In my book, I examine the trauma bond that cements Trump’s supporters to him. In that form of malignant attachment, dependency and fear are fused, not unlike the grip held by a mob boss, perpetrators of domestic violence, cult leaders, and many autocrats. The leader is both the protector and the persecutor.

In cults, the leader-follower relationship echoes some aspects of the “get’em-sick-get’em-well” strategy seen in so much advertising. Many commercials begin with ominous music and a threatening message that generates anxiety about a troubling condition—body odor, obesity, disease, or unattractiveness. Then, as the music swells with uplift and hope, the cure is offered, which, of course, is the product. Cult leaders employ an analogous approach. They generate a sense of threat by conjuring an outside danger or by being a threat. Then, the leader insists he or she is the only one who can keep members safe. As the leader is both the source of fear and the protector against it, it generates what social psychologist and cult researcher Alexandra Stein and others have called it a trauma bond.

An examination of Trump’s email fundraising appeals on the eve of his State of the Union address shows his and his handler’s reliance on this psychology. Trump is presented as a source of punishment and love, threat and promise. There are threats of exile: “Your membership is on life support” and “Your membership is on its last legs.” The danger of perceived disloyalty is presented: “Don’t let him down” and “Don’t leave me stranded.” In the event the recipient doesn’t cough up the dough, Trump channels his inner John Gotti and proclaims ominously, “I’m asking nicely.”

Should that fail to get you to open your wallet, the Trump team conjures up MAGA’s tried-and-true tribal enemies: “the Radical Left,” “the Deep State,” “Liberal Judges,” “Jimmy Kimmel,” and the “Fake News Media” (their caps).

One of the MAGA cult’s core drivers, status anxiety, often shows up in racialized forms, paranoid fantasies like the “Great Replacement” by which people of color are leading to the extinction of the white race. Then there is the long-standing delusional terror that rapacious and murderous immigrant hordes are swarming over the border like waves of relentless fire ants and “poisoning the blood.” There is also the gendered version of this anxiety. The MAGA manosphere is rife with warnings about the precarity of manhood itself because of all the independent women rejecting trad-wifery who don’t know their place and whose refusal of subordination threatens to turn men into castrated soy-boy cucks.

In the fundraising emails, the “get’em well” solution is to promise the recipients “first class MAGA status,” membership into the “Elite Inner Circle,” the “Trump Gold Club,” and the privileged “Founders Club.” With “Exclusive 2026 MAGA Membership” they are eligible for the “MAGA Gold Metal Award” and can be designated a “Top MAGA Patriot.” Share your credit card number with the Donald, and you’ll be able to “Claim Your Seat on My Trump Advisory Board.”

If you, dear reader, have not been a recipient of this email grift, your spam filter is working as designed. Or even better, your algorithmic internet profile has not identified you as a sufficiently credulous and vulnerable mark.

Trump has been vowing to invade, seize, or force the sale of Greenland since 2019. But his lust for the Danish territory has grown more intense since the beginning of this year. However, as we’ve seen recently, when there’s pushback from other world leaders or the stock market dips, he retreats into strategic ambiguity. He may even temporarily back away from his threats, as he did during his cringy hour of lies and word salad at Davos. He may say there’s a “concept of a deal.” But whatever he does, he’ll claim victory. He may claim ownership even without an invasion, as he has with the Gulf of Mexico.

However, if he follows through, as he has with other threats, like the Nicaragua invasion and political revenge prosecutions at home, the consequences will be catastrophic, and not just for Greenland. The moment American boots and bombs hit that frozen island, the US will become an instantaneous and permanent global pariah state. That, combined with MAGA’s ethnic cleansing at home, the murder of protesters, and their war against half the US population (citizens as well as immigrants), the Stars and Stripes will continue their mutation into the swastika.

Fun fact, this image was found on the bulletin board in the office of a red-faced Ohio Republican Representative, who was shocked, shocked to discover there was fascism going on there, and promised an investigation.

If Trump does eventually pull the trigger on Greenland, American military bases, companies, and citizens will be banished from Europe. China and, especially, Russia will happily take advantage of our weakness. Putin, already delighting in the extent of Trump’s demolition of the US, will make full use of the missing American deterrent in Europe, and could lay claim to Poland and the Baltic States like he has with Ukraine.

The EU, the world’s largest single economic market, could call in US debt and sell off dollars, ending our history as the global currency reserve. America will instantly go from the greatest ally of the planet’s democracies to their most despised enemy. In other words, an attack on Greenland would be a Trump-fashioned suicide vest for the US. Yes, it will demolish others, but it will also blow up what little remains of American moral authority.

In my last post, I called Trump’s foreign policy the Dom Doctrine. Unfortunately for him, few nations are willing to be his subs. No problem, because, as in all matters Trump, force is more gratifying than consent. Why negotiate or even persuade when you can grab what you covet by the pussy, as he famously proclaimed. It’s what he wants to do to other countries, and what he’s been trying to do to American democracy for a decade.

To paraphrase the journalist Stephen Marche, the animating logic of MAGA is rape.

Unlike the administration’s rationales for stealing Greenland, the stories immigration and border patrol officials tell about the murders committed by their agents require far less debunking. The entire world witnessed both Minnesota killings. We have all read numerous eyewitness accounts and viewed many videos shot from multiple angles.

Little has been left to the imagination. There’s been no ambiguity to soften the horror that unfolded before our eyes.

In fact, the clunky and utterly implausible nature of ICE and DHS lies about their assaults, abductions, and killings of Americans and immigrants tells me that they have little investment in persuading people that their actions are just. Perhaps the regime thinks it can count on the confirmation bias of the MAGA base – their willingness to see what they want to see. Afterall, no one forces Republican voters to watch Fox News. They do so because it mirrors the tribe-friendly view of the world they want to be true. Unlike authoritarian tyrants of the past or in other countries, Trump does not have to censor news that contradicts his funhouse mirror depiction of the world, though he does try. For the most part, he can count on his followers to do the censoring themselves, gladly putting on the blinders and avoiding sources of disturbing information.

The fact that DHS and other federal agencies openly confiscate evidence and make undisguised efforts to prevent state and local officials from conducting independent investigations confirms that they really couldn’t care less about winning the hearts and minds of the public beyond their tribal core of followers.

We certainly should not misread personnel changes, like demoting cosplaying Nazi wannabe Greg Bovino because of his bad press, as a meaningful retreat from the regime’s policy of gratuitous but systematic cruelty. And we should not view it as a belated expression of conscience. One anonymous but widespread social media meme captured the cosmetic nature of replacing Bovino with Tom Holman by saying it was akin to “shitting in your pants but changing your shirt.”

If Trump’s poll numbers on immigration sink even further and more Republicans defect from the cult, we may see other symbolic heads roll – Kristi Noam, Stephen Miller, or more likely, the dismissal of so-called rogue agents who failed to follow some vague protocol. This amputation tactic might remove a gangrenous limb, but it will leave behind the rotten body of an ethnic cleansing campaign disguised as immigration policy. We can expect Holman’s “draw down” in Minneapolis to be just another ICE police state shell game; it’s terror campaign will move from blue city to blue city, advancing or retreating with the labile moods of his boss.

The administration and its paramilitary force speak the loudest and with the least ambiguity in their actions, which say, in essence, “We can do whatever the fuck we want, to whomever we want, and no one can stop us.” JD Vance announced, falsely, of course, that soldiers in Trump’s paramilitary death squads have “absolute immunity.” While that is certainly a legal fiction, in MAGA world, the law itself has become a quaint anachronism. Because the Department of Justice works for Trump and his capos, not the country, judicial rulings and warrants have all the coercive power of memos dropped in a Mafia suggestion box.

While the anti-fascist movement is growing stronger in the wake of events in Minnesota and elsewhere, MAGA is not yet in retreat. In fact, as I record this, a major escalation is underway.

