The key to unpacking Donald Trump’s most dangerous tweet yet—the threat to launch nuclear war against North Korea if “Little Rocket Man” continues to think and speak in ways Trump doesn’t like—is to understand that virtually everything he says in attacking others is psychological displacement. Anything negative that he finds in himself (and that covers a vast array), he attributes to others.
Of course his appropriation of “fake news” to refer to fact-based news is intended to deflect attention from all the fact-free news on which he relies and that he constantly repeats and promotes.
If you want to have an accurate assessment of what Mr. Trump is (and what, at some level, he knows he is) just look at what he says about others and apply it to him.
All the juvenile names he calls others in fact apply to him:
“Low-energy Jeb” means “Low-energy Donald.” (He is obviously not up to carrying out the duties of the presidency.)
“Crazy Bernie” means “Crazy Donald.” (Has there ever been a crazier person in the office of president?)
“Goofy Elizabeth Warren” means “Goofy Donald Trump.” (Anyone who has looked at Mr. Trump during one of his rallies cannot doubt his extreme goofiness.)
And then there are the most memorable of Trump’s nasty names, which are also the ones that most obviously apply to him:
“Lyin’ Ted” really means “Lyin’ Donald.” (No name better describes the man who lies on a daily, often hourly—or minute-to-minute—basis.)
And “Crooked Hillary”? Trump has been crooked throughout his career: refusing to fulfill contracts; paying workers and contractors a small fraction of what he owes them; conning people with his “university”; apparently dealing with organized crime-related and Russian money-laundering operations; refusing to release his income taxes; refusing to divest himself from his business interests when he became president; using the presidency to make much more money for himself and his family members. “Crooked Donald.”
But what about “Little Marco”? Trump is tall, so how could this name apply to him? The answer is clear: What he is afraid is “little” about him is not his height. His greatest insecurity, by far, is about a specific part of his anatomy being “little.” Sean Spicer unintentionally explained Trump when he said, in a classic Freudian slip, just after the inauguration: “It’s just unbelievably frustrating when you’re continuously told it’s not big enough.”
Donald Trump with all of with his blatant misogyny, is a classic example of the psychological disorder that has been the source of most of the horrors in human history. I have named it “Acute Masculine Security Disorder” (AMID).
Calling Kim Jung-un “Little Rocket Man” is another Trump psychological displacement. It is, quite obviously, a reflection of his anxiety that his “rocket” is little.
Such masculine insecurity has caused many wars throughout history. We must hope and pray that Trump’s insecurity about his “rocket” does not lead to an unthinkable nuclear war.