By Kerri Rawson
“I THINK I have the best temperament or certainly one of the best temperaments of anybody that’s ever run for the office of president. Ever. I’ve been nice, but after watching that performance last night, such lies, I don’t have to be so nice anymore. I’m taking the gloves off, right, yes? Just remember this, Trump is going to be no more Mr. Nice Guy.”
“Normally, I’m a pretty nice guy. I’m sorry, but I am. You know, I’ve raised kids, had a wife, you know, president of the Church, been in Scouts. It goes on and on. But, yeah, I have in mean streak in me, so. And it occasionally flares up, takes control.”
After nearly four years of living under the sniveling pandering of Donald John Trump, the former quote is easily recognizable. The latter? Belongs to my dad, Dennis Rader, whom I lived with for 26 years, carefully treading around his ever-changing tempers, moods, and whims, as if navigating littered broken eggshells. As he says in the quote, Dad is a father of two, was a husband for 34 years, a Scout leader and church president—and the BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) serial killer.
I grew up idolizing my dad, toddling after him, my little hand clinging to his rough calloused one, gardening, fishing, camping. As a young adult, I hiked next to him for a week in the depths of the Grand Canyon, encouraging each other on. Six years after that, he, nearly in tears, walked me down the aisle. I often called him my best friend. He taught me about life, inner strength, and doing the right thing. He embraced me in bear hugs, taught me how to wrap a fishing line, and uproaringly fun, sent me crowd surfing at college football games.
Yet on bad days, Dad came home moody and dark, raging like a storm, demanding control: rigid obedience. Dad expected my brother and me to toe the line, and we knew at a young age to rarely ever cross it. Early on, I learned how to dodge and manage him by watching my mom: take the blame, apologize quick—let him have his way. He punched emotional and verbally abusive holes into me that I will never fully recover from. He attempted to strangle my young adult brother in front of Mom and me—twice. We knew he could be a brute, but we thought that was the worst of it. We had no idea that we’d spent three decades living with a serial killer. He lived every day of his life with us as a lie. He betrayed us, and ultimately destroyed his family, his last victims.
In 1974, Dad murdered four members of a family, including two children. After that, he murdered six more women. He lived a double life for 31 years, until finally, trapped within his own narcissistic follies, he was caught by law enforcement, pleading guilty in 2005 to ten counts of murder. He’s currently serving a life sentence of 175 years in solitary confinement in a maximum-security Kansas prison.
Dad had been locked away 11 years by the time 2016 and the rising Republican spectacle hit. At first I watched it with detached humor, but that quickly changed to aghast horror, as I realized Trump was a serious contender. Recogizing what Trump was, I became rolling ill to the pits of my stomach.
Trump was Dad. Dad was Trump.
Trump wasn’t just a corrupt, immoral, piss poor choice for any leader, let alone the highest office in the world—he was extremely dangerous, a threat to every living person on this planet; they needed to be warned.
I took up my cause to social media, especially Facebook, where I had long friendships, some going back decades, with many conservative Evangelicals who voted Republican. I knew I was up against “family values,” but I also knew these were good people who knew my story and knew what my dad was. I assumed they would listen to me. I was sadly mistaken. I got called a “lib,” rejected over my support of the LGBTQ community, berated for my pro-choice stances, and overwhelming was told: “No way am I voting for that lady.”
In the fall of 2016, it became clear that not only was Trump a serial philanderer, but also a sexual assailant and rapist, possibly even of under aged children. When the “grab the p” tapes came out, I couldn’t imagine anyone actually voting for him, let alone the “family value” folks. But in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, while taking in the fall colors, my family passed many large red and white “Make America Great Again” signs, thumbing their noses at us. Fear crept up—our country was in trouble. Not long after, I sat stunned on election night, tears rolling down my face as the white map turned red. They, my beloved friends, had held those thumbed noses and voted Trump.
The first winter after the election, I fell into depression. It didn’t seem real. How could this vile man have been chosen to lead our great country and the greater free world? How could my fellow countrymen have voted for him? Was I the only one who saw him for what he is? I was alone, stumbling, lost in the dark.
I’ve been waiting every day since that night on the couch, tears pooling, for the immense travesty of Donald Trump to be rectified. It’s not just as we have come to learn now, that a mobbed-up criminal and his minions have been installed into the White House by our enemies; it’s that a pathological liar, a malignant narcissist, a psychopath is leading the free world.
