# Post ts_110975022442113601

- Post ID: `ts_110975022442113601`
- Platform: Truth Social
- Posted: 2023-08-29T21:27:38.741Z (UTC)
- Deleted: no
- Repost: no
- Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/ts_110975022442113601
- Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/ts_110975022442113601/analysis
- Audio narration: https://static.trump.fm/audio/ts_110975022442113601.mp3 (a synthesized voice reading the post text, not a recording)

## Post text

> “LEFT’S GOAL: REMOVE TRUMP FROM BALLOT BY ANY MEANS”

## What the media says

**Video transcript** (6:23), transcribed automatically, so names and numbers may be wrong. Speakers aren't identified, so a voice in it may not be his:

> All right, joining me now, Saul Weisenberg, former deputy independent counsel and Fox News contributor, alongside Mike Davis, Article 3 project president, Saul. I was going back to that 2016 piece in the Washington Post about getting the electors to not represent the popular vote. I had forgotten about that piece completely until today. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, huh, that sounds like kind of a little bit of a radical theory in some circles, certainly. But nobody was thinking that would be part of a criminal conspiracy if anyone even thought to implement it. That was interesting. Oh, yeah, it's it's it's completely hypocritical. Of course, they would say that President Trump went further on January 6th. But there's no question that it's hypocritical. And this is more more of the same. Can you think of anything more anti-democratic than the idea that some state functionary, some state secretary of state can declare on his or her own? Well, I think Donald Trump has engaged in insurrection or rebellion under the as understood in the 14th Amendment without any kind of a trial, without any kind of process, without any kind of definition. It's just ludicrous. And to Saul's point, Mike, some states are already considering this 14th Amendment theory that we all talked about for the first time. I think last week, the week before, here's the Michigan secretary of state. Watch this. I'm going to follow the law. What the law says is what is going to dictate how I and I hope all of my colleagues proceed in this moment, in particular around thorny issues like this one. I'm going to be talking with Al Schmidt in Pennsylvania, with Cisco Aguilar in Nevada, with Brad Raffensperger. Mike, I hope they all immediately reject this, what seems to me completely unconstitutional nonsense. Well, it is unconstitutional. There is an article out by Stanford Law Professor Michael McDonald, a former federal judge who makes it very clear he's not a Trump supporter by any means, but he makes it very clear that this is a bogus legal theory by the Democrats. In order to disqualify under the 14th Amendment, you have to follow a federal statute on insurrection and rebellion. A criminal statute get a criminal conviction with a judge and a jury, and it has to stand up on appeal before you can even consider this. There is no evidence whatsoever of insurrection. Democrats looked for several years with the January 6th Commission, and they found zero evidence because it doesn't exist. Yeah, so, Sol, he wasn't charged with an insurrection account of insurrection. The wide-ranging RICO conspiracy in Fulton County, insurrection, as much as they like to talk about it, there was no sense of an intent to violently overthrow the government. This whole theory rests on, I think, a fallacious understanding of even what the basic facts are in this case. Well, here's the problem with the theory. If we were starting from scratch, it's not like there's a complete lack of support historically for this conception of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The problem is, in 1869, there was an opinion by Chief Justice Salmon Chase of the Supreme Court. He wasn't sitting as a Supreme Court justice, he was sitting as a circuit judge, but he made a ruling that's been considered definitive for about 150 years, and what he said was, this is not self-executing, this Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, that there has to be congressional enforcement. And as Mike pointed out, Congress has passed a statute that tracks the exact words of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, it makes it a crime to engage in insurrection or rebellion against the government, or to incite it, or to give aid and comfort to its enemies, and the punishment, in addition to the criminal fine, is that you cannot ever hold office again, so it's been done. Again, the idea that you would have some state official, a partisan, partisanly elected state official disqualify Trump without any kind of due process at all, I think is not going to fly. And listen, I think one of them's going to do it, and when they do, I think it'll move up rapidly through the courts, I certainly hope it does, and I think it'll be rejected by the Supremes. Yeah, I mean, you could see, right? This is gaining momentum, and we pegged it when Ludwig and Larry Tribe came out. We knew that this was going to be a boulder going down the hill, but Trump's lawyers were in court today on the January 6th case. Judge Amy Chutkin said, "I understand Mr. Trump is presumed innocent, as is every defendant. Let's not overlook the fact that Mr. Trump has considerable resources that every defendant does not usually have." And this was, I guess, regarding the timing of the case, which we're going to get into later on. But Mike, do you detect, just from that comment from the judge, I mean, that seems to speak to some anti-Trump bias right there. This Obama judge is a left-wing radical. She's been the harshest. She's a left-wing radical. She's been the harshest sentencer of January 6th defendants while she excuses the BLM protesters. There's no chance that President Trump is going to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C. with Judge Tonya Chutkin, Jack Smith, and this 95% Trump-deranged jury pool. Well, Saul, do you think it's possible to get a fair jury outcome for Donald Trump in D.C. and with a D.C. jury? I think it's virtually impossible if there was ever a case that called for a change of bend. You forget about the judge. Just because of the jury panel in D.C., I think that would happen. Unfortunately, the law is very bad on this. There's the Supreme Court opinion, the skilling opinion, which we think of as important because of honest services. Part of the ruling was that they didn't have to move the Enron trial out of Houston, so it's going to be very tough to do that. Yeah, I don't think they're going to win on that one. Saul and Mike, as always, thank you.