Pete Hegseth has begun the process of establishing a forward operating base near the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport to supply their war against the people of Minnesota.

Lost in the reassuring polling showing that most of the country disapproves of ICE’s actions is the data revealing that most Republicans, after the murder of Renee Good, thought that ICE was doing just fine, or to put a finer point on it, she had it coming.

And in a poll conducted right after Alex Pretti’s killing, nearly half of GOP respondents approved of the level of force used by ICE.

And more than a fifth of Republicans thought ICE has not been harsh enough. I’m not sure what could be harsher than murder, but there you have it.

So now we come to the underlying psychological dynamics that link Trump’s new imperial ambitions and the ICE murders being perpetrated with his blessing. Driving both is the conservative preoccupation with dominating others. It is what animates right-wing leaders and moves their followers. As I described in my last post, domination is about the effort to subjugate, to deny, and crush the agency of others. It translates into the entitlement to steal – steal another’s freedom, labor, bodily autonomy, land, health, resources, and recognition. If that last item, recognition, seems abstract, don’t forget all the awards Trump hates others for earning – the Nobel Peace Prize, ratings, applause, attraction, admiration, and, of course, election victories.

To manage the murderous envy so central to his malignant narcissism, Trump is more than happy to steal what he can’t earn. His compulsion to acquire – whether kitschy gold adornments, female arm candy, or the resources of others – seems driven by a desperation to fill the emptiness at his core. But having the power to rob, con, intimidate, assault, or murder to get those things is, for him, a special thrill all its own.

Of course, theft and domination are aims that drive far more people than Trump. Taking from others is the logical extension of the zero-sum mental world in which right-wingers reside.

No doubt, some never-Trump Republicans will recoil at that assertion, but there is a reason he was embraced and given impunity by the GOP and not the Dems. For centuries, conservatives, whether flying under the flag of Democrats or Republicans, have wanted to conserve one thing more than any other – hierarchy – hierarchy based on class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and national identity. MAGA is unmistakably part of that lineage; they can’t conceive of power as anything other than a zero-sum game. In their minds, to be a top, there must be a bottom. They love to fight, as long as they’re punching down.

However, after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s sobering and forthright speech at the Davos conference, and the arrival of NATO countries’ soldiers on the shores of Greenland, there is a growing possibility that other nations of the world might put muscle behind their mutuality, refusing both domination and submission.

But, of course, the ultimate responsibility to resist lies with us. One of the most robust findings in the psychology of groups is the power of others’ example. It’s called social proof. When our fellow citizens appear passive, compliant, and cowering, we tend to adopt that behavior. On the other hand, when members of our community declare their outrage, demand justice, and defy corrupt and cruel authority, we are emboldened to stand with them and fight back. On March 28 of this year, the third No Kings event will be held in nearly every major city and small town across the country. Be there and inspire one another. Bravery is contagious.

Lastly and perhaps more importantly, the next midterm elections, if allowed to occur, may be our final opportunity to wrest democracy and mutuality from the slavering jaws of MAGA fascism and their project of making domination the driver behind every government policy. For those who think they are too comfortable, wealthy, or white to be affected by the outcome, I will leave you with a slightly modified version of Pericles’s ancient admonition: You may not be interested in elections, but elections are interested in you.

The invasion of Venezuela, the abduction of its dictator, and the promised seizure of its assets in many ways echo the colonial swagger of prior centuries. Dark-skinned infantilized denizens of “shit-hole countries” are disciplined and controlled by a paternalistic Uncle Sam. But so far, it has been largely a performance of imperial piracy. The long-term outcomes of the attack cannot be predicted. But we already know a few things. It was done with open contempt for and indifference to Congress. The drug-trafficking rationale has been laughable on its face, given Trump’s recent pardon of a convicted drug kingpin, Honduran ex-president Juan Hernandez. That was a pardon driven by Trump’s undisguised identification with Hernandez as a fellow gangster pursued by the dogged beat cops of the Biden administration DOJ.

The usual motive for such adventures – theft of natural resources – has been stated directly, unapologetically, and proudly. There is, of course, the usual Trumpian twist. His claim on Venezuelan oil was yet one more confession by way of accusation when he voiced the debunked lie that it was, in fact, Venezuela that was the thief of America’s oil. The MAGA regime felt no need to offer up the usual fusty rhetoric about bringing democracy and human rights to a benighted backwater plagued by dictatorship and poverty.

After the legitimately elected president of Venezuela, living in exile in Spain, Edmundo Gonzalez, insisted that he be allowed to take office, Trump said no thanks, we got it. “We will run the country,” he proclaimed. What Trump seems to mean is that he will run the thugs who have run the country all along.

He didn’t want regime change; he wanted a change of dictators. A new, more malleable autocrat, like the current corrupt vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, will do fine as long as she defers to him. In fact, a classified but leaked CIA assessmentprior to the invasion concluded that Rodríguez would be well-positioned to manage the country’s police state apparatus to maintain stability in Maduro’s absence. The carrot for any puppet regime will be its cut of the spoils. The stick will be the possible return of US forces or perhaps targeted assassinations, threats Trump has already implied would be directed against an uncooperative Rodríguez.

Like so many of Trump’s assertions, his statement that he’s working with American oil companies to extract Venezuela’s oil was a lie. In fact, industry representatives insist they have no intention of investing in the risky decades-long project of developing the industry in an unstable and violent failed state. However, Trump may ultimately succeed in bullying oil CEOs into making his pirate dream come true, just as he’s extorted so many other American institutions.

While the attack on Venezuela does appear to be about taking their stuff, more importantly, it is about Trump proclaiming his right to do so. His stance is, in essence, we’re taking it because we want it. We have the military to seize it, which is proof of our entitlement. Moreover, the entire hemisphere of the Americas is ours because we say so.

The use of the military to abduct Maduro, the murder of fishermen and perhaps small-time drug smugglers, and the extradition of America’s brown immigrants to El Salvador’s torture gulags has so far not been about achieving any grand aim, but about Trump and the mafia state he commands showing their ability and entitlement to do it, to show that the Americas are his sphere of influence. And domestically, those actions demonstrate our current de facto reality – power lies with only one branch of the federal government, Trump’s executive branch.

In a deliberate echo of the 19th-century rationale for US dominance and control of the entire Western hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine, Trump dubbed his approach the Don-Roe Doctrine, which had already been codified in the administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) document in November of 2025.

Unlike those of earlier administrations, this NSS embraces Putin’s dream of returning to the global balance of tyrannies that prevailed two centuries ago, in which the world was carved up by empires that honored one another’s territorial claims and prerogatives to defend them by any means necessary. The “Donroe Doctrine” is a scheme not all that different from the gentleman’s agreements between organized crime organizations that divide geographical areas and criminal enterprises among themselves to avoid unnecessary and costly conflicts.

The present US threat to seize Greenland reveals, with even more clarity, the dynamics at play. Denmark has made its willingness to grant the Trump administration everything it is asking for explicit – a better mineral extraction deal, more territory to station bases, more troops on the ground, and more fulsome intelligence sharing. The US side has shown no interest in the offer. Clearly, the national security reasons for Trump’s insistence that he possess Greenland are bogus. As one confidential source in communication with the American administration, as well as Denmark, said, “The problem is that Trump has gotten into his head that the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is his thing. He’s now very focused on this. And it’s hard to come to an agreement with the Danes when Trump thinks he can just take it.” For this regime of predators, as gratifying as the thing stolen is the act of stealing. Handshakes imply a kind of mutuality, a relationship the MAGA Right and conservatives more generally find loathsome, weak, and unmanly. Coercion and the brutality of asymmetric force is the point. Domination as both performance and outcome is the goal. It could be called the Dom Doctrine.

