Bewildering Friends Who Voted for and Continue to Support Trump

Authors

  • Richard E. Webb and Philip J. Rosenbaum

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1234/fa.v0i83.400

Keywords:

Trump, friends, authorization, Cohen, Name of the Father

Abstract

We explore how we explain to ourselves friends who bewilder us with their allegiance to Donald Trump, an “emperor” without clothes who marches, nonetheless, forward with a record of mendacity, vitriol, and self-absorption that arguably rivals the historical record of any previous President of the United States. To speculate about the role Trump plays in these friends’ psychological landscape, we wonder about their development in relation to self-authorization. We ground our thoughts in Lacan’s idea about the Name of the Father and apply this to our friends subservience to admiring the “paternal” phallus. We illustrate our ideas with a close examination of the reflections of Michael Cohen in his book, Disloyal.

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Published

2021-08-23

How to Cite

Philip J. Rosenbaum, R. E. W. and. (2021). Bewildering Friends Who Voted for and Continue to Support Trump. Free Associations, (83), 49–72. https://doi.org/10.1234/fa.v0i83.400

Issue

No. 83 (2021)

Section

Articles

License

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