## Media

- video: https://static-assets-1.truthsocial.com/tmtg:prime-ts-assets/media_attachments/files/110/975/022/038/271/447/original/8a99a9fac421e720.mp4

## Engagement

- Likes: 8,560
- Reposts: 2,791
- Replies: 677
- Views: unknown
- Metrics collected: 2026-02-01T01:19:51.400Z (UTC)

# Analysis

_Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-03-20T08:04:11.493Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._

## Summary

Five days after his Fulton County mugshot and following Judge Chutkan's March 4, 2024 trial date order, Trump posts a nine-word conspiratorial frame that compresses four independent criminal processes into a single political conspiracy. The post is clinically significant as a concentrated expression of vulnerable narcissism under compound injury: public booking humiliation plus trial date perceived as deliberate electoral sabotage. The DARVO structure is maximally compressed — legal accountability becomes political persecution in a single declarative sentence. The "by any means" construction is the most analytically important element: it signals the opponent has abandoned ethical constraint, which retroactively authorizes unlimited counter-response by followers and subject alike. Third-person "TRUMP" mythologizes the defendant as a symbol, transforming his legal jeopardy into a collective cause. Defense mechanisms present include pathological distortion (four independent judicial processes collapsed into one conspirator), projection (subject's own boundary violations attributed to opponents), and denial (implicit total dismissal of legal merit). Paranoid features are dominant (~0.78). Authorship leans slightly toward aide-assisted given business-hours timing and curated daily content pattern. Danger level is elevated: no explicit violent language, but the framing constructs the cognitive architecture in which extreme follower response is narratively coherent. The post's brevity limits cognitive analysis; no markers detected in the available text.

# Psychological Analysis — Truth Social Post, 2023-08-29T21:27Z

## Contextual Frame

This post appears five days after Trump's Fulton County mugshot (August 24, 2023) and in the immediate aftermath of Judge Chutkan's March 4, 2024 trial date order — arguably the most concentrated period of legal pressure Trump had faced to that point. The post accompanies a video (content unavailable for analysis) and functions as a caption/headline. The surrounding posts that day form a curated grievance media package: fundraising totals, Gingrich commentary, poll numbers, legal framing. This is a managed content operation, not impulsive solo posting.

---

## Level 1 — Dispositional Traits

The nine-word post is too compressed for rich trait analysis, but what is visible is consistent with the established profile: **dominant extraversion-assertiveness**, near-zero agreeableness, and elevated neuroticism expressed as angry hostility rather than anxiety. The third-person self-reference ("TRUMP" rather than "me") is characteristic — it elevates the subject to symbolic status while simultaneously positioning him as object of external aggression.

---

## Level 2 — Characteristic Adaptations

**Agency motives** entirely dominate. The post is a power-defense operation: legal processes threaten status/autonomy, and the response is to reframe accountability as persecution. **Communion motives** are entirely absent — this is not a post about connection to supporters but about rallying them around a shared enemy. The schema revealed is classically paranoid-entitled: legitimate institutions are presumptively corrupt when they challenge the subject's interests.

---

## Level 3 — Narrative Identity

The narrative structure is a **contamination sequence**: Trump is winning (fundraising totals, polling leads, mugshot merchandise success — the surrounding posts establish this) but an unprincipled, unlimited enemy is attempting to contaminate this trajectory by "removing" him. He casts himself simultaneously as **warrior** (resistance implied) and **martyr** (victim of illegitimate force). The "by any means" construction is the key narrative move — it positions the opponent as having abandoned all ethical constraint, which retroactively justifies unlimited counter-response by the subject and his followers.

The third-person framing of "TRUMP" is notable: the subject is not merely defending himself, he is defending a symbol. This mythologizes the legal proceedings and transforms his base from political supporters into protectors of a sacred cause.

---

## Level 4 — Clinical Indicators

### Narcissistic Dynamics

**State:** Vulnerable narcissism. Despite the aggressive formatting, the content is fundamentally victimization-oriented. The subject is not proclaiming his greatness; he is proclaiming his persecution. This is the vulnerable pole.

