Part 1. Are all rich men paranoid about phone tapping?

The Horror in the White House has inspired me to tell you what I have personally experienced in the exciting area of having my office phones tapped. I specify this tweet:

How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

Forget it, I’m not getting into the typos. (I’m sure he meant to type “scared election process,” not “sacred.”)

But I will get into the psychopathology of projection. Oh, and probably paranoia, about which I know a great deal because many years ago I made it my avocational business to read a lot of psychopathology textbooks. Why? Don’t really remember.

However. Let us talk about projection. By this time, we all know it’s Trump’s primary instinct, along with blatant lies, to accuse someone else of doing what he himself has been doing. (To my satisfaction, David Frum said the same thing about Trump on MSNBC.) So when Trump accuses Obama of tapping him, you can be sure it’s Trump who has been doing the tapping. (You know that Leo Tse adage, “People who look behind closed doors are often found hiding there themselves.”)

Now let’s analyze that tweet. But first, let’s talk about one general aspect of paranoia. A paranoid’s psyche is a two-sided coin. One side is grandiosity; the other side is abject self-loathing.

So, the grandiose part of Trump’s tweet is, first, claiming he’s higher in the firmament than his “low” predecessor; second, he’s further elevated himself into–bizarrely and inaccurately–someone “important” enough for Nixon to be taping but he seemed not to know that Nixon taped himself. Was that what Trump was suggesting? Geez, analyzing this creature is almost pointless.

A premiere characteristic of paranoids is to see themselves as the god at the center of the universe, i.e., so important all sorts of baddies want to “get them.”

The projection comes as Trump accuses someone else of being “low.” The self-loathing part of Trump is confessing to seeing himself as “low” (imagining himself as vermin or a worm crawling in the gutter, i.e., “low,” is part of the paranoid dual self-portrait), and “bad” or “sick.” (I’ll bet that’s what his father used to call him.)

So in this tweet, Trump is confessing that he is a low character, crawling around in the gutter, bad and sick–because he has been tapping (and taping) other people’s phone calls.

Which, it seems, he has.

From the March 5, 2017 NYT Trump, Offering No Evidence, Says Obama Tapped His Phones – The New York Times:

Taping calls seems to hold a spot in Mr. Trump’s consciousness. He spent many years taping his own phone calls as a businessman. During the campaign, Mr. Trump’s staff members told reporters they feared that their offices were being bugged.

I’m sure they were being bugged. By their boss.

Because it’s what bosses do.

I first became aware of this executive bugging shtick when I worked for Paramount Pictures. At that time, Paramount was a subsidiary of Gulf + West, an oddball  conglomerate. There came a time when a friend of mine told me that our phones were being tapped by one of the least attractive but very powerful top executives at G+W. (She had better insider intel than I did.) Seems there was a spooky sort of guy who’d been sent around to “check” our phones. The guy was a known security expert.

Did I go crazy? No. Did I do anything about it–if there had been anything to do? No. In fact, it amused me because it seemed so pointless. What crucial piece of scandalously disloyal info were they imagining they’d grab?

During the time of the, um, buggery (sorry, couldn’t help myself), I don’t recall anybody being summarily fired or sued or killed off, or in some other way made to disappear. Not at Paramount, anyway. Some of the European money people who were involved in some mysterious way with Gulf + Western (I know nothing about this higher finance stuff) were arrested or investigated, if I remember. An aura of big, bad things hung around them. And if I also remember, the Vatican bank came up in conversations.

I don’t recall any sudden suspicious deaths.

NEXT POST: My second experience being tapped at the office.

 

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