Domination is about the effort to subjugate, to deny, and crush the agency of others. To be more plainspoken, it is theft – theft of another’s freedom, labor, bodily autonomy, land, health, resources, and recognition. Taking from others is the logical extension of the zero-sum mental world in which right-wingers reside. They detest what they call “woke” because of the implication that those at the receiving end of poverty, discrimination, or mistreatment are somehow equal and equally entitled as those with privilege.

Psychologists have described and researched what they call “social dominance orientation” (SDO). I’ve written about it extensively in my book, Hatreds We Love, and in other Minding Politics Substack posts. It refers to the tendency to embrace group-based hierarchy and a corresponding aversion to equality. One’s tribe is not only viewed as superior, but that superiority justifies rule over other tribes seen as inferior.

It is an attitude that even extends to the non-human natural world, which should be subordinate to humans and exists only to be exploited. In various colonial discourses, the two have merged. In other words, non-white and indigenous people have been conflated with the rest of nature, fauna whose main value lies in their enslavement and exploitability. Over many decades of research on psychological variables that predict partisanship, SDO is among the strongest predictors. Trump and his followers’ preoccupation with dominance – especially its display in nearly all social interactions – is part of what places MAGA firmly in the conservative tradition.

Domination is a Relationship

Donald Trump is a scrupulous follower of the golden rule – not, of course, the more familiar ancient aphorism of reciprocity but the cynical, more modern one, “Whoever has the gold makes the rules.” It first appeared in print when uttered by the character of a tyrannical king in the 1965 comic strip by Brant Parker and Jonny Hart, Wizard of Id. That line and the strip’s title are presciently befitting the current White House aspirant to royal status, whose own predatory and untrammeled id guides his every action.

Trump is only the most recent American leader to be guided by that authoritarian axiom. And it has not been limited to US politicians, nor even confined to those with the power to govern. It is also embraced by a significant plurality of the governed, both here and abroad. Fascist leaders don’t endure without fascist followers.

With apologies to the consensual kink community, in politics as well as personal life, you can’t be a dom without a sub. The crucial difference is that when it comes to autocratic power in government, there is no “safe word,” only obedience or obliteration. But naked coercion makes political control brittle and unstable. And it can provoke rebellion. Much better to induce what psychologists call identity fusion, a state of mind in which, through imagined merger with the group and its leader, submission is reframed as vicarious domination.

That is why autocrats from Louis the 14th to Donald Trump have explicitly conflated the people with the nation and the nation with themselves. If the citizens are the “body-politic” and the leader is the “head” of state, together they are one inextricable organism (at least until the guillotines arrive). One of the many instances in which he stoked that merger fantasy followed his indictment for mishandling classified documents. He famously announced, “They’re not really coming after me. They’re coming after you. And I’m just standing in their way.”

The fusion message to his base takes many forms, but the central theme is always: his self-interest is the tribe’s interest, which makes it your interest. When he fights for himself, he’s really fighting for you. Each time no one holds him accountable for crimes, it is also you who are untouchable. When he adds yet one more piece of gilded kitsch to his White House wall, it’s as if your own double-wide is resplendent with luxury adornments. And perhaps most important, when he demeans, humiliates, and hurts others, you also get to enjoy the sadistic frisson of punching down and, for at least a fleeting imaginary moment, your own status soars into the heavens.

There is an overlapping term of art used to describe how subordination and abjection can be mentally inverted, “identification with the aggressor.” This concept was first developed by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi. It is often used to describe the tendency of victims of child abuse, domestic violence, or other trauma to identify with the perpetrator. In hostage scenarios, it is called “Stockholm syndrome.” It begins as a strategy to cope with powerlessness but turns malignant when the identification drives one toward self-harm or assaulting others.

In politics, it is generally tribal outsiders who are targeted for harm. As I detail in my book, Trump has always been a permissive daddy for the sadistic aggression of his base. The joy of trolling, threatening, assaulting, and killing others, either directly or vicariously through government actions, has long animated the MAGA base. We should not be surprised to see that 60% of Republicans approve of their leader’s chest-beating proclamation to run Venezuela and steal its oil. In contrast, only 16% of Democrats and 26% of Independents find it acceptable. “America First” now means America dominates. The Right wants an empire, especially if it can be achieved with maximum swagger and merciless cruelty.

“I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those who have been wronged or betrayed, I am your retribution.” So proclaimed Donald Trump at the 2023 Maryland Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), when he launched his third and ultimately successful campaign for the presidency. Of course, as in all things, he was speaking of and for himself. Payback has been his lifelong, unrelenting crusade into which he invites others to enlist.

Trump has built a career on seeking revenge against anyone who obstructed his pursuit of wealth, power, praise, and legal impunity. As a narcissist of the thin-skinned kind, every joke at his expense, mockery, criticism, and failure to praise him not only sting initially but become suppurating psychic wounds that never heal. They are also registered as endlessly accumulating debts in his ever-expanding ledger of resentments, which must be paid back with interest.

Only revenge, even many years after the initial injury, promises relief from his humiliation. Barack Obama faced an unremitting, decades-long campaign of demonization for joking about Trump’s birther slander in his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. That vendetta targeted not just Obama personally but also his political and legislative legacy, such as the Affordable Care Act. At Trump’s urging, Republican members of Congress have ceaselessly tried to overturn and erase it from history.

Revenge is so central to the MAGA vision of governing that early in the 2024 presidential campaign, one avid Trump ally, Ivan Raiklin, a former U.S. Department of Intelligence employee, anointed himself the future president’s “secretary of retribution.” Raiklin had already compiled a target list of “deep state” enemies of Dear Leader, many of whom are now in the regime’s crosshairs, such as James Comey, Leticia James, and John Bolton. He reached out to right-wing sheriffs nationwide, hoping to organize future “live-streamed swatting raids” against those who had tried to hold Trump accountable for his many crimes. Raiklin’s enemies list, circulating since January 2024, included law enforcement officials, elected officials, journalists, and TV reporters. While not holding any elected or appointed position, GOP House members allowed him to attend committee meetings.

While Trump may be a befuddled and incurious ignoramus, he and those packaging him correctly intuit the malignant psychological synergy his base has with him. His followers mirror Trump’s sense of victimization, though from a very different class position. They are mostly white middle- and lower-income men who harbor toxic bitterness over what they perceive as forces that undermine their status and dominance.

Unlike Trump, they may suffer from the very real injuries and humiliations of class. Importantly, their rage is directed away from those who truly dominate them – the petty tyrants they must obey at work and the corporate oligarchs who rig the economic and political systems to their advantage – and instead toward non-white citizens, immigrants, women demanding equal treatment, and sexual and gender minorities. Forbidden from punching upward, they have to settle for the consolation of punching downward.

Those lacking the economic resources or political power to exact vengeance directly can fork out $18.94 to Liberty Tees and have this bit of MAGA revenge swag embossed on their own camo hoodies.

Upstream from this misdirected fury and resentment is the grievance-industrial-complex, comprised of Fox News, Sinclair, fascist bro podcasts, and other MAGA propaganda outlets. Like voracious ticks, they adhere to the minds of their viewers, extract profit from the attention they command, all the while injecting their hosts with toxic political memes. Inoculated with grievance narratives about the alleged actions of countless enemies, consumers of these media become addicted to fantasies of vengeance. As you will see, their addiction is literal, not metaphorical.

The Neurochemistry of Revenge and Its Role in Politics

James Kimmel Jr., the foremost researcher on the science of revenge, cites brain activation studies showing that when people see images of others taking revenge against an alleged bad guy, it activates the nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward system, which receives a pleasurable surge of dopamine. These vicarious revenge studies mirror research with cocaine addicts who watch videos of others preparing to smoke crack. They experience a significant dopamine rush in their midbrain areas, as if they were the ones inhaling the drug. Even more remarkably, this vicarious reward activation only needs about 30 milliseconds of subliminal (non-conscious) exposure to trigger the effect.

