I rode into town this morning to do some chores, and as I turned the corner to Main Street, one of Donald Trump’s “Stop The Steal,” caravans came honking around the corner.

There were about 30 vehicles, most of the big trucks and SUV’s, almost all with flapping and waving and huge American flags and white-on-blue flags that said “Trump For President,” and”Stop The Steal.”

Since we couldn’t move right away, I look closely at the faces in the trucks. Everyone was white, and about 90 percent of the driver’s young white men. I didn’t see any middle-aged or older whites.

Everyone looked angry and glowered at me as if to warn me to smile or honk the bank.

They were a part of the demonstrations of Trump supporters all across the country seeking to stop the election of Joe Biden.

They are convinced that the election was stolen, and nothing anybody says – judges, secretaries of state, mayors and governors, vote counters and voting officials – can convince them otherwise.

I sat in the car as these big trucks roared by, honking and raising fists – the sound of the flags flapping was intense – I wondered how it came to be that these people trust Donald Trump so completely but don’t trust anyone else at all.

How did they become this estranged and detached from half the country and almost all government and representatives?

As of this writing, there is absolutely no evidence that any voting fraud occurred in this election, but no amount of truth and reality seems to matter.

I guess that is the scary part for me, that these men in trucks don’t seem to know the election is pretty much over. Donald Trump is too much of a mess in my eyes to take the country down, but he is leaving many troubled people behind.

He is a carrier of outrage, grievance, and fury. He is a true pandemic all on his own.

My understanding of patriotism and citizenship is being upended.

Piece by piece, I’ve been working to understand what Trumpism is and how it has happened. I’ve focused particularly on the almost hypnotized followers of the President, lemmings eager and willing to drive right off the cliff.

It’s that just before I left the house and encountered the  caravan; I was reading a piece by author and social scientists Gail Sheehy (Passage) titled “Trump’s Trust Deficit Is The Core Problem.”

The essay was included in the newly updated book The  Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump, a collection of the diagnoses of Donald Trump by 37 distinguished psychiatrists and mental health professionals, many focusing on whether or not the President is fit for office or should be considered dangerous.

I did have this epiphany sitting in the car watching the caravan.

The boys looked very serious, and they loved honking those horns. It was an odd thing to see in my rural county where, according to the voting tabs, almost every single resident voted for Donald Trump.

Were they protesting me, I wondered, smiling?

I think I know why they don’t trust anyone but Trump. It might simply be because he doesn’t trust anyone but Trump.

Sheehy has been studying and writing about Trump for several years, and she has focused on his inability to trust anyone – his advisers, his aides, his family, Republicans, Democrats, allies.

The only people he seems to trust are our adversaries, and I think Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with that.

All of Trump’s biographers have presented his worldview as suffused with a sense of danger and his need to project total toughness.  His father emphasized the need for him to be a “killer” instead of a “loser.”

Is Trump still needing to please daddy, maybe? Only the approval of the tough guy’s matters. Biden made him a loser, and he doesn’t seem fascistic to me as much as he seems broken, even shattered. He is looking for a way to exit as a “killer,” not a “loser.”

The fundamental bedrock of human development, writes Sheehy, is the formation of a capacity to trust, absorbed by children between birth and eighteen months.

Donald Trump has often boasted of his total lack of trust. “People are too trusting, I’m a very untrusting guy” (1990.) “Hire the best people and don’t trust them” (2007). “The world is a vicious and brutal place. Even your friends are out to get you: they want your job, your money, your wife.”

Today, says Sheehy, Trump lives mostly alone in the White House, often without a wife or any friends in whom to trust and confide. He never really confides in anyone, she observed, because that would be admitting to vulnerability, something Trump cannot do and has never done.

Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, White House Chief Of Staff and Defense Secretary, said on the Fox Business Channel  in February of 2017 that “the coin of the realm for any president is trust – trust of the American people in the credibility of the President.”

Trump seems to trust no one. He encourages mistrust of Republican rivals, alienated most of the conservative political movement, ignored and insulted Democratic congressional leaders, calling them liars, clowns, stupid and incompetent, labeling Barack Obama as “sick” and Hillary Clinton as “the devil.”

He has insulted many powerful and respected women in the most vulgar and insulting terms and labeled journalists as “the enemy of the people.”

It’s also noteworthy to me that he is incapable of accepting responsibility for almost anything he has or hasn’t done, a trait many of his followers have also picked up; the election has to have been stolen; it couldn’t possibly be the will of the people.

Patriots usually defend the will of the people, but Trumpism doesn’t trust the people’s will at all. If they don’t like it, they assume it must be corrupt.

Beyond the people he mistrusts, Trump has also undermined trust in the institutions he commands, trashing the State Department, the FBI, the Intelligence Community, the CDC, even members of the federal judiciary who thwart him.

He’s even sowed mistrust for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and his own Supreme Court appointees when they rule in ways he doesn’t like.

He mistrusts NATO, many of our oldest allies, and is utterly contemptuous of the United Nations and any institution that supports climate change. He even mistrusts Solar Windmills, suggesting they cause cancer.

He also insists that his “allies” and spokespersons defend his false sense of reality as normal and accurate. He demands that the rest of society – and every one of his followers – accept his delusions and lies despite the lack of credible evidence.

