Donald Trump would like you to think as a plain speaker. But a number of experts think he’s doing something far less honorable. Specifically, he’s engaging in a very common and very insidious form of abuse–gaslighting.
A gaslighter deliberately plays with his or her victim’s mind by twisting information or outright lying–to the point that the victim doubts his or her own memory or sanity. It happens very often in abusive relationships. Indeed, the term comes from “Gas Light,” a 1938 play in which an abusive jerk of a husband manipulates his wife into thinking she’s going insane.
Nicole Hemmer of U. S. News & World Report thinks that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest gaslighting campaigns in recent memory. Hemmer notes that the Donald has proven time and again that he will “lie without batting an eye” to anyone who dares to call him out. But Hemmer also notes that Trump takes it one step further. Whenever journalists catch most politicians in a blatant lie, the politician will usually try to dissemble his way out of trouble. Not the Donald.
“But when they confront Trump with his lies, he doesn’t behave like most people. He doesn’t blush or equivocate or argue. He steamrolls. He bullies. He lies some more. And the journalists don’t know what to do. They brought facts to an ego fight, and found them to be worthless weapons.”
A good example of this came last fall. Last year, Trump claimed that he’d turned down an offer to appear on “Last Week Tonight.”
.@thehill John Oliver had his people call to ask me to be on his very boring and low rated show. I said "NO THANKS" Waste of time & energy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2015
There’s just one problem. According to host John Oliver, no such offer had ever been made.
A couple of points…
1. Yes, we have a boring show.
2. At no point did we invite Donald Trump to appear on it.https://t.co/qjpg9FLb0V— Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight) November 1, 2015
That didn’t stop Trump; he loudly declared in a radio interview that the “Last Week” crew had made “four or five” calls asking him to come on the show–and he’d turned them all down cold. As part of his epic takedown of the Donald, Oliver noted that he knew Trump was lying. However, it was quite another thing to be “on the receiving end of a lie that confident.” The sheer venom of Trump’s pushback led him to check to make sure that “no one had accidentally invited him.”
A more recent example was what happened to Michelle Fields. Despite several eyewitnesses seeing Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski rough Fields up, the Donald claimed Fields made the whole thing up. Lewandowski quickly got in on the act.
@MichelleFields you are totally delusional. I never touched you. As a matter of fact, I have never even met you.
— Corey R. Lewandowski (@CLewandowski_) March 11, 2016
A classic victim-blaming campaign–one which Breitbart News Network aided and abetted by hanging Fields out to dry.
Robin Stern of Yale University has studied gaslighting for years. After watching the Donald’s behavior, she concluded that he’s a gaslighter.
“When you don’t take responsibility for your actions, or deflect responsibility, or try to undermine the credibility of the person asking you about your actions, that’s gaslighting.”
She added that gaslighters almost never take responsibility for their behavior, instead turning it back on the victim or questioner. That fits Trump to a “T.”
According to Stern, there’s no way to beat a gaslighter by taking him or her on directly–it can only “inflame” the gaslighter. The only way to beat a gaslighter is to completely disengage from him or her. This only proves what I have said for the better part of a year–what passes for leadership in the GOP should have grown a pair and pushed Trump out of the race long before now. And now, they may be about to inflict a gaslighter on the nation. There’s only one way to make Trump and the GOP pay for this folly–a 40-state Democratic landslide.
