In a series of text messages made public recently between Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last Chief of Staff, Thomas says, “the most important thing you can realize right now is that there are no rules in war,” and Meadows seems to agree. This is not among the most overtly QAnon-inspired statements she makes in these exchanges, but it might be the most significant.
That is because it reflects the apocalyptic mindset that Thomas and others on the far right appear to share. When existence itself is threatened, all methods of preserving it are allowed. Rules, law, even truth itself can be legitimately sidelined. Trump himself said as much in his January 6 speech as he whipped up the crowd to march to the capitol and “fight like hell.” He said, “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.”
A big difference, in my opinion, between Trump and Thomas is this: Thomas—in her own warped way—probably cares about the country when she says things like Joe Biden attempted “the biggest heist of our history” and that “we are living through what feels like the end of America.” I would argue that Trump feels something similar but much more personal: that he is living through what feels like the end of Trump. Both viewpoints are indicative of powerful existential crises but with vastly different scopes, at least on the surface.
The problem is that Trump, who still exercises enormous power over the Republican Party, doesn’t see any difference between himself and the state. Even more disturbingly, neither does his party.
The combination of a personally threatened narcissistic autocrat with a politically fearful following can be volcanic, and the January 6 insurrection might be only the first eruption to result. We feel the aftershocks nearly every day but the pressure on the red-blue fault line continues to build toward another eruption.
In this connection, the parallels between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are inescapable. Both desperately cling to power. Both instill fear in their followers. Both have incited violence. Both see the fates of their countries and their own personal fates as equivalent. And because of that, both have little regard for the rules of war.
In an ordinary member of society, such conflation of the personal with the political is merely a symptom of individual mental distress. But in a powerful leader with followers like Virginia Thomas, the consequences can be global and devastating.