Donald Trump and his MAGA movement are currently at the epicenter of political violence in the United States. Trump has created a type of permission structure that encourages and incites violence against perceived enemies. This includes both individuals and targeted groups who are deemed to be the so-called other. Research shows that a significant percentage of Trump’s MAGA followers support political violence, up to and including an insurgency and a civil war, to put him back in power.
The violence is not just interpersonal. Trump and his regime also engaged in acts of structural and institutional violence against the American people through willful negligence and outright malice. For example, the Trump administration's COVID-19 pandemic response resulted in the avoidable deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people (if not more).
In Bob Woodward’s new book “War”, General Mark Milley, who served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, describes the corrupt ex-president in the following way: “He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…. A fascist to the core.”
In all, Donald Trump is more of a symbol than a man. The violent and other antisocial behavior he has encouraged and given permission for will, in all likelihood, continue well past the 2024 election, whatever the outcome is on Election Day.
Stephen Ducat is a political psychologist, psychoanalyst and former psychology professor in the School of Humanities at New College of California. His new book is “Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America.” In this conversation, he explains how Trump’s seemingly unbreakable power over his MAGA followers and other “conservatives” reflects a type of shared pathology and antisocial behavior that is a type of societal emergency. Ducat highlights how social psychology can help us better understand our current democracy crisis and the role that social dominance behavior, attraction to violence, sexism, misogyny and disinformation play in support for Trumpism. Ducat also praises Kamala Harris’ approach to confronting Trump’s version of masculinity by taking his thug persona head on.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length:
How are you feeling at his point in the Age of Trump? How are you making sense of this crisis with less than a month until Election Day?
I cannot help but be plagued by the many dystopian possibilities ahead. Whether Trump wins or loses the election, it is clear that Trumpism will be part of our political culture for a long time to come. Harris may very well win the vote, but it is not at all clear that will suffice to contain the forces of MAGA fascism. The latter not only oppose democracy but have already put in place voter suppression and bypass laws, along with Trumpian election officials who have vowed to discard the votes that don’t go their way.
That said, the strategic intelligence of the Harris team, especially their departure from the messaging fecklessness of earlier Democratic Party campaigns, has given me hope. Especially notable has been their effectiveness at speaking to Gen Z, a cohort that has been hard for Biden to mobilize in recent years. That generation tends to be more open-minded and embracing of difference, like liberals more generally. They not only come bundled with an exploratory attitude that has characterized youth in every historical period, but they grew up in a world in which racial, religious and gender integration in all aspects of life has been the unquestioned norm. Trump repels them because he wants to go back to the dark ages of racial and gender apartheid. They are drawn to Kamala Harris not just because she embraces the values of diversity but because she is a literal expression of it. In addition, Harris represents a new generation of female leadership. Vice President Harris is also not burdened by being part of a political dynasty yoked to the past. While formally allied with Biden, she is on a fast track of individuation from him.
What are you seeing through your expert lenses that others may not be?
From the beginning of my awareness of politics, I was mystified by the apparent irrationality of people voting against their material self-interest. I couldn’t understand the willingness of so many working- and middle-class people to elect politicians whose policies rendered their lives poorer, less free, sicker and shorter. With Trump's political rise and the delirious adoration he inspired in his base, something clicked for me. I realized how shortsighted I had been to think that material self-interest was the most potent motive in politics. It became vividly apparent that membership in groups that give us a sense of meaning and identity — what I call tribes — is a much stronger driver of political behavior than I had realized. As I show in my book, people kill and die for it.
To remain loyal members of the GOP, conservatives will oppose politicians and policies that give them health insurance, protect them from disease and reduce their exposure to life-threatening environmental poisons. During the height of the pandemic, pharmacies around the country created backdoor entrances to vaccination rooms so that Republicans could discretely enter and get the shot without being seen by their fellow conservative friends and neighbors. Some even wore disguises. In other words, they were trying to prevent biological death without risking social death.
The data is quite clear here: The worse Trump behaves the more his MAGA followers love him. Or, at the very least, it does not really hurt him in terms of popularity among his MAGA people and other “conservatives.”