You don’t need to be suffering a direct grievance or be the one seeking revenge to feel it. Merely fantasizing about revenge is enough to activate your dopamine system. This is something every action movie marketer understands instinctively. It is also an insight instinctively grasped by those who script the right-wing fairy tales for Rupert Murdoch, which have made his TV network such a profitable hedonic commodity. According to one study, the most common villains depicted in Fox News’ grievance narratives are women and people of color. It is no mystery that the MAGA base so ardently supports policies targeting women’s rights and aims to keep non-white citizens as a perpetual underclass.

For those who want to geek out on the neurological details of revenge circuitry, here is a simplified overview: grievance activates the anterior insula, part of the pain network. This then triggers the activation of the reward network in the dorsal striatum and nucleus accumbens. This induces a craving for reward, leading to reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex and dampening inhibition.

Ideally, a homeostasis is in effect when pursuing rewards. The inhibitory functions of the prefrontal cortex (what Kimmel calls the “stop circuitry”) should balance the gratification-seeking of the midbrain (the locus of the “go circuitry”). Like any addiction or compulsion, the unmodulated craving for revenge can have profoundly destructive effects.

Kimmel argues for a category of psychopathology he calls “revenge use disorder,” which is his term for the obsession with real or perceived grievances and a compulsive drive for revenge. His research indicates that it shares a biochemical signature very similar to substance use disorder, an established and well-understood diagnosis. Subjects with genetic variations that cause increased activity in their reward circuits also displayed heightened responses to revenge. These two addictive disorders also share the potential for high lethality. Revenge can manifest as mass killings or take milder forms, like trolling or compulsive Fox News watching. Naturally, the latter two can serve as initial steps toward the former.

It is crucial to recognize that in all these cases, the rush of dopamine happens in anticipation of a reward. The actual moment of getting a drug hit, winning big at a Vegas poker table, the sound of a protester’s skull hitting the end of an ICE baton, or a Trump opponent being lynched isn’t necessary. For the couch-bound MAGA TV viewer, just the promise of revenge against the enemy du jour is enough. So far in Trump’s second term, the sadistic punishment of immigrants is one promise he is actually fulfilling.

Grievance Porn, The Fox News Business Model

The process of revenge starts with a grievance over a real or imagined injury. This creates the motivation to seek revenge against the perceived culprit. That retaliation feels incredibly satisfying. It is so neurochemically rewarding that, over time, people can become addicted to the cycle of harboring grievances and seeking retribution. Research on revenge shows that it’s not just the grievance that fuels the desire for vengeance, but the vengeful acts or even fantasies of revenge are so enjoyable that some people seek out opportunities to stoke their grievances.

That easily stirred lust has made Rupert Murdoch and the lesser merchants of political grievance who followed in his wake very wealthy. Their unwritten business model became legible during Fox News’ promotion of the 2020 stolen election lie. When a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked Trump’s voter-fraud fable and tweeted about the lack of evidence, then Fox star Tucker Carlson went into a rage. Even though he had expressed his own disbelief in the Big Lie, Carlson ranted in a group email (which later became evidence in the Dominion voting machine libel suit), “Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Of course, right-wing media moguls did not create the grievance-revenge circuitry; they merely profit from it. By cultivating a tribal identity, they promoted the informational self-segregation necessary to maximize and target grievance motivation. This helps explain why right-wingers often stick to media outlets like Fox, which reliably deliver a steady stream of grievance narratives and vicarious tales of revenge against those perceived as responsible – liberals, fact-based media, scientists, assorted experts, and the usual suspects listed above.

Their efforts to restrict free speech, to the contrary, Republicans and the Trump regime—unlike most other authoritarian movements and governments of the past—do not need censorship or total control of all media to manage the flow of information to the public. They can count on the inherently gratifying nature of the grievance-industrial-complex to keep tribal eyes from wandering.

As I’ve noted, to achieve the physiological reward of revenge, merely the fantasy of exacting it is pleasurable. However, that pleasure is short-lived, producing a craving for more. This might explain why spouses and other family members I’ve worked with in therapy often say they can’t get their loved ones to turn off the TV when Fox is on.

The Grievance-Revenge Algorithm on Social Media

It’s not just right-wing media that have profited from revenge addiction. Kimmel writes about a Facebook whistleblower’s congressional testimony, claiming that the platform’s algorithm favors posts that evoke grievances. This, in turn, encourages revenge-driven responses. Regardless of users’ partisan identities, engagement rises, benefiting both Facebook and its eyeball-hungry advertisers. Additionally, a post’s circulation and prominence grow as it receives more angry emojis than likes from users. This algorithm reversed a decline in user engagement.

The rise in hate rhetoric, conspiracy mongering, and disinformation proved to be too profitable for Mark Zuckerberg to want to moderate or stop it. Just before the January 6^th MAGA insurrection, the algorithm caused a surge of posts calling for violence and executions in response to the “stolen election.” That was not the first time Facebook’s grievance-revenge algorithm contributed to political violence. Amnesty International published a report revealing Facebook’s role in fueling ethnic hatred against the Rohingya starting in 2012, which led to a genocidal campaign by Myanmar security forces in 2017. Kimmel cites a study showing that X (formerly Twitter) is the main recruitment platform for right-wing and Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups, from Neo-Nazis to Al Shabab.

The Trumpian metanarrative of revenge is also strikingly similar to Hitler’s. Hitler was driven by intense and obsessive grievance, which, like Trump’s, took an explicitly ethnic form. Essentially, the message is: We, good white Christian patriots, have been hard done by those tribal outsiders and our own nation’s liberal enablers and race traitors. For both Trump and Hitler, the ethnic other is seen as a contamination that ‘pollutes the blood.” And for both, cleansing revenge means abduction to concentration camps, torture, or ultimately eradication.

Perpetrators and Victims, Real and Imagined

The drive to seek revenge for perceived wrongs is both an evolved instinct and a neuroplastic development. In other words, it exists as a potential in all humans, but its expression depends on specific environmental conditions. For those capable of enough self-reflection, it can be consciously modulated. To do so, we must distinguish revenge from self-defense and delusional injury from real harm.

Solitary spree killers and school shooters often cite an actual, but usually imagined, injury they suffered at the hands of others, and then seek revenge. For right-wing incels, it’s women they can’t possess. For racists, it’s non-white people. For homophobes, it’s gay individuals. For the MAGA lynch mob member, it might be Democrats or liberals. For the confused misanthrope, it could be fellow humans in general. The revenge carried out by these “lone-wolf” mass murderers is a form of collective punishment, not unlike that inflicted at a group level by Hamas, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Putin’s soldiers in Ukraine. The individual identities of the targeted outsider group members fade, merging into a generalized “them.” One is designated an enemy simply by belonging to the targeted group.

Many perpetrators were once actual victims. In cases of collective punishment, those former victims might not have been harmed by the specific people they seek revenge against. Especially in feuds between clans or ethnic groups, such distinctions rarely matter. Whether or not revenge is precisely targeted, a history of victimization—real or perceived—is often used to justify violent actions. This dual identity, being both a perpetrator and a victim, appears in nearly every act of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and it can also fuel larger conflicts like nation-state wars. Usually, the label of perpetrator is disavowed by the in-group and attributed to the outsider group. Religious terrorists—whether Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, or Christian—often leverage their victim identity to claim a moral exemption for mass murder.

Part of what makes torture or murder rewarding is the belief that one is exacting righteous retribution for a crime against one’s own group. Slaughter that fits into a story of grievance and revenge is something to boast about, not deny.

Revenge and Political Masochism

Revenge drives some citizens to vote against their own material self-interest. As I detailed in my book on the psychology of political tribalism, Hatreds We Love, Republican voters are the most harmed by Republican policies. Many social psychology studies indicate that people who feel wronged by others are often willing to accept significant financial losses to punish those they see as wrongdoers. Evolutionary psychologists call this altruistic punishment. In the context of cutting the social safety net, the logic is: if “undeserving” and “lazy” poor people, mainly non-White populations in urban areas, are denied food stamps and healthcare, we should be willing to suffer the pain of losing those benefits.