Trump is Dad and Dad is Trump.
“I can barely stand to listen to Trump speak.” I’ve heard it over and over from survivors of abuse, especially those who have survived living under a sadistic narcissist. I’ve felt the same way since 2016. If you line up quotes of my dad’s and Trump’s next to each other, I would have a hard time telling them apart.
“With the Oteros and Bright, all of the males were put down quickly (or I tried to) before I prepared the females. If during my crime run, a male happened to be there or to come in, he would be killed very quickly.” —Dennis Rader, Confession of a Serial Killer
“If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.” —Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough
Dad gets off on stalking, torturing, and murdering people: your mothers, sisters, daughters, brothers, husbands, sons. The older textbooks call him a Sexual Sadistic Psychopath; the newer ones talk about NPD: Narcissistic Personality Disorder; ASPD: Antisocial Personality Disorder; and Sadism.
Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, writes in Too Much and Never Enough: “I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), but the label gets us only so far.” Mary goes on to say that “a case could be made that [Donald] also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe form is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others.”
“They could ID me. I wore no mask. I felt like leaving them as they were, but something Dark told me to murder them.” —Dennis Rader, Confession of a Serial Killer
Trump admitted to Bob Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. ‘I wanted to always play it down,’ the president said. ‘I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.’”
In their final interview, on July 21, Trump vented to Woodward: ‘The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault.’”
“If Bob Woodward thought what I said was bad then he should have immediately, right after I said it, gone out to the authorities so they can prepare.” —Donald Trump, 9/10/20
A bully, abuser, predator, sadist, narcissist, psychopath, sociopath: choose your word for what my dad is, what Trump is. They want to blame anyone other than themselves for their horrific choices. My father stood in court in front of surviving family members and blamed the victims that he murdered for their own deaths. Trump, with his passive inaction, or intentional total disregard for human life, has so bungled the covid response that he now has over 200 thousand American deaths on his hands, yet wants to blame the journalist who interviewed him.
Forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee, author of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, writes, “We are facing a democide of genocidal proportions, because we have handed power to someone who is anti-human in psychology. When criminality combines with mental pathology, this kind of large-scale violence becomes possible. This bottomless need to place his own psychic survival above any protection of the public should rather be a warning. This means he would be equally inclined to destroy the nation or the world—which he has the power to do—if he were to feel humiliated from the loss of an election, for example.”
Trump isn’t insane, and I’m not sure he’s suffering from dementia, either. He’s in control of what he wants you to see, where and when—it’s all a big game. Why are we not catching predators like my dad quicker, and why has no one put Trump behind bars yet? One reason: they hide right next to us. They blend well, function more highly than we expect, and they can stop; they have gaps. Another key reason: they have the ability to express and feel a wide range of normal human emotion. At least in the case of my father: love and empathy.
People can’t swallow that a murderer of children can love. So they dismiss it, narrowly placing someone like my father into one category. When they do this, they miss his true modus operandi, skipping over suspects. Dad was never looked at once in 31 years, until a week before his arrest.
It’s not that someone like my father has no ability to have empathy or love, it’s that he has the ability to turn the switch off. Thus, he easily crosses moral lines that most folks would never come near. In my father’s words, he “cubes.” Switching and controlling personas, what he wants you to see and how he decides to interact. He mimics and mirrors what he thinks you want to see. But under the infinite cube of masks is a real person with a range of true emotions. That’s who we need to study and learn, so we can stop them from causing so much harm.
“Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all.” —Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough
As we near the election, I expect Trump to continue to ramp up his insanity, pushing what he can to continue to capture his diminishing base. A cornered predator has little to lose. As the enormous strain of being near the end of being useful as a bought-out chaos agent by our enemies, and with the protections of being the President soon to be lifted, I expect Trump to become more and more unstable, vile, and dangerous. We must stay on vigilant watch, continuing to call him out on his lies.
Abusers like my dad and Trump insist on loyalty, allegiance, control; they will go to great lengths to pound these demands into those around them. They want to cut us off, make us feel alone, afraid, stumbling around in the dark, or worse, to give up entirely. They derive pleasure and power from our pain, and if we die in the process, so much the better.
