Did they destroy anything when they were there? No.”
Literally every single one of these claims are false and anyone even remotely interested in ascertaining the truth of the matter would know that in seconds. Yesterday’s Trumpist rioters — many armed with loaded firearms and in body armor — savagely beat law enforcement officers, planted pipe bombs, and ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to interrupt the functioning of the lawful government of the United States. As stated above, all of this information is easily ascertainable to anyone with an internet connection, working fingers, and the strength to commit a few keystrokes to obtaining information discomforting to themselves. I am confident that Mr. Catanzara did not, and will not, muster that strength, as it would expose him to information threatening to a core pillar of his personal identity. This did not stop him from commenting on what the riots were and were not with self-confident authority.
Second, a smaller number will engage in Trump’s favorite and most obvious deflection tactic — “whataboutism.” Sufficiently conditioned people will shirk from the threatened narcissistic injury of personal blame or accountability for as long as they can recriminate against someone —often literally anyone — else who they consider blameworthy on any topic, related or not related. “Whataboutism” practitioners have essentially decided that so long as the world remains morally imperfect in any dimension, their own obvious shortcomings cannot be judged. For Trumpists, there is a laundry list of TRUE villains who must be addressed and disposed of in their entirety before any self-critical examination is warranted. This list is familiar: (a) “the media;” (b) “the left;” (c) “communists;” (d) “black lives matter;” (e) institutions of higher learning; (f) the government that Trump himself runs; (g) RINOs; etc.
Here again, Mr. Catanzara is instructive. In his interview today he, without apparent prompting, stated that:
“[The Trump insurrectionist riot was …] Very different than what happened all across this country all summer long in Democratic-ran cities and nobody had a problem with that. They were all blaming the police and the police’s response to the violence, looting and criminal behavior.”
This is Mr. Catanzara’s diving head first into the shallowest of “whataboutism” waters as a coping mechanism. First, his favorable comparison of the Trumpist insurrectionary riot as “very different” than previous riots is simply not relevant to its blameworthiness. Any sane person would be able to state that both instances of riots are wrong or, alternatively, their relative blameworthiness are not directly interrelated to, or contingent upon, one another. A criminal court does not let the second defendant go free because the first defendant committed a worse crime. Second, it is obviously not the case that “nobody had a problem with [previous rioting]” — as millions and millions of Americans plainly did express their legitimate “problem” with those riots. However, to Catanzara, it feels like no one cared, or didn’t care enough, or didn’t apologize, or whatever — so put another tick in the “unforgivable grievances” column. Fundamentally, like many Trumpists, Catanzara’s tacit position is that until this and all the other grievances he holds are resolved, the Trumpist insurrection — a literal violent attempt to interrupt the United States’ government from its lawful operation— is simply not yet ripe for severe moral judgment. Get your priorities straight, people!
Lastly, a minority will simply buy-in to facially implausible and self-serving conspiracy theories instead of seeing their Nation’s Capitol being ransacked in front of them live on television. These are the true believers who have so enmeshed Trump and his conspiratorial politics into their identity, that they will simply reject that which is obvious to their senses and, instead, recite conclusions that are soothing to their ego. They will seek out and share social media content that asserts that the riots were conducted by antifa (or communists, or the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers) merely impersonating Trump supporters. They will watch Fox News, OANN, and NewsMax anchors irresponsible speculate that outside infiltrators “could” have been involved and assume they did until told otherwise (they will not be told otherwise, see above). The most extreme will simply accept that God, Q, or some other fantastical leader have divinely directed the insurrectionary riot, so it was an inevitable and necessary part of “the plan” and, accordingly, not an appropriate subject for moral blame. After all, Q works in mysterious ways and it’s not for us to judge him.
These men and women will never stop to critically examine any of this “evidence” nor its tortured route to these insane conclusions because, subconsciously, they have already let Trump build a bunker around their head brick by brick and from within these wild conspiracies are actually more coherent and comforting to them than the vulgar complications of the objective world.
Unfortunately, John Catanzara cannot yet get us to this stage of delusion. To do that, we have to turn to the truly elite Trump adherents and apologists who enable and engage in this insanity. Consider:
(a) Trumpist celebrities, like Kevin Sorbo, who, in the space of less than three hours cheered as his long desired Trumpist revolution against the government had arrived but, by the time insurrectionary violence got bad, had decided it was actually antifa impersonators.[2]
(b) Trumpist lawmakers, like Rep. Matt Gaertz, who, mere hours after Trumpist rioter had been cleared from the chambers he was speaking in, cited a false and since retracted Washington Times article and suggested members of antifa had secretly infiltrated otherwise peaceful Trump supporters to cause chaos and violence.[3]
(c) Trumpist pseudo-intellectuals, like Scott Adams, who while the riot was still in process, stated that it was an “awesome protest” and, with the characteristic ambivalence of insincere controversy-mongering shit-stains, compared the insurrectionist riot to Colin Kapernick and mused while smirking that the whole ordeal was really the fault of the several states for failing to conduct sufficiently “transparent elections.”[4]
This Trumpist cancer is metastasizing in front of you live right now. Keep an eye out. Once you get the archetypes, the specific instantiations are easy to spot.
[1] https://t.co/XG1pMybYdA?amp=1
[2] https://twitter.com/DavidAGoodman/status/1347245348079562753?s=20
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/07/antifa-capitol-gaetz-trump-riot/
[4] https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1346972109390548992?s=20
