# Post ts_111665704112936815

- Post ID: `ts_111665704112936815`
- Platform: Truth Social
- Posted: 2023-12-29T20:57:04.613Z (UTC)
- Deleted: no
- Repost: no
- Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/ts_111665704112936815
- Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/ts_111665704112936815/analysis
- Audio narration: https://static.trump.fm/audio/ts_111665704112936815.mp3 (a synthesized voice reading the post text, not a recording)

## Post text

> “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick threatens to remove President Biden from the Texas ballot”

## Media

- image: https://static-assets-1.truthsocial.com/tmtg:prime-ts-assets/media_attachments/files/111/665/704/029/132/933/original/8fc1a262491a38cd.jpg
- image: https://static-assets-1.truthsocial.com/tmtg:prime-ts-assets/media_attachments/files/111/665/704/035/615/166/original/e9ea3dc39cec807a.jpg

## Engagement

- Likes: 9,982
- Reposts: 2,727
- Replies: 834
- Views: unknown
- Metrics collected: 2026-02-01T01:19:51.381Z (UTC)

# Analysis

_Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-03-24T17:34:45.648Z (UTC): a model's reading of this post, not his words. Its psychological terms describe the language, not a clinical assessment of him._

## Summary

On December 29, 2023 — one day after Maine's Secretary of State removed Trump from the primary ballot — this aide-authored post deployed a textbook DARVO counter-move by amplifying Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's threat to remove Biden from the Texas ballot. The post delivers no original Trump text, yet communicates a precise message: the ballot removal campaign can be met with symmetric retaliation. The core epistemic distortion is a false equivalence between Trump's legally-grounded 14th Amendment disqualification and a speculative, legally-dubious Biden removal — seeding the narrative that such actions are arbitrary partisan tools rather than constitutional adjudications. The strategic absence of Trump's characteristic emotional register signals deliberate message management at a moment of acute political vulnerability (compound narcissistic injury from Colorado and Maine decisions). Defense mechanisms present include displacement (aggression redirected to Biden via a surrogate), projection (electoral vulnerability attributed to Biden), and rationalization (threat packaged as neutral news-sharing). The post contributes to epistemic closure dynamics by normalizing ballot manipulation as mutual political warfare and establishing a loyalty test requiring acceptance of the false equivalence. Danger level is elevated — not for direct incitement but for institutional delegitimization and the normalization of electoral retaliation as proportionate response.

# Post Analysis: ts_111665704112936815 | 2023-12-29

## Overview

A deceptively simple post — a single headline quote and two image attachments — that functions as a precision rhetorical instrument in the immediate aftermath of the Maine ballot removal decision (December 28, 2023). The post contains no original Trump text; it shares a headline reporting Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's stated intention to remove President Biden from the Texas ballot as a counter-move to the Colorado and Maine 14th Amendment rulings.

---

## Authorship Attribution
**Verdict: Aide-authored (High Confidence) — Scavino**

Posted at 3:57 PM Eastern (Mar-a-Lago local time, UTC-5), this falls squarely within business hours. The format — clean headline, image cards, zero personal commentary — is a Scavino signature. Authentic Trump posts during this period are characterized by emotional reactivity, ALL CAPS, typos, first-person assertiveness, and evening/overnight timing. None of those markers are present.

The *strategic restraint* itself is notable: the absence of Trump's characteristic voice suggests deliberate message management, likely reflecting the political sensitivity of the moment. When the legal situation is most acute, the communications apparatus tightens.

---

## Psychological Context and Trigger

**Trigger: Acute Narcissistic Injury (High Confidence)**

The Maine Secretary of State's December 28 ruling — removing Trump from the state's primary ballot under the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause — arrived just 24 hours before this post. Combined with the Colorado Supreme Court ruling still in legal limbo (appealed to SCOTUS December 27), Trump's campaign is facing an existential electoral threat. The ballot removal decisions represent a compound narcissistic injury: public exposure, institutional defeat, and a direct challenge to Trump's political survival — all operationalized by individual officials exercising unilateral authority.

**Narcissistic State: Vulnerable (oscillating toward counter-grandiosity)**

The post does not display the explosive grandiosity typical of Trump's injury responses (cf. "ROT IN HELL" Christmas posts). Instead, it reflects a cooler, controlled vulnerable state in which the primary goal is injury containment and counter-narrative establishment. The base must be shown that the threat is not unidirectional — that symmetrical power exists.

---

## Defense Mechanisms

**1. Displacement (Immature)**
Rather than directly defending against the Maine/Colorado rulings, aggression is redirected toward Biden as the counter-target. Patrick is the vehicle; Biden is the proxy for the Democratic institutional apparatus that injured Trump.

**2. Projection (Immature)**
The implicit logic projects the same electoral vulnerability onto Biden that Trump actually faces. This converts Trump from target to power-holder: "we can do this to you."

**3. Rationalization (Neurotic)**
The post packages an aggressive political threat as neutral news-sharing, providing the psychological and communicative benefit of the aggression without the social cost of explicit hostility.