This leads to what Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent professor of psychiatry at Yale University and Columbia University, describes as Trump’s “extreme manipulation of reality.”

Lifton calls this “malignant normality” – the gradual acceptance by a public inundated and overwhelmed by toxic untruths until the untruths pass for normal and are accepted as truth.

Looked at another way (by me), to be an enthusiastic supporter of Donald  Trump, you must distrust the people and institutions who operate our government and shape our civic life.

There is simply no way to be a Trump supporter if you don’t believe that Joe Biden stole the election, that he is a socialist, that Kamala Harris is a Communist, and that their election will mean the loss of many, if not most, of your personal freedoms.

Viewed that way, and through Trump’s own perspective, why would they trust anyone but him? He is protecting them from a hostile world.

Sheehy cites Dr. James F. Gilligan, a psychiatrist, and author who has studied the motivations behind violent behavior over his twenty-five years of work in American prisons.

“If we psychiatrists who have experience in assessing dangerousness, if we give passive permission to our president to proceed in his delusions, we are sharing our  responsibility.”

This is the same conclusion many journalists reached in this final year of Trump’s presidency. But not before those delusions and lies went unchecked and have been absorbed into the neural systems of a lot of needy, fearful, or angry people.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley believes that President Trump represents a very different subculture from any commander in chief. “He represents the New York building business – where you don’t let your right hand know what your left hand is doing,” says Brinkley.

“In Trump’s world, he must win at all costs. It’s not about character or public service or looking out for your band of brothers.”

Trump is unique in our political history.

His lies are his truth and the truth of many of his supporters. He states what he wishes to be true. If his statement is proven false, he is neither bothered nor embarrassed.

Instead, he predicts that his truth will catch up to his critics – the “fake news” – claims are true.

“I’m a very instinctual person,” he says, “but my instinct turns out to be right.”

Trump’s narcissism is perhaps the most frightening thing about him.

“Narcissistic people like Trump want more than anything to love themselves, but desperately want others to love them too, wrote chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University, Dan. P. McAdams, in an issue of the Atlantic.

“The fundamental goal in life for the narcissist, ” wrote McAdams, “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see.”

What we see now from Donald Trump is precisely what the psychiatrists have been saying and seeing and predicting all along.

This is what happens when he fails to win the glorification he promised to his very loyal followers, his political lovers, in a way? He can’t bear to look failed or defeated in front of them. He denies reality, convinced he can somehow change it, as he has always done.

Behind the grandiose behavior of every narcissist lies the deep pit of very fragile self-esteem, according to the experts. Deep down the person, he trusts least of all is himself.

As a child, Trump was always proving to his father that he was a “killer.” It’s hard to look at his hopeless standoff now and not wonder if he isn’t still doing the same thing. Maybe that’s the key to explaining not only him but his followers as well.

To me, a committed Freudian and the beneficiary of 30 years of therapy, this makes a lot of sense. In his own mind, he can never be tough enough.

One of Freudian therapy’s big ideas is the idea of “transference,” the redirection to a substitute, often a therapist or authority figure, of emotions that were originally felt in childhood but carried onto adult life.

One often-cited example of transference is when you observe your father’s characteristics in a new or different boss. You attribute fatherly feelings to this new boss, and they can be good or bad feelings.

Politics doesn’t explain all those men in big trucks riding around the country waving giant flags at everybody, even those who side with them.

This is malignant narcissism, not politics, and there is a visible transfer of emotions between Trump and the men in those trucks. You can see it in those rallies and their faces. Trump does not see himself as a servant of the people; he sees everyone, supporters or not, as his servants; they exist to serve him.

He thinks the election was stolen. They think the election was stolen. He thinks the pandemic is a Democratic conspiracy. They think the pandemic is false and exaggerated. He doesn’t wear a mask.

Trump and his followers exist outside of the realm of politics; they can’t be understood by conventional experience with politicians.

I have the feeling that social media – the digital environment that powerfully connects people to others, even when distance, has been a seminal factor in forging this kind of unprecedented bond.

President-elect Biden sees Trump as an aberration, the reflection, and the result of a difficult time.

I am no shrink, historian, or seer, but that feels right to me. Biden has a good long view of things.

Trump can and will do a lot of damage as he moves off the big stage, but what can be done can also be undone. For me, the challenge is to grasp what happened.

Trump has often been hateful, but I can’t bring myself to hate him. In a way, he is really no different than the homeless man screaming for attention in a subway station.

Very few people appear strong enough to handle social media’s power and its effect on our emotions, moods, and values. I’ve sure struggled with it, and I consider myself pretty strong-willed.

He thinks the election was stolen. They think the election was stolen.  He won’t wear a mask. They don’t wear masks He thinks the pandemic is a Democratic conspiracy. They think it was a political conspiracy. . He thinks the results of the election will be overturned. They think the results of the election will be overturned. It is almost like lovers – neither can see, hear, or listen to anyone but the other. And on and on. They transfer their emotions onto the other.

It’s a powerful experience for me to pore through these trained psychiatrists and social scientists’ research. They saw what he was like, none of the pundits and politicians did.

They know things I don’t know; it is more important than ever to listen to them and learn from them.