The HuffPost author quotes Ruth Ben-Ghiat:

“But the booing is also a kind of lethal blow to the kind of ego that the strongman has because the secret of the strongman is that they are very weak and they are very brittle,….”

The crucial qualifier above is “a kind of” because she doesn’t mean “a type of” which would mean that it was a “type” of lethal blow like an axe to the head is a type of lethal blow. When she says “a kind of lethal blow” she more means “a sort of but not quite a lethal blow.”

Ben-Giat used the word brittle. Psychotherapists like me use the word “brittle” in contrast to “adaptable” to refer to the psychological defenses everyone uses to protect the self, or ego, from being overwhelmed by anxiety and/or depression during times of severe stress. Any psyhologically healthy person is likely to have their usual psychological defenses put to a challenge during extremely stressful situations like being fired, experiencing the death of a loved one, being told they have a debilitating disease, or being informed that they are terminally ill themselves. The less brittle their defense are the better they do.

Trump is like a high school student who for years anticipated going to an Ivy League college and who lived with parents who made it clear that they expected nothing less. Their self-image was based on being a star student from grade school through high school and they aspired to going to a Harvard or Yale. To the extent they felt loved by their parents because of their achievements they’d have their identity wrapped up in things like getting straight A’s. They were so confident in themselves that they never applied to a back-up college “just in case” and when all the Ivy League colleges they applied to rejected them they ended up suffering a debilitating emotional collapse.

If they were really like Trump they would handle what they saw as the worst life setback they ever had by going on rants with their family, friends, and in social media about how stupid the college admission officers were and how Harvard and Yale were really pissant universities anyway.

The potential lethal blow for Trump would be so decisively losing the election that his claims of a stolen election would ring hollow and be dismissed by most of his cult. Since the election is likely to be close this won’t happen. Therefore should he lose we already see the psychological defenses he will use since he used them the first time he lost to Biden.

Sorry, Professor Ben-Ghiat, but merely getting booed at by a hostile audience won’t be a lethal blow for Trump. In fact, he responded in typical Trump fashion by going to a NASCAR race and standing outside pretending the stadium crowd which was too far away to even see him was cheering for him.

This prompted me to make my own illustration for the story:

Below, Ruth Ben-Ghiat says “it’s all about ego” without noting that Trump wears his ego (or self-image) like a the modern day equivalent of a suit of armor as depicted on the superman type images on his so-called trading cards.

Addendum:

I thought this photo was unusual for the reason below:

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