Is it not surprising that the characters in the anti-Trump camp show excessively high levels of emotionality and poor social judgment as they move along in their attempts to remove a president of the United States? The more shrieking, fist-shaking, finger-pointing, virtue-signaling, and emotional distress a group of people actively exhibits or poorly suppresses, the more an observer should say to himself, "What's going on here? What am I missing?" Nancy Pelosi refers to Scripture, the Deity, and the Constitution. Adam Schiff disregards with impunity accepted convention about what constitutes fairness in reaching a judgment about another person. Joe Biden loses his temper in public. Jim Comey violates rules regarding the leaking of confidential or even secret communications by engaging directly in the illegal behavior, doing so like an amateur intelligence operative. John Brennan expresses exceptionally bitter anger with threats about future consequences to President Trump and the country.

It must be very important for these people to be believed, or they would not be so excessively passionate. And because they are passionate, they lack insight into how others view their high emotion. Why might this be the case?

President Trump violates a chief rule for anyone engaged in secretive behavior: the only person you can trust is someone you can control. President Trump is not such a person. He does not need money. He does not need more power than he already has as president. He cannot be threatened because his response is to kick harder than the kick he is receiving. He holds annoying values by which he judges others. Such frankness cannot be permitted in a world of political operatives. And critically, the most frightening complaint about President Trump is that he is impulsive and says what is on his mind. If he thinks it, he is likely to say it. To those up to no good except for themselves, such a person should never be allowed access to sensitive information that can compromise schemes. Therefore, most people in the president's sphere of influence believe they are under threat.

Those under threat have banded together like a silly school of sardines trying to make themselves seem like a massive organism to scare a marauding shark, even while they are being gobbled up.

This banding together in the face of threat extends upward from sardines to people and as far downward as amoebae. Anyone who has spent any time at all thinking about amoebae intuits that they live lonely lives, eating their way from birth to death — but then there is the social amoeba, dictyostelium discoideum, affectionately known as dicty among biologists. When their environment becomes threatening (they run out of food), they gather together in a blob and roll along until they reach a place with more abundant pickings, somewhat like when families or whole towns flee war and famine. Should a ball of amoebae not find such a place, they build a tower using their frail little bodies, and the top amoeba sporulates. Then all the little dictys die together like the sardines in response to the shark. How single-cell organisms exhibit social behavior is a study that we should undertake to understand ourselves better.

Since people collaborate under pressure no less than sardines or amoebae and President Trump is viewed as a shark, it behooves those who wish to understand to delve into the doings of each player in this impeachment game who is feverishly cooperating with everyone else. Anyone who expresses open hatred for Trump exhibits emotionality beyond reasonableness. Anyone who feels that his personal future is at risk because of President Trump has a lot of secrets. And in particular, anyone who pays huge sums of money to undermine him as president probably wants to increase his own personal wealth, perhaps at the expense of the average citizen.

The people who come to the president's rallies do not feel threatened by him. They feel that he seeks their welfare. In this way, this Rorschach card of a president, through clear statement of his policies, gets people to respond differently to him based upon what they feel they have to lose or gain. Because of this analysis, it may be fair to conclude that President Trump is a reliable diagnostic tool for determining who has undisclosed special interests. It would serve the health of our society to take careful note of these people, raising our level of suspicion of these parties in order to preserve our general well-being.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.