I won’t bury the lede. Someone needs to shove a mic in Karoline Leavitt’s face, or Donald Trump’s face (for the matter), and ask:
“Is Donald Trump the US Constitution?”
This sounds like a d*****s question, doesn’t it? Because of course he’s not. So why in the hell do I insist that someone ask it? Because right now, Donald Trump and his mouthpieces are using a tactic called forced-teaming to gaslight the public at scale. They’re trying to do the ol’ Nazi razzle-dazzle where, if you repeat the lie often enough, it’ll stick.
Well, not the f^ck if I have something to say about it.
Forced-Teaming Defined
Here’s Gavin de Becker’s definition of forced teaming, from a handout titled “The 7 Things Predators Do to Turn People Into Prey.” This handout comes from his larger work, The Gift of Fear. In it, Gavin de Becker defines forced-teaming as follows:
Forced teaming is a way to establish premature trust because a were-all- in-the same-boat attitude is hard to rebuff without feeling rude. The detectable signal of forced teaming is the projection of a shared purpose or experience where none exists. “How are we going to handle this?”, etc.
Why is forced-teaming relevant from a national perspective?
First, Donald Trump isn’t a so much president as he is a mobster. Indeed, Trump is a felonious Russian asset who has been part of a transnational crime syndicate for decades, and he’s hacking up this country for parts in an attempt to destroy our democracy— with billionaire backers and venture vultures waiting to carve us up like a gd turkey.
Donald Trump is violating the Constitution.
One of the ways he and his minions are trying to manipulate you is by blurring the line between Donald Trump and the Constitution itself.
A Depraved Example of Forced Teaming
Recently, Donald Trump broke the law by deploying the National Guard as a stunt to intimidate the people of the United States, to make us feel like we are under occupation. Courts all across the country, including judges Trump himself appointed, have told him this is patently illegal.
Donald Trump ignored that court order, and a Guard member, Sarah Beckstrom (just 20 years old), died after a man shot her and another National Guard member. Worse still, intelligence resources that should have gone to protecting the Guard (who are sitting ducks) have been poured into abducting our neighbors— not for anything they have done but because the president is a vile racist who needs a vulnerable group to vilify as he robs the country with his friends.
But let’s return to the federal fuckery: Nearly half of the FBI and other intelligence agencies have been diverted to terrorizing our neighbors— which means they’re not doing key jobs. One of those jobs is vetting asylum seekers, and because the feds were busy doing fascism, no one was there to ask a vital question:
“Hey, this guy applying for asylum might be traumatized. Our own CIA trained him as a ‘child soldier,’ at seventeen. We destroyed his country and then abandoned our Afghan allies. Now we’ve got ICE abducting those same allies who helped the US military survive in that war we waged in Afghanistan. That’s a lot of trauma for anyone to go through. When we process this application, we need to make sure this dude gets counseling and support. (Note: We might also want to impeach our oath-breaking POTUS.)”
But, as I said, they were busy: abducting our neighbors, trafficking them to third countries, holding them without criminal charges or a right to trial, torturing them, and recreating a trans-Altlantic slave trade in the process. This isn’t just corruption. This isn’t politics. It’s an organized crime syndicate, right out in the open.
In short, these people are fucked up and they fucked up.
Or, a more grim possibility: they’ve diverted national security on purpose and let down a number of intelligence firewalls meant to protect the American people, knowing that a chaos would unfold that might allow a conman to attempt to declare Martial law or invoke the Insurrection Act (more on that in a bit).
Back to Forced-Teaming: Here’s What It Looks Like
Hello, DARVO: A Narc’s Old Friend
Here’s a vile exchange between Gabby Giffords and one of Trump’s flying monkeys, Mike Davis. First off, this response from Davis is a “two-fer” of DARVO and forced-teaming. We’ll start with unpacking the DARVO and close out this essay on forced-teaming.