The central quality that has defined Trump’s success as a businessperson and political conman and as a brand is impunity. The fact that he has been openly corrupt, lying, racist, predatory, cruel – and until recently never been held to account or made to pay a significant price – is what half the population has found ugly and infuriating. It is also what the other half continues to experience as powerfully seductive and admirable. Those polarized responses have only become starker as he increasingly doubles down on his sadistic and antisocial behavior.
For his base, Trump functions as what I call a “permissive superego,” the sociopathic daddy who says, “Be cruel, violent and bigoted, just like me. And I will love you even more for it – as long as it serves my interests.” Trump also cultivates a “trauma bond” with his followers. He simultaneously promises to keep them safe from outsider threats and vows vengeance against anyone, including his supporters, should they show disloyalty to him. Like any mob boss or cult leader, Trump plays the role of both protector and threatening persecutor.
He frames his own murderous aggression as simple retaliation against being victimized by liberal persecutors. Trump seizes every opportunity to play the crucified Christ but one that will never turn the other cheek. His followers intuitively attached panty liners to their ears, the new MAGA crucifix, to honor with a symbolic bandage the savior’s survival of an attempted assassination. So, of course, Trump’s return to Butler, Pennsylvania, was his version of the resurrection – a demonstration of God’s intervention and preference for the GOP candidate. It was also designed as political theater to show his indestructibility.
What is Trump’s appeal to the MAGA diehards and the larger base of his movement? Specifically, what does MAGA mean to them?
To understand what has made Trumpism so compelling to his conservative base, it is vital to appreciate some of the psychological differences between conservatives and liberals. It is important to emphasize that the differences are relative, not absolute. Traits that characterize conservatives can still be found in liberals but to a much lower degree – and vice versa.
With that caveat in mind, researchers have found that conservatives tend to score higher on measures of disgust sensitivity, xenophobia, ingroup loyalty, deference to traditional authority, need for sanctity and concern for purity. They also have what psychologists call a social dominance orientation — a preference for hierarchical rather than egalitarian relationships between groups. It is probably apparent how that psychology is a lock-and-key fit with MAGA messaging.
Democracy depends on shared understandings of reality, facts and truth. How have the Trumpists and other right-wing actors (which include foreign powers such as Vladimir Putin's Russia) undermined, if not gutted, this?
Post-truth is more than simply lying; it attempts to undermine the very notion of truth – that experts can be trusted, facts can be disentangled from fiction and truth is knowable or even matters. Since 2016, many of us on the left have wondered how a charmless, treasonous and psychopathic con man could garner the support of half the country. Liberals tend to suffer from what I call naïve rationalism — the belief that political behavior, like voting, is driven by a sober assessment of the facts. Therefore, the main task of activists and politicians is to present correct data to the public.
Now that so much of his corruption has been exposed, it is even more baffling that he continues to do so. One of the most common explanations is that Americans suffer from a plague of disinformation. While that is undoubtedly correct, it doesn’t answer a vital question. Why does half the population refuse to swallow blatant falsehoods while the other half gobbles them up like essential nutrients?
Post-truth, in many ways, derives from conservative psychology and serves the aims of the authoritarian leaders they follow. If truth is unknowable, that leaves room for the leader to define reality. Embracing or being seen to embrace a belief central to tribal identity marks you as a loyal member.
Conspiracy theories are central to conservative post-truth. Of course, there are real conspiracies. But the crucial difference between them and fantastical ones is evidence. Actual plots can be proven or disproven. All conspiracy narratives share a generic structure: The world we perceive is a carefully crafted illusion. Behind the stage set of reality is a secret cabal of malevolent actors whose evil motives drive the world's seemingly random or explainable events. Natural disasters, accidents, mass shootings, pandemics, wars and election outcomes are never what they seem, but the intentional result of those nefarious plotters who choreograph the crisis actors putting on the performances the rest of us are duped by.
We are currently seeing the right promote those paranoid narratives as a way of fitting the ongoing series of natural disasters into the MAGA worldview and displacing the science-based account of climate change. Conspiracy theories are not only devoid of factual support, but factuality itself is irrelevant when it comes to believing and spreading the stories. Only the revered leader has the secret knowledge about what is going on behind the scenes. Only they can know the truth. Part of being a loyal tribe member is accepting and promoting what the leader says.
