Brittany Mahomes, wife of three-time Super Bowl champion NFL Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, liked a “2024 GOP Platform, MAGA” list published by the GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and the former president (and media outlets) noticed.
Trump thanked her on TruthSocial by writing: “I want to thank beautiful Brittany Mahomes for so strongly defending me.”
While Mrs. Mahomes is being criticized by anti-Trumpers and fans of mega pop star Taylor Swift (who is dating fellow Chiefs football player Travis Kelce and who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020), she is also gaining MAGA supporters as followers. The latter are flooding her comments with words of encouragement.
As one MAGA supporter wrote: “Don’t walk back anything.” Another chimed in: “You’ve gained another fan for having the courage to stand your ground!”
On the other side, Mahomes heard from people who tacitly criticized her intelligence for expressing her support of Trump. Here’s an example from the comments: “I’m surprised she’d admit to being a Trump follower. I’m pretty sure her new friend Taylor is not a Trumper, she’s way too smart and a defender of women’s rights…”
Mrs. Mahomes referred to those who criticized her decision to like a Trump post as “haters.”
She wrote on an Instagram story: “To be a hater as an adult, you have to have some deep-rooted issues you refuse to heal from childhood.”
Haters, of course, are everywhere online, with numerous studies reporting hate speech on the rise especially on platforms like X (formerly Twitter), which, under owner Elon Musk, has relaxed its moderation policies ostensibly to encourage “free speech.”
Mahomes’s practice of armchair psychology — diagnosing childhood trauma as afflicting those who protest her position — is popular on both sides of the aisle.
Arguments regarding unhealed childhood trauma in hateful adults has been repeatedly used to explain the behavior of Trump, who — employing unambiguous hater methodology — often focuses on the negative (“America is a failing country”) and lashes out against his opponents with name-calling and intimidation, not infrequently threatening to jail his opponents.
The proliferation of online hatred and its common roots in childhood trauma has interested not just the quarterback’s wife but scholars, too: With Trump as their subject, MIT Researchers Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad wrote about the relationship between childhood punishment and support for authoritarianism.
Trump’s niece Mary Trump, a psychologist, makes a similar contention, writing about how Donald Trump’s upbringing within a “toxic family” with “a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse” forged his world view and “authoritarian leanings.”
After the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, forensic psychologist Bandy X. Lee wrote about Trump’s “pathological appeal and how to wean people from it,” in Scientific American.
Lee wrote: “Cult members and victims of abuse are often emotionally bonded to the relationship, unable to see the harm that is being done to them. After a while, the magnitude of the deception conspires with their own psychological protections against pain and disappointment. This causes them to avoid seeing the truth. And the situation with Trump supporters is very similar.”
Note: According to The New York Post, Mahomes’ like on the Trump post was reportedly removed.