Let’s start with the DARVO long division, breaking down Mike Davis’s attempt to gaslight Giffords and the American public. Remember, DARVO is an acronym created to help people identify a specific tactic of gaslighting, where bad-actor denies the harm, attacks the complainant, and reverses the order of victim and offender. People who are in the wrong DARVO as they breathe, and they also recruit minions to gaslight alongside them, because psychological abuse is more potent when it’s parroted by a chorus.
Here’s DARVO at play in Mike Davis’s nonsense:
* Deny: “Gun violence???” [invalidates the issue]
* Attack: “F**k off, Gabby.”
* Reverse: “The real problem is your piece-of-s**t-husband, @SenMarkKelly and other Democrats”
* Victim: “who mass-import terrorists, demonize the National Guard, and call on 18-year-old enlistees to disobey”
* Offender: “the President of the United States.”
Think of this as a sentence diagram to illustrate rhetorical mistruthin.
Once you see the rhetorical foolery, you can’t unsee it. The point of DARVO is to dodge accountability by making yourself a victim and projecting your failures onto someone else. It’s also psychological abuse.
But wait! There’s more. We still have forced-teaming!
Peep that last scatological utterance from Mike Davis and you’ll see it:
“and call on 18-year-old enlistees to disobey the President of the United States.”
That, ladies, gentlethems, and men, is forced-teaming. This is what narcs do: when they’re in positions of power, they fuse themselves with the institutions so that a critique of them is a critique against the institution itself.
The National Guard doesn’t swear an oath to the President. This is their oath:
“I, ________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and of the State of [State name] against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to them; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the Governor of [State name] and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to law and regulations. So help me God.”
I repeat, once more with feeling: someone needs to get a mic in front of Leavitt, or Trump himself, and ask:
“Is Donald Trump the Constitution of the United States?”
Its a weird-ass question, but it needs asking because direct questions highlight the rhetorical sleight of hand:
No one’s job is to obey Donald Trump. Our duty is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States— even, and especially, against traitors who sell out the people for self-enrichment. The Constitution is the law, not Donald Trump. Our elected officials, intelligence members, and members of the armed forces swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States. Donald Trump is not the United States.
Dear Journalists: Ask the Question to Their Faces
“Is Donald Trump the Constitution of the United States?”
Asking it in exactly this manner is important:
* The weirdness of the question’s phrasing breaks the script and grabs attention.
* The question answers itself, but it also puts those trying to blur that distinction on the defense.
* Once the card-trick is exposed, it’s hard to unsee and makes it impossible to swallow fascist b******t.
Here’s another reason I need you to understand what forced-teaming is: this man is trying to sow chaos so that he can invoke Martial law, or cite the Insurrection Act, which would suspend everyone’s rights.
Here are two things to keep in mind: when someone violates their oath of office and is doing illegal s**t, they’ve violated their contract with the American people and the American people, as such, are under no obligation to follow Martial law from those who are lawless and gaslighting us in our faces.
You heard Senator Mark Kelly: don’t obey illegal orders.
That includes us civilians— especially.
Ain’t nobody should be “just following orders” rn.
On Martial Law + The Insurrection Act: We Got This
Anxious readers may protest: “But what do we DO when this happens?”
I understand your worries, and it’s good to ask questions like this. I’ve asked them, too.
Fortunately, there are a good number who have thought about this (and for some time now). For example, I refer you to Daniel Hunter’s “What to Do If the Insurrection Act is Invoked?” from Waging Nonviolence.
Please remember: autocrats are not creative people— they all do the same s**t. Our neighbors around the world have been here before, and there are tried and true strategies to take down dictators. If you’re curious about getting in the details, I refer you to Choose Democracy, Waging Nonviolence, The Strategic Nonviolence Academy, and the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict— where you can find resources and mentorship to prepare you to protect our democracy.
Remember: we outnumber the fascists in overwhelming numbers— what determines the course of history is whether everyday people organize in their local communities to shut this all down. We’ve got all the cards that matter. What remains to be seen is if we have the integrity and moral courage to use them.
You are bigger than your fear.
Do not give up the ship.