Almost four years later, I can still feel the hopelessness of election night and the dark, empty months after. Yet even on our darkest days, like the 2017 Charlottesville riots, hope can be found if you look hard enough. That awful night, I found myself online searching for answers, and ran into like-minded Resistance folks. Their fight for what is right and just lifted my spirits. Over the past years, we’ve fought hard to hold the blue line: truth, justice, law, and light win out.
The election is six weeks from today. The fate of our country, its people, and the world lie in our hands. Joe Biden is an honest, decent man, with decades of experience. Biden, along with Kamala Harris, and their solid, experienced team can right this wayward ship before it’s too late. Don’t choose four more years under the jackboots of our oppressor.
Now is the time to choose our destiny: life, liberty, and the right to pursue happiness. Your well being, the well being of your children, and their children, depend on you making the right choice. We can take back our country and our lives, but we must decide to do it together. United, standing on the line of truth, our abusers stand no chance against us. Join me, let’s lock arms, and take back what’s rightfully, lawfully ours.
Kerri Rawson (@KerriRawson) is the author of A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming. Since her father’s arrest, Kerri has been advocating for victims of abuse, crime, and trauma.
Photo: Gage Skidmore. Photoshop: Greg Olear.
I seriously doubt theres space on the internet for my entire list of who im mad as hell at, and why, but i will give it a shot. The only ppl that were patriotic enough to speak up was one person in DC. & 2 ambassadors, or maybe one was a former ambassador I dont remember now. IN ALL OF DC. Then constituents on the right allowed the degrading of those patriots to happen amongst themselves. Every motherfucker that has written a book, but wouldnt step up is a traitor, and i have no idea who these ppl are that buy their books. There isnt enough curiosity on the planet for me to support these traitors. The GOP & Co, goes without saying, but im MAD AS HELL at the dems too. DJT didnt happen overnight and their participation in the shady fuckery for years hasnt helped. Pelosi clearly doesnt know, even after experiencing it first hand, that dems continually have shown up to a gun fight with plastic, disposable flatware and apparently none had the sense to know it, over and over. I read somewhere years ago that for watergate they hired a pheonominal amt of lawyers, who did Pelosi hire, and why did she say when asked why they werent imeaching him that he isnt worth it? There's unknown fuckery in there somewhere, and i doubt we will ever know.They needed to be balls to the wall from the beginning, but no, lets fund human rights violations at the border ffs. I dont buy that precedence bullshit either because if a dem wants to commit human rights violations when they are in power they more than deserve to be cut off at the purse. Dont get me started on how thoroughly pissed off I am that there are far more laws that pertain to me than whats necessary. I mean jay walking??? Yet its a thing, they know if i need to be arrested, what the range of punishment is including fines, but donald fucking trump can stroll in and steal the peoples house, and theres nothing to be done when an entire party is corrupt because God forbid, all these years, they've spent their time choosing which lobbyists they will allow to suck up to them, and what needs to happen to me if i jaywalk!! In 2016 they really couldnt imagine that someone shady as hell may come along, foreign funded to abuse the looholes?? I realize they had to work within the constitution, but she could have taken advantage of screen time. She needed to be on every screen everywhere explaining what happened, what should have happened, and why it went wrong.The press.... not enough room, moving on. The entire education system for using 12 yrs of schooling to teach people how to take a test, but graduate people that cant think critically, or independently. Countless times each day I see ppl on the left repeating what they heard the press or other ppl say. They are easy to spot because just like those on the right, they all say the same thing, but when you ask them a question that wasnt covered by the press, or the other ppl, they got nothing. Zip. Nada. So they have no understanding to the core if a thing that they believe in, and although they cant answer the question, they dont like the sound of it as clearly its going against their pre-fab beliefs, so they block you. Same for ppl that dont share their views across the board. No talking even remotely respectfully to a fellow countryman, or woman with the understanding that ppl are different here. Different colors, religions, beliefs, and that its what this place is about, and its ok to disagree, but no. All while telling people on the right to turn off foxnews. Im saying its never occurred to them to research a provable thing so they dont KNOW what they are spouting, while accusing folks on the other side of the very same, yet they dont see it. Not a clue. Same for the right. No wonder no headway could be made in changing minds on the right in the beginning when there was a chance to do so, they cant explain a thing that they dont know the details of so it comes down to my media knows more than yours because ppl that think like me say it does. Seriously, this is what we are working with for the most