by Charles B. Strozier and David M. Terman

Whatever Donald Trump is, or is not, psychologically, Trumpism as a social movement deserves close scrutiny in terms of its values and motivations. Our focus is on a self psychoanalytic perspective that we believe can illuminate social and political events. Trumpism, it seems to us, consists of elements of a perverse form of nationalism, racism, group paranoia, and a sense of imminent destruction that has apocalyptic overtones. We are defining that ominous mix as Trumpism. We are deeply concerned by its potential malevolence. We may be living in Germany of 1932, or a bit more hopefully, in Italy of 1924.

Trumpism celebrates a virulent form of nationalism. It was once the case in the 19th century that nationalism was closely aligned with the liberal dream of a revitalized communal identity, from western to central and southern Europe, to nascent entities in eastern Europe, including forsaken Jews in the shtetls, and more revolutionary groups opposing tyranny in Russia. Now Trumpist nationalism is the scourge of the misguided and enraged. It wraps itself in often gigantic flags that parody any legitimate notion of American exceptionalism that once celebrated fairness, equality, democracy, and openness to the peoples of the world. In Trumpism, the American self is celebrated as narrow, mean, isolationist, and illiberal. We would say psychologically, however, that a brittle uncertainty shines through the Trumpist form of nationalism.

Trumpism is also racist to its core. America ruled for eight years by an aloof and confident black man riled the racist core of the movement. Trump’s own birtherism seemed a joke until we saw the radical turn against Muslims, and Mexicans, and indeed all non-whites threatening at the border and within. We have even seen the rise of a new antisemitism that recycles ancient tropes of Jews conspiring to control the world. A new sense of the dangerous other creates dualities in Trumpism that drives it politically to increasingly extreme positions. The racism of Trumpism is not (yet) genocidal, but it definitely erodes decency towards the other in our public discourse.

Those dangerous others, at least as perceived in Trumpism, threaten to undermine American white values. The threat seems imminent and real, especially as hyped in rallies and in the right-wing media. We are frankly dealing with a newly energized group paranoia, something one of us has argued (Terman) constitutes a gestalt spurred by the historical crisis of the moment. Paranoia, as a technical term from psychiatry, is not too strong to describe wildly exaggerated and imagined fears of a deep state working at odds with legitimate government, of liberal elites conspiring to replace whites with all kinds of unwelcome immigrants, and a radical decline in traditional cultural and religious values. An evil other is responsible for our ills.

The fearsome other established in this paranoid universe assumes an identity that is larger than life. He, she, or they, also form a constantly shifting landscape, hiding in the shadows, conspiring to destroy America’s true self. He, she, or they, are sometimes specific figures (Nancy Pelosi) but more often vaguely identified as snobbish liberal elites, homosexuals, and Jews. In such conspiracy thinking, evidence is irrelevant. In fact, unlike in science, it is the absence of evidence that proves the conspiracy. In Trumpism, arguments are not rational. Once the paranoid emotional state is established, everything, and nothing, serves as proof that dark forces are working to destroy American life.

The more radical these dynamics become, the more the paranoia merges into what another of us (Strozier) has argued is apocalyptic thinking. In this cognitive universe, we are at the end of time and on the verge of destruction. Only radical action can stave off disaster, though the specifics of that danger are constantly shifting. Such thinking easily embraces the need to defend oneself with lots of guns but more generally it fuels vague—and dangerous–notions of violence.

Freud noted that in the psychotic retreat from reality the world itself crumbles. A deep sense of what we would call narcissistic injury fuels the collapse of the individual or group self. Such a collapse results in a failure to understand the motivations of others, who are reduced to simplistic categories of good and bad, those who support the fragile group self and the rest are experienced as deeply frustrating and injurious. Those frustrating others become then malevolent, threatening, and ultimately evil.
There are many sources of this injury, some economic, others social and political, but all are fed by the white heat of social media that nourishes resentments of liberal elites and fantasies of liberals conspiring to muscle whites aside and replace them with minorities and hated others. One of the curious ways in which right-wing propaganda works in the world of social media is to nourish a sense of vicarious humiliation. You are not alone in feeling the world is collapsing. In fact, your misery and fears are seemingly everywhere.

The apocalyptism of Trumpism, however, curiously has a restitutional character that is a response to and reflection of the collapse the self. That trauma has many sources, including a loss of social position, but psychologically leaves people feeling ignored and humiliated. Their apocalyptism and paranoia reverses the humiliation, becoming in the process salvational. The paranoia and apocalyptism stave off the total collapse of the bonds and aspirations of the group. They provide a disturbed but effective form of meaning structure. The danger, however, is that such psychological structures are unstable and subject to fragmentation and rage. As we have seen so often with tyrannies, governments and social orders can collapse in a heartbeat of violence.

Trumpism has not yet taken over America. We still have vibrant institutions, unlike, for example, Germany in 1933, where Hitler knocked down an open door. We also have a resistance, even if it lacks cohesion and is in some disarray. That resistance needs strengthening to stop the Trumpism that so profoundly threatens America. It is imperative to arrest this destructive process and then turn our attention to the sources of the injuries that have recently occurred over the last several decades to the America self of which Trumpism is a symptom.

Charles B. Strozier is a historian and psychoanalyst and the author of Kohut’s biography, Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001). David M. Terman is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was part of the intimate group around Kohut. He is also the former Director, The Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Both Strozier and Terman were contributors to and co-editors of The Fundamentalist Mindset (Oxford University Press, 2010).