This has been the lose-lose strategy of working-class and underclass GOP voters for generations. As long as Republican politicians and Fox News can promote grievance narratives about immigrants benefiting from healthcare subsidies (the current fiction they have crafted to undo Obamacare) and welfare cheats stealing tax dollars that fund entitlements, some of their voters will happily trade their own benefits for the addictive pleasure of depriving unworthy others of those benefits and feel virtuous in the process.

My bad-news-battered readers might wonder where hope lies. Is it even possible to break the hold that political revenge addiction has over so many citizens? Remember that, like other addictions, the reward of revenge is fleeting. When it has been inflicted, whether in reality or fantasy, nothing really changes afterward. Our psychic or material suffering persists unabated. This presents an opportunity for those in the prosocial/prodemocracy/pro-planet resistance movement to highlight the connection between genuine grievances and their root causes, use that shared understanding to build alliances across tribal lines, and hold actual perpetrators accountable.

The psychological and messaging approach to creating that trans-tribal coalition is discussed in the last chapter of my book. I hope some of you will be inspired to explore it. Of course, not everyone can be reached. Many in MAGA will fiercely resist any effort to break the umbilical link to their favorite right-wing propaganda outlets. But if fair elections continue in the US, all we’ll need is a majority.

If an anti-fascist coalition can win elections again, it would also revivify another crucial institution that could serve as a bulwark against the perils of individual and group vengeance: a functional, independent, and fair justice system. In the most recent Democratic Justice Department, led by Merrick Garland, timidity, delay, and political caution share responsibility with Republican sycophancy for Trump’s currently lawless and corrupt regime. And now, under his autocratic control, the Justice Department has become the vehicle for personal vendettas rather than providing an alternative to them.

First, a self-preserving disclaimer: Given the current climate of manufactured conspiratorial hysteria around Kirk’s killing, MAGA’s conflation of criticism with calls for political violence, and my own desire to avoid an involuntary vacation to a Salvadoran gulag, I must belabor the obvious. Refusing to canonize an odious cheerleader for neo-Nazi ideology and a committed hater of multicultural democracy is not the same as celebrating his murder.

Even those who utter the most vile speech should not be targeted for violence. Unlike Trump and his party, the self-appointed vigilantes and trolls who make up his nationwide lynch mob, and Kirk himself, no principled civil liberties advocate would argue differently. OK, end of disclaimer.

The Right loved Charlie Kirk because he could make outrageous neo-Nazi views seem like reasonable debate topics. As a congenial mouthpiece for fascist ideas, he became one of the “very fine people on both sides” whom Trump praised after the 2017 white supremacist march in Charlottesville, VA.

Back then, Trump’s effort to differentiate the good neo-Confederates from the bad white supremacists and Nazis rang hollow. Now, that sort of ambiguous and false distinction is no longer necessary. Unapologetic Nazis have found themselves welcome in Trump’s inner circle. MAGA conservative pundits like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens are even making concerted and explicit efforts to rehabilitate Hitler. Right-wing conspiracy huckster Alex Jones now sports a Hitler moustache, which, he insists, has “had a wild effect on women. I thought they were about to start throwing their panties at me.”

Until his murder, Kirk was the superstar of fascist normalization. His fan base extended well beyond the Trump GOP. Modern neo-Nazi groups proudly claim him as one of their own. At a memorial for him in Huntington Beach, California, the fascist group Patriot Front chanted, “White men fight back!” They understand, just as Kirk did, who their enemies are.

Shortly after the assassination, it was revealed that Kirk’s killer was not some bloodthirsty racial justice warrior of color, born in the primordial ooze of some West Coast woke Gomorrah. Tyler Robinson was a political independent from a white, Christian, MAGA conservative, gun-loving family. He was such an unsatisfying culprit for the Right that Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox said, “For 33 hours, I was praying that if this had to happen here, it wouldn’t be one of us – that someone drove from another state, or someone came from another country. Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for…”

Robinson’s sociopolitical milieu was a reality too complex, too counterintuitive to accept, because the right-wing worldview is founded on the notion that problems originate mainly from tribal outsiders. Immigrants and non-white citizens (aided by political liberals) exist as a kind of contaminant or infection in the culture. They “poison the blood,” as Trump and Hitler were both known to warn against. In Trump’s first term, the solution was building “the Wall.” Now, a more aggressive cleansing is required. Unlike Governor Cox’s begrudging acceptance of reality, Trump and his minions immediately rejected the view that the perpetrator of Kirk’s killing was a lone individual. Robinson was merely an expendable pawn in a vast conspiracy involving Antifa, liberals, comedians, George Soros, and Democrats. The Trump regime quickly adopted exterminationist rhetoric and called for collective punishment against anyone vaguely “left.”

The Method Behind Kirk’s Propaganda Success

Overlooked by apologists on the Left and the Right was the rhetorical strategy operating in plain sight that drove Kirk’s “debates” with young students. To debate with him about whether Black people are inherently murderous and low-IQ predators or whether LGBT people are pedophilic groomers is to validate those assertions. It’s the racist version of the Christian Right’s demand that biology classes in schools teach “both sides” of the concept of natural selection, evolutionary science and “intelligent design.” The very structure of a “debate” creates a symmetry between evidence-based positions and crackpot lunacy, elevating the latter to the status of the former.

Resolved: “Because God prefers rich, conservative, straight white people, they are entitled to dominate everyone else.” Prove me wrong!

Before the current whitewash of Kirk’s legacy bleaches out his actual history, it is vital to remember that he called for the murder of President Biden, rushed to the defense of the MAGA thug who fractured the skull of Paul Pelosi, and put crosshairs on the heads of professors whose speech he didn’t like. Many of those on Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” continue to live with death threats from right-wing terrorists.

Kirk worship, mandatory in the red parts of the country, is the Confederacy’s “lost cause” refound. There is no need to bring statues of the fusty old slaver, Robert E. Lee, back into the public square. There is a more current savior of the white race. Sculptures of Saint Charlie will now be erected on college campuses in Texas and Florida, and likely elsewhere.

New York’s Cardinal Timothy Nolan described Kirk as a “modern-day St. Paul” and a “hero.” Those who failed to place Kirk in their pantheon of political deities have paid a hefty price for exercising free speech. Many across the country, including everyday people and celebrities, have been fired or otherwise punished. Non-citizens perceived as lacking a pious attitude toward MAGA’s fallen martyr have had their visas revoked and been deported.

Even well-meaning liberals like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and California Governor Gavin Newsom opted for hysterical blindness when it came to recalling Kirk’s character. When it mattered most, they sacrificed historical truth for the sake of illusory political harmony. Maybe they thought their encomiums to Kirk would somehow immunize them against being targeted in the promised holy war against liberals and Trump critics. Let’s hope they and the rest of us are not so embedded in wishful thinking that we let our passports expire.

Speaking of campaigns of vengeance against the innocent to rectify delusional grievances, stay tuned. My next Substack will explore the neuroscience of political revenge, the animating emotion behind MAGA, and why it’s as addictive as cocaine.

The conspiracy story surrounding the “Epstein Files” might be as fictional as those on The X Files, but the facts of the case have only partially mattered to the Trump base. Like the stolen election big lie, climate denial, and the myth of predatory immigrant invaders, the belief in an Epstein-funded international cabal of liberal cannibalistic pedophiles is key to MAGA catechism. They are stories so saturated with group identity that denying them risks being expelled from the tribe. For Trump to now repudiate such a foundational tale has generated shock and horror among the faithful. He might as well have announced he was transitioning to “Donna,” donating his fortune to Planned Parenthood, and campaigning to place the visage of Barack Obama on Mt. Rushmore. But before we can understand the impact of this shocking renunciation, we have to disentangle reality from fantasy, even when they might overlap.

