# Post x_709885620034867200

- Post ID: `x_709885620034867200`
- Platform: X (Twitter)
- Posted: 2016-03-15T23:34:55.000Z (UTC)
- Deleted: no
- Repost: no, but it quotes a tweet by @jsconlon11
- Canonical URL: https://trump.fm/post/x_709885620034867200
- Analysis page: https://trump.fm/post/x_709885620034867200/analysis
- Audio narration: https://static.trump.fm/audio/x_709885620034867200.mp3 (a synthesized voice reading the post text, not a recording)

## Post text

_Quotes @jsconlon11, pasted in quotation marks the way early X retweets were made by hand. The words in quotation marks are @jsconlon11's, not his; a reply of his, if any, follows the closing mark._

> "@jsconlon11:  @BertShad @Foxnews @megynkelly I tried to give them a shot tonight, but they have the whole anti Trump cheerleading team."

## Engagement

- Likes: 8,593
- Reposts: 2,615
- Replies: 0
- Views: unknown
- Metrics collected: 2026-01-31T23:43:13.380Z (UTC)

# Analysis

_Machine-generated by trump.fm on 2026-03-09T19:57:13.364Z (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 a night of sweeping primary victories across four states, Trump allocates social media attention not to consolidating political momentum but to prosecuting a seven-month-old grievance against Megyn Kelly and Fox News. This post — the third anti-Kelly retweet in rapid evening succession — exemplifies a clinically notable pattern: narcissistic injury that resists satiation even by objective triumph. Rather than direct attack, Trump employs the retweet-as-proxy strategy, amplifying follower hostility while maintaining plausible deniability. The paranoid framing of Fox News as fielding a coordinated "anti-Trump cheerleading team" distorts an editorial reality in which the network was broadly favorable to his candidacy; only Kelly represented consistent friction. At Level 2 (characteristic adaptations), the dominant motive is power-through-grievance: the wound is not merely remembered but actively instrumentalized to bond with the base and pressure media institutions. At Level 3 (narrative identity), the protagonist role is striking — victim of institutional bias on a night of vindication — producing a contamination sequence in which electoral triumph is immediately shadowed by persecution. Defense mechanisms include displacement (from victory to grievance), passive aggression (via proxy retweet), and projection (coordinated bias attributed to others). Danger assessment: none. No violent imagery, no eliminationist language. This is low-intensity, maintenance-mode grievance amplification — clinically interesting primarily for its timing and perseverative quality.

# Psychological Analysis: Twitter/X Post — March 15, 2016 (23:34 UTC)

## Contextual Frame

March 15, 2016 is **Super Tuesday III**: Trump has just won Florida (decisively eliminating Rubio), Illinois, Missouri, and North Carolina — a commanding performance that has effectively cleared the establishment lane of competitors. By any conventional political calculus, this is a night for consolidation and momentum-signaling. Instead, the evening's Twitter output includes three sequential retweets of follower complaints about Megyn Kelly and Fox News. This post is the third in that sequence.

**Local time / Authorship:** Trump was almost certainly at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach FL (his victory rally location that evening). UTC 23:34:55 = **7:34 PM Eastern**. This is within primary coverage viewing hours — an active, personally engaged window. The serial anti-Kelly retweet pattern (BertShad → gregens21 → jsconlon11) is distinctly authentic Trump behavior documented across 2015-2016. Authorship confidence: **medium-high authentic** (0.72).

---

## Level 1: Dispositional Traits

The post is a retweet, so direct language production is minimal. However, the *selection* of this content is itself an expressive act revealing:

- **High Neuroticism / Angry Hostility**: Active grievance maintenance on a night of objective triumph
- **Very Low Agreeableness**: No capacity to extend goodwill even to institutions (Fox News) that were broadly supportive
- **Moderate-Low Conscientiousness**: Inability to defer or modulate the Kelly grievance response to a more strategically appropriate moment

---

## Level 2: Characteristic Adaptations — Motives & Schemas

**Dominant motive: Power through grievance prosecution.** Even when winning, the schema of "media establishment as adversary" must be continuously reinforced. This is not merely emotional reactivity — the serial retweet sequence represents deliberate curation of a hostile media narrative that serves several strategic purposes:

1. Signals to the base that no victory is pure because enemies are everywhere
2. Creates ongoing pressure on Fox editorial by implying audience defection
3. Rewards loyal followers with presidential amplification (a form of patronage)

**Agency without communion:** No motive toward connection, celebration, or inclusion. The victory posts that evening are formulaic; the Kelly retweets carry personal energy.