part. Then the folks on the right, who cant look up a thing to save their lives either, dont seem to know the difference now between fact & opinion. I have 4 right leaning friends, all for 25 yrs or more. One i cant stand to speak to any longer, another that i had no idea they were truly...challenged(trying to be nice), and 2 that even tho they will read the material that i send them links to, and countless screenshots of first hand accounts on a given subject, and they are too busy working to look into it themselves & ive explained that ive been researching this squatter for 2 yrs now for 10+ hours a day, at least 6 days a week, (im no brainiac and second guess myself, so i look 3x more than i need to),to say to me, well thats what you think is right. I shit you not, and not a single link was to a media piece (God forbid), mostly gov docs. Im talking months of sharing info with them and they think "thats what i think is right or true", while they believe the network thats all in on the disinfo campaign with the traitorous fucks, and a traitor that cant tell the truth if it was to save his life. Thats it, thats what they got. Never once does it occur to them, after hearing from so many ppl, sometimes ppl that dont normally even talk politics, that just maybe theres a small possibility that theres a thing they dont know, or are wrong about. Not once. I have given them plenty, but have said loud and clear, dont take my word for it, research. Nope, not with the crew we are working with, and none of these ppl are the toothless billies that are portrayed to be the last of the cult either. And lastly, to every person that preached about a patriotic dept, or person bullshit that was going to come along and save us. Not because it was a bad idea, for a while anyway, but because even now I dont see one of those ppl explaining the truth. At least their hearts were in the right place tho. So now its WAY late, he WILL steal the election. Biden has hired hundreds of attys i read the other day, but how do we know they can possibly be prepared for the surprise fuckery that surely Barr has up his sleeve that no one else is privy to. Ppl continue to say "they cant do that", & "thats illegal" & im torn between feeling bad for them still thinking that applies, and being mad as hell that they havent figured out the big picture yet and poking them right in the eye. So i will finish with this: 1: we are currently under fascist rule, even if you dont know it, or think we are not, we are. 2: when we encounter fascist behavior in our lives or online we have to say it, out loud, or type it on the screen, and call it what it is, its important. 3: voting isnt going to save us so plz stop with the "just wait until november" business. Its imperative that we vote, and not discourage others, but its equally imperative that we know and accept the truth. Its heavy as fuck, and theres a good possibility that many will shut down and take to the bed. Thats ok, but hurry up because its all hands on deck. We NEED a Biden landslide, but by itself its not enough. 4: when the president steals it(he will) & we know it, we MUST get in the streets and i mean by the tens of millions (yes, that many), even if Barr has made it illegal, which i think hes doing as we speak, or already has & doesnt want ppl to know yet. Its going to be ugly, and honestly some arent going to make it. If you have paid attn when the secret police were in portland, and DC, you have to know he has no morals or conscience. 5: Even then, we are currently a shell of a democracy, and we will be damn lucky to get out from under these fascist motherfiuckers, but this is the last best chance there will be. If we dont do it, american experiment over. 6: im no expert, and personally am not an authority on this, but when i watched all the impeachment stuff before & during, i saw the GOP behavior, i knew then he wasnt leaving. I didnt sleep and download this knowledge miraculously though, i dug in and read, and researched, and compared using info provided by ppl that know way more than me. Plz get ready. If you think its terrifying to get in the street with the possibilities it entails, just wait and see what life will be like if we dont. Its unimaginable to us, i assure you. Im moret terrified that more dont know this, and of many that do, dont seem to have it in them to fight for this country. I can only pray im wrong. This is where we are, if you dont believe me please read anything that covers hitlers methods used to take Germany, or anything that covers methods used by any authoritarian coup in the last couple of decades, and on top of that: what a person is truly like that has his personality disorders as the author of this piece has explained. Start comparing. Pray for us please, and be brave. If you are elderly or disabled, your job will be to be on social media almost constantly when ppl are in the streets posting and tweeting about the fascist fuckery so much so that the others are drowned out. 🙏❤🇺🇲
Also, ppl are being arrested in nyc for totally peaceful protest of ICE in broad daylight. Police arent asking them to leave first, no announcement, just charging them physically and arresting them, and keeping their phones for a long time apparently. Also, and this is imperative: when its time to get in the street it MUST BE 100% PEACEFUL. We cant give them footage to tak over painting a make believe narrative while they see destruction or fire, or whatever on the screen. We cant claim to be protecting a place while defacing it, or burning it.