In the Trump case, it’s like people want to be lied to. Heidegger famously said, toward the end of his life, “Only a god can save us.” What if the god people look to as savior is … Loki? When you point to Carl Jung and Martin Heidegger to shed light on Donald Trump, you can be assured that you are overthinking things. On the other hand, the magical thinking aspect of Trumpism, and the imperviousness of Trump to standards of logic and, well, standards, does make you wonder the language of election as “mass ritual” and “psychogenic storm” have something to tell us about a phenomenon that defies conventional analysis.

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