The Dark Tetrad Personality of Project 2025 and MAGA
They want to kill dogs, democracy and us.
Last Tuesday night I scrolled Substack’s social media arm Notes and came across an unsettling post from
. Watkins writes the vital and essential Substack How Project 2025 Will Ruin YOUR Life. Her Notes post referred to and included a link for an article from the UK’s the Guardian.The article alleges that Project 2025’s evil engineer and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts when he taught history at New Mexico State University killed his neighbor’s female pit bull Loca with a shovel. The alleged reason? Loca barked too much and kept him and his family up at night.
If true, Roberts one ups South Dakota Governor Kristi’s Noem’s canine slaughter of her hunting-breed puppy named Cricket. Noem failed to train Cricket and grew angered after the puppy, whom she admitted hating in her memoir, instinctually hunted and killed her neighbor’s chickens. Because of this, the former Snow Queen shot Cricket to death in a gravel pit before moving on with her shotgun to exterminate a goat.
Are Roberts and Noem psychopaths? Only a board-certified psychiatrist or psychologist could make a certain diagnosis with a trusted scientific test. Regardless their alleged and admitted behavior on its face disturbs and raises the question. Animal abuse rests among a psychopath's psychological traits.
Other traits include lack of empathy and lack of guilt. Chris Patrick, PhD studies psychopaths and created the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure. Among the traits the test looks for are callousness, disinhibition, dominance, impulsivity, inability to regulate emotions and behaviors, cruelty, spitefulness, irresponsibility, contempt for other humans, predatory behavior and exploitation.
According to the UK’s National Health Service, “Psychopaths are considered to have a severe form of antisocial personality disorder. It then lists the signs of antisocial personality disorder:
exploit, manipulate or violate the rights of others
lack concern, regret or remorse about other people's distress
behave irresponsibly and show disregard for normal social behaviour
have difficulty sustaining long-term relationships
be unable to control their anger
lack guilt, or not learn from their mistakes
blame others for problems in their lives
repeatedly break the law
Though he has never sat down with a mental health professional and been formally diagnosed, all these signs sound like convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Inmate Number P01135809. He seems to either be a bad seed or the matrix of Roberts, Noem, Project 2025 and MAGA.
Three years ago Mary Trump told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi regarding Inmate Number P01135809, the GOP and MAGA politicians and government officials, “They are him. He is them. He represents them.” The same can be said about Project 2025.
Board-certified forensic and social psychiatrist and violence expert Bandy X. Lee has addressed what she terms “Trump Contagion.” However, MAGA and Project 2025’s harsh rhetoric and inhumane policies fermented in neoliberalism decades before convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Inmate Number P01135809 rode down his tacky elevator. His brass and gold-plated architectural monstrosity Trump Tower came into existence after he demolished the Bonwit Teller building its art deco friezes The Met said it would take. Perhaps the foundation for the bloodthirsty convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, his MAGA enablers and followers and Project 2025 is The Dark Tetrad.
Dark Tetrad personality traits seem to drive and fuel the Project 2025 and MAGA movements. According to Psychology Today:
Dark Tetrad traits score high on measures of the following:
Narcissism: A belief that one is special, particularly gifted, obsessed with themselves and that they are superior to others.
Machiavellianism: A tendency to see people as a means to achieve one's own goals.
Psychopathy: A condition characterized by a lack of affective empathy and the willingness to exploit others.
Sadism: The tendency to derive pleasure from the pain or humiliation of others.
Those with high Dark Tetrad personality scores tend to be malicious, exploitative, ruthless, and mean. They typically hold themselves in high esteem and do whatever it takes to get what they want. Dark Tetrad personalities score low on traits of emotionality, honesty, humility, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Men score higher than women in measures of each of the Dark Tetrad traits.
Project 2025 and MAGA want to control people and the United States’ federal and state governments. Doing so will enact their brutal policies and harm the marginalized along with stripping every American of their Constitutional and civil rights. Both will use any means to enforce their barbaric plans to achieve their perverted and dystopian totalitarian Christian Nationalist society.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade; abortion bans; blocking IVF; menstrual trackers; undoing voting rights; targeting activists, protestors, artists, librarians, educators, writers and the deaths of Marcellus Williams, Candi Miller, and Amber Thurman serve as just a few examples of The Dark Tetrad in action.
Because I am not a trained psychologist and have no medical background, I hesitated writing today’s post. Yet this thought has plagued me since the state of Missouri put the innocent Williams to death. Plus my lay interest in psychology that began in high school and continued with my self-education through peer reviewed and trade articles and the work of Mary Trump made me mull this over.
The Dark Tetrad sounds a lot like Project 2025 and MAGA’s foundation to me. What do you think especially if you do have a degree and certification in psychology or psychiatry?
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No psychology, MSW, psychiatry degrees or knowledge here, but it seems that Trump and “all the best people” surrounding him as well as many in the MAGA cult are psychopaths and narcissists. They frighten me because there is no telling what this band of Orcs will do when Dear Leader lets them run amok in our democracy. The tension and fear they create is abusive. Even though we are getting close to the election, there is no relief in sight. This is what evil creates, ie, chaos, fear, hatred, all the darkness there is. I pray that our country gets past this.
"exploit, manipulate or violate the rights of others
lack concern, regret or remorse about other people's distress
behave irresponsibly and show disregard for normal social behaviour
have difficulty sustaining long-term relationships
be unable to control their anger
lack guilt, or not learn from their mistakes
blame others for problems in their lives
repeatedly break the law"
It's the republican party in a nutshell.