---

## DARVO Structure
This post is a textbook partial DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender):

- **Deny**: No acknowledgment of the legal basis for Trump's removal
- **Attack**: Implicit threat of symmetric retaliation against Biden
- **Reverse Victim/Offender**: Trump's side is framed as capable of the same electoral intervention, neutralizing the asymmetry of the original injury

---

## Rhetorical Analysis

**Core technique: Surrogate ventriloquism + strategic silence**

Dan Patrick speaks; Trump is merely the amplifier. This construction gives Trump three simultaneous benefits:
1. The threat is communicated to the base
2. Plausible deniability is preserved ("I'm just sharing the news")
3. The implication that Republican officials stand ready to retaliate is established

**False Equivalence (Central Distortion)**
The post conflates two legally distinct situations: Trump's 14th Amendment disqualification (rooted in documented insurrection allegations) and a hypothetical Biden removal (whose legal basis is unstated and unclear). This false equivalence is the post's primary epistemic distortion, seeding the narrative that ballot removals are arbitrary partisan tools rather than legal determinations.

**Firehose Contribution**
Within the high-volume Truth Social posting environment on December 29, this post is one of several nodes advancing the counter-narrative that the ballot removal campaign is mutual and retaliatory, not legally grounded.

---

## Multi-Level Personality Framework (McAdams & Pals)

**Level 1: Dispositional Traits**
Because this is aide-authored, direct trait expression is attenuated. The *choice to amplify* this particular story reveals low agreeableness (counter-attack orientation), low conscientiousness (escalating rather than de-escalating), and high neuroticism (angry hostility channeled through proxy).

**Level 2: Characteristic Adaptations**
Dominant motive: **Power** — specifically the restoration of power symmetry after a perceived power loss. The post reasserts that Trump's coalition retains electoral weapons.

**Level 3: Narrative Identity**
- **Protagonist role**: Fighter-by-proxy; the victim who strikes back through surrogates
- **Contamination sequence activation**: The ballot removal events represent the contamination arc (legitimate candidacy → illegitimate persecution). This post is an early redemption counter-move.
- **Contrasting other**: Biden as the true electoral threat; Democratic officials as the agents of persecution
- **Identity claim** (implicit): "We are not without recourse; this can be done to them too"

---

## Archetypal Analysis

**Primary archetype: Trickster / Shadow**

The post embodies the Trickster dynamic: using the rules of the established order against itself. The implicit argument is that 14th Amendment ballot removal, deployed against Trump, reveals the arbitrariness of the system — and therefore justifies symmetric counter-deployment. This is the Trickster move: not defending order but exposing it as corrupt, then turning its tools around.

The **Shadow** projection is also active: the qualities Trump's critics identify in him (willingness to weaponize electoral systems) are projected outward onto Democratic officials, with Patrick's counter-threat serving as the mirror image.

**Order/Chaos positioning: Order Attacker**
The post attacks the legitimacy of the electoral order that has targeted Trump, while implicitly proposing a counter-order where Republican states exercise equivalent authority.

---

## Fact Verification

| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|-------|---------|----------|
| "Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick threatened to remove President Biden from the Texas ballot" | **Mostly True** | Patrick made public statements in late December 2023 suggesting Texas could pursue removing Biden from the ballot as a counter-response to the Colorado and Maine 14th Amendment actions against Trump. The 'threat' framing is editorially loaded but consistent with Patrick's stated intent. The legal basis for such action against Biden was far weaker than the 14th Amendment grounds used for Trump's removal, making the implicit equivalence misleading. |

Overall Veracity: 80%

## Epistemic Closure Dynamics

The post contributes to shared psychosis dynamics by:
1. Treating ballot removal as a mutually available partisan weapon (contradicting the legal specificity of the 14th Amendment argument)
2. Feeding followers the narrative that the system is rigged and retaliatory, requiring no acceptance of the legal basis for Trump's disqualification
3. Establishing a loyalty test: accepting the false equivalence as true marks in-group membership

---

## Cognitive Status

Authorship is aide-attributed; direct cognitive assessment of Trump is not applicable for this post. No cognitive markers can be reliably extracted from a surrogate-authored headline share.

---

## Danger Assessment: **Elevated**

Not stochastic terrorism. Not direct incitement. However:
- The post normalizes using ballot removal as a partisan political tool, potentially escalating a cycle of retaliatory electoral interventions
- Contributes to delegitimization of election administration as an institution
- Establishes a narrative framework in which electoral violence or refusal to accept results can be framed as proportionate response to Democratic "aggression"
- The retaliatory framing of legitimate legal proceedings as partisan attacks lowers the threshold for followers to view election officials as legitimate targets of hostility

---

## Summary

On December 29, 2023 — one day after Maine's Secretary of State removed Trump from the primary ballot — this aide-authored (Scavino-attributed) post deployed a classic DARVO counter-move by amplifying Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's threat to remove Biden from the Texas ballot. The post says nothing in Trump's own voice, yet communicates everything: that the ballot removal campaign can be met with symmetric retaliation, that Democratic officials have weaponized electoral systems, and that Republican surrogates stand ready to respond in kind. The core epistemic distortion — false equivalence between Trump's legally-grounded 14th Amendment disqualification and a speculative, legally-dubious Biden removal — serves the broader project of delegitimizing the Maine and Colorado decisions as arbitrary partisanship rather than constitutional adjudication. The absence of Trump's characteristic emotional register suggests deliberate message management at a moment of acute political vulnerability. Danger level is elevated not for direct incitement but for institutional delegitimization and normalization of ballot manipulation as mutual political warfare.