There are two Epstein stories. The real-world one features an accused pedophile, his various enablers like Ghislaine Maxwell, friends who may have participated in his crimes, and a coterie of hangers-on. Epstein was charged with multiple crimes but ultimately received a sweetheart deal from a prosecutor, Alex Acosta. He would later become Trump’s Secretary of Labor. Acosta was eventually pressured to resign once his legal coddling of Epstein was exposed. Epstein’s putative suicide under conditions of a 24-hour watch, along with a highly edited and truncated videotape that doesn’t even show all the entrances to his cell, has not earned public confidence in the official account of his death. These suspicious details have generated considerable fodder for conspiratorial speculation, some of which may one day be confirmed.

Then there is the MAGA/Q-Anon conspiracy narrative version, heavily promoted by Trump. The central characters in that story, beyond Epstein and Maxwell, include a global cabal of pedophilic Democratic politicians, Hollywood liberals, and bankers who, in addition to sexually exploiting their young victims, harvest and ingest their blood for its immortality-promoting constituents. Some readers will recognize this as an updated iteration of the medieval antisemitic fantasy of Jews stealing the blood of Christian children to use in matzo bread.

In that MAGA version, somewhere in the Justice Department documents, there is a list of all the deep-state members of the Epstein cabal, the proverbial “client list,” which he kept as blackmail material to ensure he would never be prosecuted. According to Q believers, Trump was anointed by God to bring that cabal of left-wing predators to justice, possibly through mass public executions. This would usher in a glorious golden age where diseases are magically cured, and righteousness prevails on Earth. The “myth” of climate change will be dispelled, and the natural disasters attributed to it will cease because the liberal elite will no longer be able to manipulate the weather.

Remarkably, in the real world outside the conspiracy story, MAGA/Q-Anon cult members have seemed mostly unfazed by Donald Trump’s long history of sexual predation, his conviction for sexual abuse, lecherous comments he made about his own daughter, and his proud boast about being able to grope women without consequences. His long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was never a secret. Epstein himself said, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” Trump even acknowledged that he and his friend shared a preference for women “on the younger side.” If any member of the ruling elite were being protected by the government’s handling of Epstein’s crimes and his soft-ball prosecution, it would be Donald Trump. However, in the MAGA/Q-Anon conspiracy version of the Epstein story, all of that is overlooked, rationalized, or mostly denied. Instead, Trump is portrayed as the hero working behind the scenes in a kind of conspiracy of virtue to bring the sexual predators and child molesters in Epstein’s world to justice.

Like other right-wing myths, belief in the Epstein conspiracy has been key to membership in the Trump cult. As the high priest of his tribe, Trump is revered. Seen as infallible, all-powerful, and all-knowing, his words are treated as absolute truth. Until now, no amount of evidence contradicting him could shake his followers' faith. Like all cults, believing in the leader’s claims is more about group loyalty than facts. There are policy views, such as those on tariffs, taxes, national debt, or foreign interventions. Then, some beliefs are deeply tied to group identity. Psychologist Dan Kahan refers to such ideas as 'identity-protective cognitions.”

Rejecting those beliefs can lead to exile from the tribe. Therefore, it is crucial to embrace them even if they defy all logic and contradict available facts. And it is not entirely irrational to do so. Evolution has programmed us to value our place in the group above all other considerations. For most of human history, our survival depended on it. That is what makes social proof so persuasive when it comes to consumer choices, voting preferences, and opinions on issues. It explains why product and political advertisers constantly endeavor to show “people like us” endorsing a medication, breakfast cereal, movie, or congressional candidate. It’s also why polls shape as well as measure public opinion. This is the driver behind the relentless pursuit of reviews for nearly everything we buy or use, as well as our trust in their veracity. For many people, especially conservatives, it can seem like a small step from being an outlier to becoming an outsider.

The Epstein Conspiracy Story and the MAGA Mind

We need to understand the Epstein conspiracy theory and others circulating among Trump supporters within the larger psychological context of MAGA. In this world, the most convincing stories are those that cannot be verified or disproven with evidence. Hidden plots involving malicious actors operating behind the scenes generate the most excitement and fear among the base. This relies on humans’ well-known “negativity bias,” a trait some researchers have found to be more pronounced in conservatives.

Our ancestors were more likely to pass on their genes if they assumed danger rather than safety in uncertain situations. And unseen threats provoke more fear than visible ones. We are primed to worry more about covert threats than overt ones. We can’t protect ourselves against what might emerge from the shadows. So, it is best to maintain constant vigilance and share news of danger with others. Perceiving threat in the face of ambiguity is motivated by a need to keep us from being sucker punched by reality. Whatever usefulness this may have had for early humans, the persistence of this tendency can lead us to a state of debilitating paranoia.

Another feature of the right-wing mindset that supports MAGA’s conspiracy stories is rigid black-and-white thinking. To reduce ambiguity, this may come from the same threat management need as the negativity bias. Right-wing stories tend to feature purely bad perpetrators and entirely good victims. They are ready-made narratives that MAGA supporters are conditioned to understand, accept, and share. This kind of thinking also makes people more receptive to metaphors of infection. So, when Trump or Stephen Miller says our pure white culture is being contaminated by the dirty other, or that immigrants are “poisoning the blood,” little explanation is needed. Eliminating the infection is seen as the key to making America great again.

If those malevolent conspiracies can never be proven false, they serve as a dependable tool of fear that can be used whenever the regime needs to boost loyalty. More importantly, if the truth can never be fully uncovered and is unknowable, it allows Trump the freedom to shape reality for his followers. The obvious Orwellian irony of his social media site, Truth Social, is that it is made up almost entirely of falsehoods that reflect what Trump wants his base to believe.

His compulsive lying and his hatred of evidence are well known. It may include fabrications about communicable diseases, weather, economic data, legal judgments against him, or science in general. The truth is whatever Trump says it is. He insists that nothing be known or believed beyond what he proclaims. We could call him an epistemological autocrat. It is no wonder that he despises experts of all kinds, appoints feckless incompetents to nearly every role in his administration, and declared after his 2016 victory, “I love the poorly educated.”

After years of pushing the Epstein conspiracy theory, along with his allies in Congress and right-wing media, the base’s demand to release the “client list,” which may or may not exist and could or could not expose Trump, has caused a frantic reversal by the president and his closest aides. There is no list, nothing to see here, so please move on. In many past scandals and issues, denial, projection of responsibility, and his demand for blind trust kept the base calm. But that might not work this time.

The core of the MAGA crisis is the cognitive dissonance it causes. Since Trump is the cult’s high priest, if not its ruling deity, and the Epstein conspiracy theory is part of its essential gospel, how do followers reconcile the contradiction when the priest rejects the gospel? I cannot predict how this will unfold. Will the identity-protective belief be retained, possibly leading to Trump’s dethronement? Or, as in many past cases, will identity-protective reverence for him cause followers to lose interest in the scandal or find an expendable scapegoat, such as Pam Bondi, to blame for the betrayal? Will Trump succeed in offering up a diverting piece of red-meat grievance to distract the base? Contemplating more wishful scenarios, perhaps the formerly faithful will recognize the fraudulent nature of both his conspiracy stories and his persona. If that happens, this episode might finally enable his followers to see the little man behind the curtain.

“I want to be a prick just like Donald Trump,” proclaimed Michael early in our psychoanalytic work together. Finding his “deep masculinity” through mythopoetic men’s drum circles, shooting his gun at the local firing range, and pumping iron did not suffice. He longed for a personality makeover that would enable him to be cold, cruel, and ruthless, believing it would make him a “real man.” That was his goal for treatment, which I continually frustrated by exploring his need for it. Michael’s failure to weaponize himself in that way led to relentless self-denigration, as well as disappointment in me.

