Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

The Daddy Double Helix

Letter to a Trusted Friend

Hi Bill,

Thank you for the excellent piece by Sam Greene 1, and for your comment. I agree wholeheartedly with Greene that "imputing to Trump’s thought process either our greatest hopes (things might not turn out so bad!) or our greatest fears” is a serious danger. Equally, I would like to venture a response to his “call” for an "insight into how Trump is making his decisions.”

​

My response is actually a tiny, but lethal, subset of the larger persuasion/narcissism hypothesis we discussed last year. And although tiny, it may be what drives the persuasion/narcissism interface in the first place. One way to “illustrate” this subset could be through a metaphor:

The Daddy Double Helix

Almost everything Trump says and does seems to stem from a kind of “daddy double helix.” One strand in the helix strives to please daddy, to do whatever it takes to be loved by him. The other strand seeks to be daddy, to inflict on others what daddy inflicted on him. Such a helix could be said to be the “DNA” of the clinically narcissistic, ultimately self-destructive, out of control creature Trump became.

​

Explaining Trump

This metaphor may help explain what Trump does. For example, his behaviour with Zelensky in the Oval Office was, on the one hand, an attempt to please daddy (Putin) by savaging daddy’s enemy (Zelensky). It was also an attempt to be daddy by inflicting the kind of violence on Zelensky that Trump’s real daddy inflicted on him when he dared to cross him (Zelensky’s original refusal to find dirt on Biden).

​

Also, it could be said that Trump is seeking to build his own empire as the most un-ignorable way to please/be two daddies (Putin and Xi). He seeks to please (impress) the two emperors, so he must create an American empire by subsuming Canada and Greenland. And he seeks to be the two emperors, so he must trample Denmark as a sovereign country.

At that point the three of them, as equal emperors, would control the three parts of the world. And he would, at last, be both pleasing and being his daddy.

Predicting Trump

This metaphor may also help predict what Trump will do next. Right now, for example, the “please daddy/be daddy helix” predicts that Trump will soon:

​

1

Publicly encourage China to take Taiwan (little Trump pleases daddy [Xi] by praising daddy’s right to dominate and destroy).

Publicly disavow Taiwan as an ally (little Trump is daddy by feeding Taiwan to Xi)

2.

Publicly encourage Musk to destroy the Constitution (little Trump pleases daddy [Musk] by encouraging the extremes of his maniacal behaviour).

Publicly call for the dissolution of the House and Senate (little Trump is daddy by removing any obstacles to his power).

This “double helix” is essentially two strands of a pathological “daddy” imprint, leading to the, I think, entirely predictable creature that is the 78-year-old Trump. In fact, I suspect that virtually all of what Trump over the years has said and then retracted, scrambled and then spat out, confirmed and then reversed, has been this “daddy double helix” at work.

To seek to please daddy and to be daddy – deadly stuff.  

Pitying Trump

The most striking feature of the clinical narcissist at work inside Trump right now is his construction of a path to self-destruction. True narcissists will, in the end, destroy their own projects. Trump’s crazed butchering of the infrastructure of government and his frenzied, ignorant imposing of tariffs, heedless of the real needs of even his own base, are already diminishing his approval ratings. He is destroying the thing that gave him the very thing he sought: the loyalty of his electorate.

This emerging path to destruction seems to me explicable also by the “daddy double helix.” The healthy child inside the adult narcissist desperately wants to be himself, his real self, the self not molded by the violent figures of childhood. But there is only one sure way to find the real self, and that is to destroy the molded self and see what is left. The way to destroy the molded self is to “please and be daddy” in the extreme, to act on the violent figures’ demands in a deranged way so that their very aims are destroyed.

This possibility serves, I think, as another way to “explain” and to “predict” Trump right now: he does what he does in order to destroy everything he has built; and what he does next will be in service of that destruction. He is alienating his supporters, and he will do whatever he can to alienate them further. Until he is alone. Until he can see if there is anything left.

I picture, at the end of this road, the tiny but no longer daddy-trapped Trump standing in the middle of 5th Avenue, arms raised, thanking his god for shooting him and thereby resurrecting him.

Eliot would agree: “In the end is my beginning 2”

​

1 Sam Greene 23 Feb ’25 “TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup”

2 T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, Harcourt USA, 1943

​

​

​

​

​