## Authorship Analysis

**Aide-Written** (score: 15%)

### Indicators

- Posted at 3:57 PM Eastern (Mar-a-Lago local time, UTC-5) — squarely within business hours, a strong aide indicator
- Zero personal commentary, no ALL CAPS, no typos or stream-of-consciousness fragments
- Content is a clean headline quote with attached media — characteristic Scavino formatting
- Absence of first-person pronouns or emotional reactivity, unlike authentic Trump posts
- No exclamation points or signature rhetorical flourishes

## Psychological Profile

### State

**Vulnerable State**

**Trigger:** Narcissistic Injury — Exposure (Colorado and Maine ballot removal decisions, particularly Maine Secretary of State's December 28 ruling)

Sentiment: -0.30

### Clinical

**Malignant Narcissism:**
- Narcissistic: 50%
- Antisocial: 40%
- Paranoid: 40%
- Sadism: 20%

**Defense Mechanisms:**
- projection (immature)
- displacement (immature)
- rationalization (neurotic)

**Cognitive Complexity:**
- Complexity: 20%

**Parasocial Techniques:**
- Implicit message delivery — audience receives the 'we can do this to Biden too' subtext without Trump needing to state it directly, creating a sense of shared understanding
- Surrogate ventriloquism — Dan Patrick articulates the threat, keeping Trump's hands clean while feeding base's desire for retaliation

## Danger Assessment

**ELEVATED**

### Indicators

- Normalization of ballot removal as a mutually available partisan weapon, delegitimizing legal constitutional processes
- Contributes to framing of election officials as partisan actors rather than constitutional administrators, potentially elevating hostility toward them
- Establishes retaliatory counter-narrative that positions legitimate legal proceedings as aggressive acts justifying symmetric response
- Epistemic closure contribution: followers who accept false equivalence are primed to view electoral institutions as inherently illegitimate

### Gaslighting

- False equivalence framing presents legally distinct situations as symmetric, distorting followers' understanding of the Maine/Colorado rulings
- Implicit DARVO: reverses victim and offender by positioning Trump's coalition as capable of the same electoral intervention, obscuring the legal asymmetry
- Attacks on institutional legitimacy ('arbitrary partisan tools') undermine followers' ability to accept independent factual assessment of the disqualification proceedings

## Fact Checks (1)

_The model's verdicts from 2026-03-24._

> Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick threatened to remove President Biden from the Texas ballot

**MOSTLY TRUE**

Patrick made public statements in late December 2023 suggesting Texas could pursue removing Biden from the ballot as a counter-response to the Colorado and Maine 14th Amendment actions against Trump. The 'threat' framing is editorially loaded but consistent with Patrick's stated intent. The legal basis for such action against Biden was far weaker than the 14th Amendment grounds used for Trump's removal, making the implicit equivalence misleading.

Sources: Known events context: Maine Secretary of State removes Trump from ballot, December 28 2023; Known events context: Trump Appeals Colorado Ruling to Supreme Court, December 27 2023

Overall Veracity: 80%

## Tags

- ballot-removal (95%)
- DARVO (85%)
- false-equivalence (90%)
- aide-authored (90%)
- narcissistic-injury-response (80%)
- 14th-amendment (85%)
- epistemic-closure (75%)
- surrogate-ventriloquism (80%)
- institutional-delegitimization (80%)
- whataboutism (85%)

## That day

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

**After Second Ballot Removal, Trump's Machine Builds Counter-Reality While He Broadcasts a Target**

Trump spent the day reeling from Maine's decision to remove him from the 2024 primary ballot — the second state to do so in two weeks. His team flooded his account with nearly two dozen links to friendly media outlets, building a counter-narrative of surging polls, Democratic overreach, and retaliatory threats to remove Biden from ballots. The most alarming moment came late the previous night, when a bare link to the Maine official's personal biography was posted without comment — broadcasting her identity to millions of angry followers. By evening, Trump himself appeared to take the wheel, firing off an all-caps accusation that Biden is "a threat to democracy" and predicting a Great Depression if he loses — turning the very charge leveled against him into a weapon.

Full digest for 2023-12-29: https://trump.fm/date/2023-12-29/analysis

## Citation

- APA: Trump, D. J. (2023, December 29). “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick threatens to remove... [Social media post]. Truth Social. trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/ts_111665704112936815
- MLA: Trump, Donald J. "“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick threatens to remove President Biden..." Truth Social, 29 Dec. 2023. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_111665704112936815. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026.
- Chicago: Donald J. Trump, "“Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick threatens to remove President Biden...," Truth Social, December 29, 2023, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/ts_111665704112936815.

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