**Trigger:** Compound narcissistic injury. The Fulton County booking constituted a uniquely intense injury — a mugshot is precisely the kind of public humiliation most threatening to a status-obsessed individual. The Chutkan trial date, positioned the day before Super Tuesday, was experienced (and presented) as deliberate electoral sabotage. Emerging scholarly discourse about 14th Amendment ballot disqualification added a genuinely novel threat vector.

**Rage:** Present but modulated into cold strategic framing rather than hot emotional discharge. The all-caps signals intensity but the sentence is declarative, not exclamatory. Intensity ~0.65.

### Defense Mechanisms

1. **Distortion (pathological):** The entire apparatus of four separate criminal processes — federal grand juries, state grand juries, federal judges, electoral law scholars — is collapsed into "the Left" with a single conspiratorial goal. This is gross reality reshaping in service of inner needs.

2. **Projection (immature):** The subject, whose documented conduct involved sustained efforts to remain in power despite losing an election, accuses opponents of "removing" a candidate "by any means." His own boundary violations are attributed wholesale to the other.

3. **Denial (pathological):** The implicit assertion that none of the legal proceedings have merit — that all are purely instrumental political tools — requires total denial of documented evidence across multiple independent investigative bodies.

### Malignant Narcissism (Kernberg)

- **Narcissistic features** (~0.72): Grandiosity (implicit — he is important enough to be the specific target of a coordinated national conspiracy), entitlement (to ballot access regardless of legal findings), exploitation of followers' protective instincts.
- **Antisocial features** (~0.50): Systematic delegitimization of judicial processes functions as contempt for rule of law. Not explicit here but the framing enables it.
- **Paranoid features** (~0.78): The post is a concentrated paranoid frame — coordinated enemy, unlimited methods, existential stakes. The paranoid reading requires no engagement with specific evidence.
- **Sadism** (~0.10): Not present in this post.

---

## Rhetorical and Propaganda Analysis

The post exemplifies what could be called **delegitimization compression**: the entire democratic-legal apparatus is compressed into a conspirator with a single goal, stripping out all complexity. The "by any means" hyperbole is particularly significant — it signals unlimited threat, which activates tribal protective instinct in followers and implicitly authorizes unlimited counter-response. This is structurally analogous to propaganda techniques that reframe state accountability as tyrannical persecution.

The use of the declarative present tense ("GOAL: REMOVE") presents a contested interpretation as established fact — an epistemic closure maneuver requiring followers to accept the frame to remain in good standing with the in-group.

---

## Gaslighting and Reality Distortion

The post inverts the factual frame: legal proceedings initiated through evidence-based grand jury processes are recast as purely political ballot manipulation. This is a DARVO operation in compressed form: *Deny* the legal legitimacy, *Attack* the institutions as partisan instruments, *Reverse* victim and offender (Trump is the victim of removal; the legal system is the aggressor). The repeated pattern across this day's posts of framing legal accountability as persecution constitutes an escalating epistemic closure demand on the audience.

---

## Danger Assessment

**Level: Elevated**

No explicit violent imagery or dehumanizing language. However, the "by any means" construction performs a specific rhetorical function in the stochastic terrorism pattern: it identifies a target ("the Left," implicitly their agents in the judiciary and DOJ), articulates an existential grievance (ballot removal equals electoral disenfranchisement of Trump voters), and implicitly signals that normal ethical constraints do not apply to the opposition — which lowers inhibition thresholds for followers who may respond to that framing. The post does not call for action, but it constructs the cognitive environment in which extreme action by motivated followers is narratively coherent.

## Fact Verification

| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|-------|---------|----------|
| "The Left's goal is to remove Trump from the ballot" | **Mostly False** | At the time of posting (Aug 29, 2023), no state had initiated proceedings to remove Trump from any ballot. 14th Amendment disqualification challenges were in legal scholarship and early advocacy phase; no state had acted. The criminal prosecutions are legally distinct from ballot removal mechanisms. Framing prosecution as ballot removal conflates separate legal concepts. |
| "Opposition is pursuing removal 'by any means'" | **Unverifiable** | Characterization of opponents' willingness to use unlimited or unethical methods is a political opinion claim not amenable to factual verification. The rhetorical function of the phrase is to eliminate ethical constraint on counter-response rather than to describe a documentable fact. |

Overall Veracity: 35%

## Authorship Analysis

**Uncertain** (score: 45%)

### Indicators

- Post is a video caption/headline, not a standalone text post — formatting consistent with aide-curated media sharing
- UTC 21:27 = ~5:27 PM EDT (Trump likely at Bedminster, NJ in late August); business-hours timing favors aide involvement
- All-caps declarative headline format is used by both Trump and his communications staff
- Surrounding posts that day are all external URL shares — suggests systematic content-curation workflow
- No typos, no ellipses, no stream-of-consciousness digression — unusually clean for authentic Trump

