Throughout the Trump campaign, there was a peculiar pattern to Donald Trump's knee-jerk responses and his vile slander of opponents: most of his accusations against others can be interpreted as reflections of himself. His derisive name-calling with puerile attributes include "lying Ted" and "crooked Hillary". He often calls his critics "weak", "fake" and "phony". Looking at how his first term as president has started, most of those attributes which he assigns to others are in fact applicable to himself. Perhaps the most telling moment was when Hillary Clinton, in one of the televised presidential debates, accused Donald Trump outright of being Putin's puppet. Donald Trump interrupted by responding "No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet". This is a response at the intellectual level of a five-year-old, but let's not dwell on that. Hillary Clinton was certainly not a puppet of Putin, nor of anyone else. Donald Trump, however, has showed time and time again that he refuses to say anything even remotely negative about Putin, for unknown and inexplicable reasons. It's getting difficult to ignore that elephant in the room, and we see a slow but constant trickle of revelations around his alleged ties to Russia.
During his campaign, Donald Trump accused Hillary Clinton of being mentally unfit for the presidency. Now we see him struggling to even pretend he has what it takes for the job. Republicans built a "psychological profile" of Hillary during the campaign, but the candidate who would really have needed that profiling was Donald Trump.
There are many more examples of this, too numerous to list. Trump's pattern of projection is pervasive and consistent, so much so that it seems like a personality trait. Does this behavior extend to more than personal insults during debates? Shortly after the Russian interference with the election process started, but before it became publicly known, Trump started shouting about how the election was rigged in Hillary's favor. Could that have been an inadvertent admission that he knew it was actually being rigged in his favor?
The incumbent 45th President of the United States is lying more often than he tells the truth. We already knew that, and whenever he says "believe me" or "it's true", experience tells us that his claims are almost certain to be false. However, there could be a lesson here. When Donald Trump accuses someone else of something, we should suspect that those very accusations could apply to himself. It might be suppressed self-criticism, even a subconscious admission of guilt, or it might just be that he lacks enough imagination to make up an accusation from scratch. In any case, whenever he accuses someone of something, we should perhaps consider using the retort of an annoying child:
"I know you are, but what am I?"