That moment in our work took place in 2004, thirteen years before Trump became a serious candidate for office. Back then, The Donald was merely a vacuous celebrity famous for being famous, and a corrupt, racist, and predatory nepo-baby developer who cultivated the fictitious persona of a bootstrapped business genius, which he enhanced with mob-boss affectations. This was also the year the self-proclaimed entrepreneurial savant filed the first of six bankruptcies for his failed casinos. (Let’s remember that a casino is a business in which customers line up to give you lots of money in exchange for brain-addling quantities of alcohol, a dopamine-fueled fantasy of instant wealth, and the risk of a greased slide into poverty. How Trump could come to financial ruin by hoovering up the hard-earned cash of the desperate and gullible remains a mystery.)

While a secular evangelist of the prosperity gospel, Trump was (and remains) a grifter relentlessly on the prowl for the next mark. Many, like my patient, were smitten with the performance and saw him as a model to emulate. As Michael already had an anatomical prick, what he envied was Trump’s psychological prick – the sense of entitlement to dominate others, to take what and whom he covets, and crush those who impede his pursuit of self-interest.

While “penis envy” was second-wave feminism’s Freudian bête noire, the conventional critique mistook the organ (the penis) for the symbol (the phallus) and missed the real sufferers of this hypothetical condition – males. The phallus is a signifier of omnipotence, invulnerability, absolute self-sufficiency, and complete domination. It is something that no one has and many want. Readers may recognize the centrality of this phallic psychology in the rhetoric and policies of MAGA Republicans. In one of the few manifestations of gender equality on the Right, being a dick is an opportunity available to women and well as men, and it is rapidly becoming this regime’s governing philosophy.

The phallic woman is depicted in this reproduction of an ancient Roman sculpture.

The symbolic equation between untrammeled power and the phallus did not originate with the fanciful conjuring of psychoanalysts with too much time on their hands. We can find it etched on the ancient Greek pottery used to commemorate military victories, which featured erect penises and scenes of losers in a war being anally raped. It can also be found in the imagery of contemporary editorial cartoons. In my 2005 book, The Wimp Factor, I describe numerous iterations of this theme. In the 1990s, Hillary Clinton redefined the role of First Lady. Determined not to be a demure, cookie-baker standing by her man, she showed herself to be an intellectual and wonky power-house partner to her husband, Bill. That defiance of female gender norms ushered in decades of right-wing depictions of her as both a castrator of men and the one in the marriage who not only wore the pants but also the package. Even Spy Magazine made an unsubtle contribution to this genre. Their cover featured an alteration of the famous Marilyn Monroe photo over a heating grate. Photoshopped with the head of Hillary, it showed hot air blowing the hem of her skirt upwards, revealing a pair of men’s underwear fully equipped with a penis.

This cover may be blurry due to decades of photocopying, but the message remains clear.

This image and the many others like it that circulated at the time illustrate how some in our culture, especially those on the Right, view female power. It also suggests that the phallus and what it represents are perceived as detachable and mobile. While Spy played gender fluidity for laughs, it was and remains an abiding fear for conservatives. It terrifies them because, at some level, they believe gender is not so immutable and view that possibility with horror. For decades, conservative men in particular have projected their anxieties about the instability of manhood onto the political playing field. Trapped in the gendered version of their zero-sum worldview, women’s agency is seen as a theft from men. The exception to that paranoid narrative is when female conservatives don phallic armor to fight for the patriarchy and other elite privileges.

The Phallus as a psychological and social signifier is quite portable.

The OG phallic woman of the modern Right is Ann Coulter. In the early 2000s, she was fond of insulting her male critics with femiphobic epithets like “girly-boy” and “panty waist.” Regarding predominantly Muslim nations, Coulter advised her Republican colleagues to “invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Following the revelations of Rush Limbaugh’s drug habit, comedian Bill Maher said in his January 23 2004 monologue on his HBO show Real Time, “This has been the toughest week for conservatives since Ann Coulter admitted she had a penis.”

Combative, arrogant, obdurate, and lacerating of opponents, Coulter was the prototype for the next generation of fascist Barbies that became the standard for Fox News’ primetime lineup. She also provided a role model for the MAGA dominatrices currently holding political office, like Kristy Noem and Pam Bondi, who translate their boss’s sadism into policy. We also see the Coulter legacy of dickishness in the repudiation of empathy expressed by Iowa GOP Senator Joni Ernst at her recent town hall. An anxious constituent responding to the proposed cuts to Medicaid in the Republican budget bill yelled out, “People are going to die.” Ernst shrugged and replied with icy dismissiveness, “We are all going to die.”

Destroying health care is lethal enough; the pistol is redundant.

In my most recent book, Hatreds We Love, I look at the subtypes of MAGA’s most oxymoronic strata, anti-feminist women. It includes trad-wife warriors for female subordination prominent among the base, and the policy pugilists who now staff the administration. It is the latter I’m focusing on here. They are part of the regime charged with delivering the punishments Dear Leader mandates for his enemies of the day, whether it be abducting and transporting migrants to the perpetual torment of Salvadoran gulags, enabling an early death for the millions who rely on subsidized food, shelter, and health care, shuttering universities that don’t end fact-based education, or investigating and incarcerating political opponents.

For MAGA’s female enforcers, their actions are accessorized with the cosmetics of phallic fem cruelty. Various observers of right-wing fashion have described the carefully curated look. It includes stiletto heels, makeup so thick it functions as a kind of facial Kevlar, heavily lacquered talons, pendulous plastic eye lashes, warpaint eyebrows courtesy of Sharpie, and the de rigueur glistening metallic crucifix that no holy warrior would leave home without. When lip plumpers, cheek fillers, and wrinkle relaxers are added, the result is what some have called the “Mar-a-Lago face,” the perfect complement to gravity-defying and surgically engineered neo-breasts.

Ultimately, her “Mar-a-Lago face” would not save her from replacement.

The aesthetic seems to be the cosmetic equivalence of Trump’s toilet chandeliers and garish gold wall adornments — defiantly unsubtle, unapologetic, and cheesy status displays. It must be said that prominent political women and men on the Left also make use of fashion signifiers, but like liberals more generally, they are more heterogeneous in their fashion choices. At least, that is the observation of a sociologist of fashion, Anna Akbari. As I document in my current book, when it comes to policy, opinion, neighborhoods, and self-presentation, liberals tend to prefer diversity to uniformity.

All this may leave some wondering why MAGA women’s exoskeleton of phallic hardness is not just tolerated but admired by an administration and voting base that otherwise revile any deviation from traditional gender norms. The answer may lie in the fact that it is a display ultimately designed to please their man – the Royal Prick himself, Donald Trump. He is quite likely flattered to see his dickish cruelty reflected back by what one reporter dubbed his “MAGA Mean Girls.” Trump’s snickering pleasure at the violent and sadistic actions of the national lynch mob over which he presides has always been obvious. He is no doubt gratified that his foot soldiers in Manolo Blahniks stand ready to stomp on anyone who displeases him. As Echoes to his Narcissus, they are perfectly aligned with the Right’s perspective on who women and men are supposed to be.

In Taylor Sheridan’s signature series about the modern West, Yellowstone, the landscape is depicted as a timeless treasure threatened by various putatively liberal scourges, all centered in Bozeman’s growing Californication – yoga emporiums, overpriced boutiques featuring ersatz cowboy couture, permissive parents of entitled brats, and every species of sanctimonious Left Coast woke.

Culture-war pearl-clutching aside, on planet reality, the climate crisis is the accelerating disaster that eclipses every other affliction and conceivable complaint. However, in the show, it is never mentioned or perhaps deliberately omitted. Interestingly, in the background of numerous scenes, the repressed returns in the form of smoke from Montana’s increasingly catastrophic wildfires. The smoke, while ever-present, is acknowledged only once in the script, presumably because it sullied the bucolic vistas to the point that it couldn’t be ignored or doctored by the film crew. After a naïve tree-hugging environmentalist expresses alarm over it, one of Dutton’s ranch hands calmly but with notable exasperation cowboy-splains that the fires are caused by lightning and are thus a normal, seasonal occurrence and an unavoidable feature of nature’s predictable cycles.