## Psychological Profile

### State

**Vulnerable State**

**Trigger:** Narcissistic Injury — Exposure (Fulton County booking (Aug 24) + Chutkan's March 4, 2024 trial date + emerging 14th Amendment ballot-eligibility challenges)

**Rage:** Intensity 65% targeting Unnamed 'Left' as undifferentiated enemy collective
- Proportionality: 20%

Sentiment: -0.78

### Clinical

**Malignant Narcissism:**
- Narcissistic: 72%
- Antisocial: 50%
- Paranoid: 78%
- Sadism: 10%

**Defense Mechanisms:**
- distortion (pathological)
- projection (immature)
- denial (pathological)

**Cognitive Complexity:**
- Complexity: 15%

**Parasocial Techniques:**
- Direct address via conspiratorial framing invites audience into shared victimhood
- Undefined collective enemy ('the Left') allows followers to project any adversary into the role
- Existential stakes framing activates tribal protective instincts

## Danger Assessment

**ELEVATED**

### Indicators

- 'By any means' framing positions opponents as having abandoned all ethical limits, implicitly authorizing unlimited counter-response
- Delegitimization of judicial processes as purely political instruments undermines followers' acceptance of legal outcomes as binding
- Existential stakes framing ('remove from ballot') activates tribal protective response that can justify extreme action
- Part of high-volume curated content day that cumulatively constructs a persecution narrative with no off-ramp
- Stochastic terrorism pattern partially present: target identified ('the Left' and by implication their agents), grievance articulated (ballot removal = disenfranchisement), no explicit action call but narrative logic implies necessity of resistance

### Gaslighting

- DARVO operation: four independent evidence-based grand jury processes recast as coordinated partisan ballot manipulation
- Rapid revisionism of ongoing legal reality — proceedings that began under Republican-appointed officials presented as purely Democratic political weapons
- Epistemic closure demand: accepting the 'Left's goal' frame as fact required for in-group membership
- Denial of documented reality: emerging legal challenges to ballot eligibility were at scholarly discussion stage, not operational conspiracy

## Fact Checks (2)

_The model's verdicts from 2026-03-20._

> The Left's goal is to remove Trump from the ballot

**MOSTLY FALSE**

At the time of posting (Aug 29, 2023), no state had initiated proceedings to remove Trump from any ballot. 14th Amendment disqualification challenges were in legal scholarship and early advocacy phase; no state had acted. The criminal prosecutions are legally distinct from ballot removal mechanisms. Framing prosecution as ballot removal conflates separate legal concepts.

Sources: Known events context: Georgia case and Chutkan trial date are criminal proceedings, not ballot removal mechanisms; 14th Amendment challenges did not reach state secretary of state level until late 2023

> Opposition is pursuing removal 'by any means'

**UNVERIFIABLE**

Characterization of opponents' willingness to use unlimited or unethical methods is a political opinion claim not amenable to factual verification. The rhetorical function of the phrase is to eliminate ethical constraint on counter-response rather than to describe a documentable fact.

Overall Veracity: 35%

## Tags

- ballot_removal (95%)
- persecution_narrative (90%)
- DARVO (85%)
- vulnerable_narcissism (80%)
- delegitimization (82%)
- mugshot_response (75%)
- aide_curated (60%)
- epistemic_closure (78%)
- martyr_archetype (72%)
- georgia_indictment (88%)

## That day

_From trump.fm's machine-generated digest of the day, not his words._

**Five Days After His Mugshot, Trump Declares Justice 'Officially Dead' While Flooding the Zone with Vindication**

Trump spent the day processing the aftershocks of his historic Fulton County mugshot, alternating between declarations of political persecution and boasts of surging poll numbers. The morning opened with controlled grievance about his indictments before pivoting to claims about rising polls and a record-breaking Tucker Carlson interview. An afternoon attack on Chris Christie and a flurry of shared supportive articles gave way to an evening crescendo in which he declared American justice "officially dead" -- the day's most intense and emotionally flooded moment. The day closed with a breezy announcement about upcoming Truth Social videos, as if none of it had happened.

Full digest for 2023-08-29: https://trump.fm/date/2023-08-29/analysis

## Citation

- APA: Trump, D. J. (2023, August 29). “LEFT’S GOAL: REMOVE TRUMP FROM BALLOT BY ANY... [Social media post]. Truth Social. trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/ts_110975022442113601
- MLA: Trump, Donald J. "“LEFT’S GOAL: REMOVE TRUMP FROM BALLOT BY ANY MEANS”" Truth Social, 29 Aug. 2023. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_110975022442113601. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026.
- Chicago: Donald J. Trump, "“LEFT’S GOAL: REMOVE TRUMP FROM BALLOT BY ANY MEANS”," Truth Social, August 29, 2023, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_110975022442113601.

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