Food stamps cut, insurance premiums up: Psychologists explain how Trump can justify this cruelty | “Violent innocence”

In a situation so grotesque it could easily have been lifted from a recent episode of South Park, the President of the United States hosted an extravagant 1920s-themed party at his Mar-a-Lago residence under the slogan “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” — quite literally as SNAP food tokens were wiped from existence for millions of already hungry people across the nation he professes to care for. And that’s not to mention the heinous double negative grammar error.

This is not blissful ignorance from the Trump administration: it declined to tap into contingency funds that could have kept food assistance going and deliberately chose not to. His luxurious get together with the high and mighty of society was a sick joke to those Americans he claimed for so long to want to serve.

And to add to the horrid nature of it all, the Republican cronies that surround their lord and master now have the cheek to turn around to the people and say that legal red tape is stopping them from providing what they have cut off. For this group of white men, along with women either too ignorant or too stupid to see their misogyny, to claim that laws, rules, and what we all previously called ‘normal procedure’ is keeping them from helping ordinary citizens struggling on the breadline is beyond ridiculous. It’s obscene.

Alexandra Cromer, a licensed therapist with Thriveworks, tried to explain how these GOP officials can sleep at night given their actions, calling on a term known as ‘violent innocence’, something first coined by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas: “Violent innocence is a term that posits that a person or institution can cause significant harm while remaining morally ambiguous and/or seemingly ‘unaware’ that they are causing it."

“It means that an institution or person is maintaining a level of unawareness to protect or preserve their belief that they are not harmful and do not cause active harm,” she added (via HuffPost). “Violent innocence can be dangerous because it posits that growth is not an ongoing process of gaining consciousness awareness.”

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“The first step toward real accountability is an openness and awareness that being receptive to feedback ― even feedback you disagree with ― is a requirement for health,” Cromer said. Some chance of Trump’s brain going anywhere near accepting feedback.

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