To “gaslight” someone isn’t just to lie to them or to manipulate their emotions. It is a deliberate attempt to deceive someone into questioning their own perception of reality.
It wasn’t until late 2015 that we began to see “gaslighting” applied to Trump. Among the first to do so was conservative pundit Matt K. Lewis, in a November 2015 article for the Telegraph: “Any introspective person covering Mr Trump will eventually have to grapple with whether or not they want to believe The Donald or their lying eyes.”
And then, even some psychologists took up the idea, drawing parallels between Trump’s actions and the classic tricks of gaslighting — such as undermining the victim’s perspective, controlling the topic of conversation and forcefully denying the truth.
Leah McElrath, a psychotherapist and political activist, analyzed Trump’s quasi-apology after the release of the notorious “Access Hollywood” video in which he made vulgar comments bragging about assaulting women.
Trump’s insistence that “these words do not reflect who I am” amounted to gaslighting, McElrath wrote — similar to the language she’s heard from domestic abusers — effectively telling the public that “the reality you just experienced didn’t actually happen.” (Her Twitter thread on the subject was retweeted thousands of times.)
“It’s quite obvious to see that there’s some form of manipulation going on,” Joshi says. “We’re going to have to read ourselves out of it. We need multiple sources. We should be critical of everything — even the word ‘gaslighting’ itself.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...3c4b4fb5a63_story.html?utm_term=.e5a5d0ca5c7c
It wasn’t until late 2015 that we began to see “gaslighting” applied to Trump. Among the first to do so was conservative pundit Matt K. Lewis, in a November 2015 article for the Telegraph: “Any introspective person covering Mr Trump will eventually have to grapple with whether or not they want to believe The Donald or their lying eyes.”
And then, even some psychologists took up the idea, drawing parallels between Trump’s actions and the classic tricks of gaslighting — such as undermining the victim’s perspective, controlling the topic of conversation and forcefully denying the truth.
Leah McElrath, a psychotherapist and political activist, analyzed Trump’s quasi-apology after the release of the notorious “Access Hollywood” video in which he made vulgar comments bragging about assaulting women.
Trump’s insistence that “these words do not reflect who I am” amounted to gaslighting, McElrath wrote — similar to the language she’s heard from domestic abusers — effectively telling the public that “the reality you just experienced didn’t actually happen.” (Her Twitter thread on the subject was retweeted thousands of times.)
“It’s quite obvious to see that there’s some form of manipulation going on,” Joshi says. “We’re going to have to read ourselves out of it. We need multiple sources. We should be critical of everything — even the word ‘gaslighting’ itself.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...3c4b4fb5a63_story.html?utm_term=.e5a5d0ca5c7c
