I think it would help to better understand the meaning of Trump’s wild accusations against reasonable politicians and officials.

Let’s take the example of Trump’s rant against former Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch of last week:

Yovanovitch impeachment testimony gives burst of momentum to Democrats

The Hill com, November 14, 2019

Democrats’ impeachment inquiry received a boost of momentum from the Friday testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, who faced public attacks by President Trump as she detailed in personal terms how a shadowy smear campaign successfully led to her removal as the top U.S. diplomat to Ukraine.

In a moment that would’ve been perfect for television split screens, Yovanovitch was in the midst of describing the “terrible” feeling of learning she was being abruptly recalled from Kyiv when Trump issued a tweet attacking her diplomatic record, describing her as having a reverse-Midas touch when it came to foreign policy.

“Honestly, after 33 years of  service to our country — it was terrible, it was not the way I wanted my career to end,” Yovanovitch testified during the second public impeachment inquiry, shaking her head and closing her eyes as she recalled the moment.

The president’s jab that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad” not only added to the sympathy that a career foreign officer was being bullied by the most powerful leader of the free world, but it also sparked claims among Democrats that Trump was seeking to intimidate the witness…

I will try to understand the meaning of this accusation by making a transfer from the understanding of Hitler’s anti-semitism by the founder of the Psychogenic Theory of History, Lloyd DeMause[1]:

When Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907 at the age of eighteen, he reported in Mein Kampf, he haunted the prostitutes’ district, fuming at the “Jews and foreigners” who directed the “revolting vice traffic” which “defiled our inexperienced young blond girls” and injected “poison” into the bloodstream of Germany.

Months before this blood poison delusion was formed, Hitler had the only romantic infatuation of his youth, with a young girl, Stefanie. Hitler imagined that Stefanie was in love with him (although in reality she had never met him) and thought he could communicate with her via mental telepathy. He was so afraid of approaching her that he made plans to kidnap her and then murder her and commit suicide in order to join with her in death.

Hitler’s childhood had been so abusive – his father regularly beat him “with a hippopotamus whip,” once enduring 230 blows of his father’s cane and another time nearly killed by his father’s whipping that he was full of rage toward the world. When he grew up, his sexual feelings were so mixed up with his revenge fantasies that he believed his sperm was poisonous and might enter the woman’s bloodstream during sexual intercourse and poison her.

Hitler’s rage against “Jewish blood-poisoners” was, therefore, a projection of his own fears that he might become a blood-poisoner. Faced with the temptation of the more permissive sexuality of Vienna, he wanted to have sex with women, but was afraid his sperm would poison their blood. He then projected his own sexual desires into Jews– “The black-haired Jewboy lies in wait for hours, satanic joy in his face, for the unsuspecting girl and ended up accusing Jews of being “world blood-poisoners” who “introduced foreign blood into our people’s body.

As is usually the case with delusional systems, Hitler’s projection of his fears of his own poisonous sexuality into Jews and foreigners helped him avoid a psychotic breakdown and allowed him to function during his later life. He admitted this quite specifically in Mein Kampf, saying that when he “recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted, shameless, and calculating director of this revolting traffic in the scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back . . . the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.”⁷ From that moment on, Hitler became a professional anti-Semite, ordering Nazi doctors to find out how Jewish blood differed from Aryan blood, having his own blood regularly sucked by leeches to try to get rid of its “poison, giving speeches full of metaphors of blood poisoning and of Jews sucking people’s blood out and, eventually, ordering the extermination of all “world blood-poisoners” in the worst genocide and the most destructive war ever experienced by mankind.

The success of Hitler’s ability to use anti-Semitism to save his sanity was dependent, of course, upon there being millions of followers who shared his fantasies about poisonous enemies infecting the body of Europe. Much of Europe at that time shared Hitler’s experience of a severely abusive childhood,⁹ and many shared his fantasy that the ills of the modern world were caused by the poisonous nature of Jews. When he used metaphors of blood in his speeches, saying the world was a constant warfare of one people against another, where “one creature drinks the blood of another,” and that Jews were spiders that “sucked the people’s blood out,” he was cheered on by millions who shared his fantasies.

Now if Hitler’s projected rage against “Jewish blood-poisoners” was a projection of his own fears that he might become a blood-poisoner, what was the rage of Trump against former Ambassador Yanukowitch?

Could the president’s jab that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad”, be a projection of his own fears that everywhere he went turned bad for the outer world, be it as business man, politician or as abuser of women etc.?

[1] Lloyd DeMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, 2002, chapter 4: Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social Violence