I rest my case on ‘psychological projection’

Yesterday I wrote a long Facebook post explaining the phenomenon of “psychological projection,” in which a person’s ego defends itself against its own character flaws by first denying they exist and then attributing them to other people. Frequently, this involves shifting the blame for your own mistakes or shortcomings to someone you want to mock, degrade, disparage, diminish, denigrate, ridicule or defame.

Today, ironically, I read the following words in the Morgantown Dominion Post. See if you can guess who the author is writing about:

“(He) is firing up (his party) before the midterms with his signature rallying cries: I, I, I, I! Me, me, me! My, my, my!

“According to a tally by The American Mirror’s Kyle Olson, (his) campaign speech Monday for (a Congressional candidate) referred to himself 92 times in 38 minutes — or an average self-allusion every 24.7 seconds.

“When he wasn’t 'I'-ing, the former narcissist-in-chief was lying.”

Oh, wait…I guess that last paragraph kind of gave it away when the writer called her subject our “former” narcissist-in-chief.

Yes, that’s right, boys and girls. Believe it or not, Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin – who I once believed to be the Anti-Christ – was referring not to faux-president Donald J. Trump, the most deplorable narcissistic liar ever to occupy the Oval Office, but to former president Barack Obama. She projected onto Obama those exact Trumpian traits, calling him a liar and a self-consumed narcissist, among other things…and that was all in the first three paragraphs of her column.

God only knows what the rest of the story said. I had to stop reading so I could alternate between laughing, crying, shouting at my computer monitor, shaking my head and finally composing myself long enough to write this shieldWALL essay. Halfway through, I stopped writing to look up “psychological projection” again in the dictionary and what do you know? This time, I found Michelle Malkin’s photo there.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never liked Michelle Malkin. I was watching her smirk and sneer and spew snarky slander about Democrats and Liberals long before her man Donald Trump oozed down the golden escalator to run for president. [CHALLENGE: Try to say "spew snarky slander" three times fast.]

I’ve always believed she was evil, nasty, chronically mean-spirited and under the egomaniacal delusion that she was the smartest person in the room. By that I mean any room and every room. I'm talking about any room in any time and any place. Narcissism? Seriously? Michelle Malkin ought to know it when she sees it, because it stares back at her every time she looks into a mirror.

Having said all that, I have also come to the conclusion that the air inside Malkin's bubble must be getting pretty thin, preventing the synapses in her brain from firing properly. Either that, or all of her computers, hand-held electronic devices, radios and television sets are broken and she’s been cut off from the daily news for weeks, because while she was writing a column that called Barack Obama a lying narcissist, Donald Trump was flying around to every red state in the country saying things like this:

“A vote for Patrick Morrisey is a vote for me.”

“A vote for Dean Heller is a vote for me.”

“A vote for Ted Cruz is a vote for me.”

“A vote for [insert any Republican name here] is a vote for me.”

Or, as Malkin likes to put it, "I, I, I, me, me, me, my, my, my." If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the lying narcissist with the “me” complex was none other than Trump himself.

According to Everyday Health, the theory of psychological projection was developed by Sigmund Freud, who noticed that his patients would occasionally accuse others of having the same feelings they themselves were demonstrating. (Click here to read more about the condition.) The classic example of Freudian projection is a woman who has been unfaithful to her husband and accuses her husband of cheating on her. 

* Or, as I noted in my Facebook post, someone who represents a political party that wants to deny health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and blames it on the other political party.

* Or encourages his followers to form an angry mob by telling them the other side is an angry mob.

* Or denies that he is the enemy of the people by calling the news media the enemy of the people.

* Or denies conspiring with a foreign government to rig an election while accusing his opponent of conspiring with a foreign government to rig an election.

* Or promises people he will never lie to them while telling an average of 5 or 6 lies every day of his life.

It also applies to a narcissistic liar who ignores the fact that Donald Trump is a narcissistic liar and writes a newspaper column calling Barack Obama a narcissistic liar. As I frequently say, some things are difficult to explain.