---

## Level 3: Narrative Identity

**Protagonist role:** Victim of coordinated institutional bias — *on a night of vindication*. This is psychologically significant. The contamination sequence operates in real time: triumph (massive primary wins) → immediately shadowed by persecution (Fox's "anti-Trump cheerleading team"). The narrative cannot rest in the good.

**Contrasting other:** Megyn Kelly, metonymically expanded to encompass Fox News as an institution. The "cheerleading team" framing deprofessionalizes the entire network — reducing journalists to partisan performance artists.

**Identity claim (implicit):** "I win despite coordinated institutional opposition — even the networks that should support me are rigged against me."

---

## Level 4: Clinical Indicators

### Narcissistic Injury Persistence
The Megyn Kelly wound originated at the August 6, 2015 Republican debate — **7+ months prior**. The fact that a night of sweeping political victories does not displace this grievance, but instead coexists with it (three retweets in one evening), is consistent with the clinical literature on malignant narcissism: injuries to the grandiose self are not erased by supply but maintained as active grievances requiring ongoing prosecution.

### Paranoid Features
"Anti-Trump cheerleading team" reflects suspicious overreach: Fox News in 2016 was broadly favorable to Trump. The perception of a *coordinated* institutional operation against him, generalizing from one anchor's adversarial coverage to the whole network, is a paranoid cognitive extension disproportionate to the actual stimulus.

### Proxy Attack / Passive Aggression
The retweet-as-proxy strategy is sophisticated reality management: hostility is externalized through a follower's voice, insulating Trump from direct accountability for the attack while ensuring its amplification. This is a recurring defense mechanism in his Twitter behavior.

### Defense Mechanisms
- **Displacement** (immature): Victory energy displaced onto old grievance
- **Passive aggression** (immature): Attack delivered through follower retweet
- **Projection** (immature): "Cheerleading team" mirrors Trump's own rally-crowd dynamics, projected onto journalists

---

## Rhetorical Analysis

The operative phrase — "anti-Trump cheerleading team" — accomplishes several rhetorical moves simultaneously:
- Reframes journalism as performance/advocacy
- Implies organizational coordination (paranoid amplification)
- Devalues professional credentials ("cheerleading" vs. reporting)
- Positions Trump's audience as discerning consumers who see through the performance

**Reality distortion:** Fox News was not running an anti-Trump operation. The characterization distorts the actual media landscape of early 2016.

---

## Danger Assessment

**None.** No violent imagery, no eliminationist language, no stochastic terrorism indicators. This is maintenance-mode grievance amplification — low intensity, high frequency.

---

## Longitudinal Note

This post fits seamlessly into the established 2015-2016 baseline. The Megyn Kelly feud is a continuous longitudinal thread traceable to the August 2015 debate. No deviation from established patterns. What is clinically notable is not the deviation but the *persistence* — the grievance shows no signs of resolution despite months of political success. This perseverative quality is consistent across multiple prior primary nights in the longitudinal record.

## Fact Verification

| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|-------|---------|----------|
| "Fox News had an 'anti-Trump cheerleading team' on primary night" | **Mostly False** | Fox News was broadly supportive of Trump's 2016 campaign. Megyn Kelly's coverage was adversarial in specific instances, but characterizing the whole network as an organized anti-Trump operation misrepresents the editorial environment. Multiple Fox anchors and commentators were overtly favorable to Trump. |

Overall Veracity: 20%

## Authorship Analysis

**Self-Written** (score: 72%)

### Indicators

- 7:34 PM Eastern on primary night — active engagement window during live TV coverage, consistent with Trump personally monitoring results
- Pattern of retweeting anti-Megyn Kelly follower content is a well-documented authentic Trump behavior throughout 2015-2016
- Third consecutive anti-Kelly retweet on this evening (BertShad → gregens21 → jsconlon11), showing deliberate grievance amplification sequence
- No typos or ALL CAPS, but retweets rarely show those markers regardless of author
- Retweeting followers as proxy attack is a known authentic Trump technique for deniability

## Psychological Profile

### State

**Mixed State**

**Trigger:** Narcissistic Injury — Criticism (Megyn Kelly / Fox News — residual wound from August 2015 debate, continuously restimulated by Kelly's coverage)

