The Shadow Knows: Donald Trump’s Weaponization of the Legal System as a Way of Life

Trump and his Republican allies have proven themselves far better than the Democrats at weaponizing language to create catchy memes that harvest powerful emotions and link them with overly simplistic beliefs to shape political opinion.  For instance, the Republicans have claimed “Patriot” as a self-descriptive word that they alone own.  “Weaponize” itself is also just such a word and it has become the rallying cry to create a deeply misleading and undermining belief among many about America’s judicial system. The fact is that, while accusing the Democrats of “weaponizing the Judicial system,” nobody has done a better job of precisely that than Donald Trump.  In fact, perhaps no single individual in American history has surpassed Donald Trump in gaming our judicial system with his more than 4,000 legal cases since the 1970’s. What is clever in a diabolical way, is how Trump has now flipped this ability —weaponizing and gaming the legal system—into his claim of being himself an innocent victim of the Democrats’ antidemocratic weaponization of the judicial system.   

What does this have to do with the Shadow? EVERYTHING-- for those of us who think about the relationships between politics and psychology. C.G. Jung’s psychology places great emphasis on what he called the Shadow.  The Shadow is generally conceived of as being made up of those characteristics in our unconscious mind that we disown or refuse to acknowledge because they make us deeply uncomfortable with our self-image.  These qualities range from unsavory to destructive to criminal to evil.  Jung imagined every individual to have a Shadow, just as every culture can have its unique Shadow.  The relevance of this concept to our current political theatre, and to the polarization of our population, should be apparent as each side of our political divide projects its own Shadow onto the other in what we might think of as Shadow wars.  And, no modern American political figure brings to mind the relevance and reality of the notion of the Shadow more than Donald Trump. Trump has been singularly effective at projecting his own Shadow onto his enemies in regards to many of his own shortcomings, but this ability is particularly evident in his games around what he calls the “weaponization of the judicial system.”   He has had decades of practice in the art of weaponizing the judicial system in which he has learned to employ virtually every known maneuver to avoid legal judgment including denial, delay, appeal, and counter accusation. It is not surprising that in the current incarnation of his judicial Shadow projection game Trump accuses the Democrats, and the judicial system itself, of weaponizing the legal process against him, with himself as the innocent victim.  That is his way of life: Shadow projection-- pure and simple.  And it is remarkably effective at creating confusion, mistrust, and ultimately chaos—features the Shadow takes delight in cultivating.  Accuse your enemy of your own misdeeds.  Turn everything upside down.  The Shadow Knows. 

Stated most simply, Trump projects his own shadow of deceit and manipulation onto his enemies—for instance “Crooked Joe Biden”. “Who is crooked?” one must ask.  Certainly Trump himself. To further infect the “commons” with his outsized personal Shadow, Trump has not only convinced a sizeable portion of the American people that his version of legal events is the truth but he has also managed to seduce that same public into paying his colossal attorney fees.   This sorcery is worthy of a shaman and is fully befitting a political and/or religious cult leader.  And with the most recent Supreme Court decision further extending Presidential immunity from legal prosecution, one has to recognize that Trump himself is the reigning master of weaponizing our judicial system, a skill that he has developed as a way of life over decades of exhausting and crushing people in court proceedings

Thomas Singer MD is a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst.  He is a contributor to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the co-editor of Mind of State:  Conversations on the Psychological Conflicts Stirring U.S. Politics and Society and editor of Cultural Complexes and The Soul of America.