**Rage:** Intensity 30% targeting Megyn Kelly and Fox News editorial team
- Proportionality: 15%

Sentiment: -0.38

### Clinical

**Malignant Narcissism:**
- Narcissistic: 60%
- Antisocial: 20%
- Paranoid: 45%
- Sadism: 10%

**Defense Mechanisms:**
- displacement (immature)
- passive aggression (immature)
- projection (immature)

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

**Parasocial Techniques:**
- Amplifies follower voice to simulate organic groundswell against shared enemy
- Positions self as passive observer of others' spontaneous outrage, not instigator

## Danger Assessment

**NONE**

### Gaslighting

- Characterizing Fox News — which was broadly favorable to Trump throughout the 2016 primary — as running an 'anti-Trump cheerleading team' constitutes reality distortion; amplifying this claim via retweet launders it as spontaneous popular perception rather than strategic framing

## Fact Checks (1)

_The model's verdicts from 2026-03-09._

> Fox News had an 'anti-Trump cheerleading team' on primary night

**MOSTLY FALSE**

Fox News was broadly supportive of Trump's 2016 campaign. Megyn Kelly's coverage was adversarial in specific instances, but characterizing the whole network as an organized anti-Trump operation misrepresents the editorial environment. Multiple Fox anchors and commentators were overtly favorable to Trump.

Sources: General knowledge of 2016 cable news coverage

Overall Veracity: 20%

## Tags

- megyn-kelly-feud (85%)
- proxy-attack (80%)
- retweet-amplification (75%)
- narcissistic-injury-persistence (70%)
- media-enemy-construction (65%)
- super-tuesday (50%)

## That day

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

**Victory Night Hijacked: Trump Sweeps Four States but Spends the Evening Fighting Megyn Kelly**

March 15, 2016 — Super Tuesday III — was objectively Trump's most consequential primary day to date. He won Florida decisively (eliminating Marco Rubio from the race), along with Illinois, North Carolina, and Missouri, losing only Ohio to hometown Governor John Kasich. The day's posting arc, however, tells a more psychologically complex story than simple triumph. It opens in the shadow of the Chicago UIC Pavilion rally cancellation four days earlier, with late-night defensive posts on March 14 deploying DARVO and Reagan-invocation to externalize blame. It transitions through a disciplined morning of economic-nationalist messaging and rival attacks, passes through a brief vulnerable episode of unverified ballot-access anxiety, and then arrives at a primary-night victory window that should represent peak grandiose supply — only to be immediately contaminated by a sustained six-post grievance cluster targeting Megyn Kelly and Fox News.

The Kelly cluster is the day's defining clinical datum. Between 6:26 PM and 6:54 PM ET, Trump published six posts attacking Kelly — amplifying follower hostility, deploying the "Crazy Megyn" devaluation nickname, and rewarding proxy aggression with presidential-candidate amplification. This occurred while four state victories were being confirmed on live television. The narcissistic architecture's inability to internalize success as a stable self-state, independent of enemy suffering, is laid bare: electoral triumph does not resolve the seven-month-old wound from the August 2015 debate. Three of these posts reached elevated danger levels due to sustained named-target identification before a hostile mass audience. A secondary clinical feature is the false Ohio victory claim — an aide-authored checklist post marking ✅Ohio despite Kasich's decisive win — representing an early instance of reality-distortion in service of a total-dominance narrative. Sleep gap analysis (last post ~11:48 PM ET, first post 5:25 AM ET) suggests approximately 4-5 hours of sleep on primary eve, consistent with campaign stress but below healthy thresholds.

Full digest for 2016-03-15: https://trump.fm/date/2016-03-15/analysis

## Citation

- APA: Trump, D. J. (2016, March 15). "@jsconlon11: @BertShad @Foxnews @megynkelly I... [Social media post]. X (Twitter). trump.fm. https://trump.fm/post/x_709885620034867200
- MLA: Trump, Donald J. ""@jsconlon11: @BertShad @Foxnews @megynkelly I tried to..." X (Twitter), 15 Mar. 2016. trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/x_709885620034867200. Accessed 9 Oct. 2026.
- Chicago: Donald J. Trump, ""@jsconlon11: @BertShad @Foxnews @megynkelly I tried to...," X (Twitter), March 15, 2016, archived at trump.fm, https://trump.fm/post/x_709885620034867200.

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