Meanwhile, back in the world outside Sheridan’s right-wing morality tale, Montana’s forests have been devastated by a decidedly abnormal degree of drought, beetle infestation, and cataclysmic fires. The massive death of trees has turned those forests from a carbon sink into a net carbon emitter. Ironically, in the wake of that destruction, the endeavors that the Dutton family most revere are also imperiled, such as ranching, rodeos, hunting, and fishing.

In Sheridan’s new conservative fable, Landman, he shifts from climate denial to climate nihilism. Human-caused global warming is real but unavoidable. Yes, we’re headed for disaster, but all the proposed solutions for eliminating fossil fuel dependency would only worsen matters. It’s best to extract all we can, make a buck, and keep our truck tanks full.

Tommy Norris, played by Billy Bob Thornton, is the strenuously grizzled tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold landman fixer for the oil company M-Tex. It’s a profitable but midlevel company that exploits ruthlessly, battles the ever-meddling federal government over its pointless regulations, and makes mutually backscratching deals with murderous local Mexican drug cartel leaders. Unlike the big guys, such as Exxon-Mobile, it treats its employees like family, even as it constantly puts them in harm’s way, assigning jobs that occasionally kill and maim the grumbling but hard-working and loyal petro proletarians. The tumultuous lives of M-Tex CEOs and workers, on and off the oil patch, anchor the show -- their tragedies, safety-defying heroism, violence, mockery of women, and other manly melodramas.

Echoing the conservative hectoring of Yellowstone’s sage “salt-of-the-Earth” ranch hand characters, Tommy responds to a strawman environmentalist’s questions by vomiting up a monologue of pseudo-facts like a MAGA post-truth Wikipedia. He’s another Sheridan character scripted to regurgitate right-wing lies with conviction, like so many Republicans in the real world.

In one scene, Tommy explains to a naïve big-city lawyer that the windmills she sees in the oil fields are used to power equipment that is out of range of the usual utility lines. But he’s quick to point out (falsely and uncorrected in the script) that each one will take 20 years to offset the carbon footprint created by their manufacture. Like so many others in the show, this claim is utterly bogus. One study showed that the actual offset takes an average of 5.3 months. Another found that high-energy output turbines can recoup the carbon required to build them in as little as 64 days. But in the MAGA-verse, anything that affirms their worldview, regardless of disconfirming evidence, becomes gospel and goes viral. A writer for RedState breathlessly proclaimed about that scene and others, “Every left-winger should have his eyes held open and should be forced to watch this on repeat until it sinks in.”

Newsweek offered up an impressive list of well-researched fact-checks in its valiant effort to constrain the gushers of petrochemical industry propaganda that emanate from the mouths of the show’s characters. The reporter, Tom Norton, effectively demolishes the preposterous lies about the impact of, necessity for, and available alternatives to fossil fuel extraction.

Straining to be fair-minded, Norton points out that the series “is by no means an apology letter or puff piece for the oil industry, as it depicts industrial corruption and the inherent human danger involved in drilling.” What he overlooks is that admiring those who get away with corruption and defying, if not denying, life-threatening hazards are key features of the MAGA worldview. Showing the corruption and brutality of the industry is Sheridan’s way of celebrating it. Saying “fuck you” to laws and regulations designed to protect the workforce and the environment upon which all life depends is perfectly consonant with the freedom to harm so often demanded by the Right.

Domination, the other defining value of conservatives, which I discuss extensively in my book, is a theme that runs through Sheridan’s work. The relationship one should strive to have with women, men, animals, and the rest of the natural world is subjugation. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed. Exploit or be exploited. Masculinity itself is defined by one’s success in subordinating others and staying on top. Whether the resource to be exploited is a patch of West Texas dirt that veils a voluptuous oil reservoir or a female body that also exists for the taking, the imperative is the same – drill, baby, drill. The same sentiment can be heard in the current favorite meme of MAGA bros, “Your body, my choice.”

Readers might view the comparison between those two iterations of entitled resource extraction as a rather specious analogy. But I would invite you to consider the research that shows a real-world association between those seemingly unrelated modes of domination. In the North Dakota oil fields, scholars found that after the area was opened for exploitation, the incidence of sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking rose dramatically in local communities. In the West Texas drilling zones, groping, sexual harassment, and retaliatory actions against women who filed complaints about it are quite common. In Native communities where oil development has advanced, the rate of disappearance, murder, and sex trafficking of Indigenous women has increased significantly. Those associations have not been limited to the oil fields or the US. Another extraction industry, Australian mining, is also a site of profound misogynist violence.

In the more romanticized version of environmental plunder and sexism enacted in Landman, the men are nearly all predators who exhibit varying degrees of compensatory charm. The women generally fit into one of the three stereotypes common to many right-wing narratives. There is the aerobicized, plasticized, borderline anorexic bimbo with an insatiable sexual appetite and an even more powerful lust for shopping, which comes in both MILF and adolescent varieties. They are what all men want, the story tells us. A man who has one is the envy of his peers.

Then there are the non-demanding, self-sacrificing, hard-done-by mothers and wives who possess a certain wisdom but need the help of good men to get by. They are the gender version of the noble savage fantasy. They are nearly all pious Mexican immigrant women in this show. In his hit series Yellowstone, that role was occupied by Native American characters. (The Mexican men in Landman, on the other hand, are depicted as violent, knuckle-dragging thugs who either work for M-Tex or the cartels.)

Finally, we have the phallic women, female characters who exercise a kind of sadistic agency by being even bigger pricks than the men, often besting males in their own pissing contests. The chief example in Landman is Rebecca Falcone, the company’s stiletto-heeled mercenary risk-management attorney. Like her avian namesake, Falcone is a legal predator who swoops in to kill her opposing litigants with grace and skill. She is a heartless consigliere who seems as if she would not think twice about harvesting the organs of widows and orphans if it would boost her employer’s profit margin.

Tommy Norris is a master of the profane bon mot. He oscillates between malignant and benevolent sexism, whatever the occasion calls for. A good representative of his benevolent mode is a scene in which Tommy catches his cartoonishly “hot” daughter smooching a celebrity football star. To express his paternal concern for his progeny’s virtue, he grabs the guy and punches him in the throat.

In Sheridan’s version of petro-masculinity, having a dick means you have to be one – to men, women, and the planet. And fuck those Chicken Littles who whine about extinction. Let’s party while we’re here.

Lastly, it may seem like a trivial and self-indulgent, if not masturbatory, undertaking to analyze the narrative subtext of a TV show. But in a country like the US, where people increasingly eschew facts, evidence, and expertise, what citizens understand about the world primarily comes from the emotionally compelling stories they hear. If nothing else, Taylor Sheridan is a master storyteller. That makes the unexamined and easy to swallow conservative assumptions embedded in his entertaining parables all the more important to identify and challenge. As that ardent RedState author illustrates, a well-told fabrication can easily be more persuasive than bloodless data. But it is not enough to critique the fictions that flatter and enrich oil oligarchs. Those of us on the side of planetary vitality, equality, democracy, and truth must tell better and more enthralling stories.

“Oh no, not another piece about him. I can’t bear it!” But wait. Before you hit delete, let me say that I share your disgust and exasperation with having to ceaselessly bear witness to the pathology and predatory impulses of the vilest psychological exhibitionist of our lifetime. Opening my news feed daily for the past decade has meant waking up to the open raincoat of that attention-hungry creep desperate for us to look.

Sometimes, I can only watch MSNBC for about 30 seconds before the bilious revulsion begins. Since his election, reality has felt like a lethal pathogen. I want to keep it out. But we are about to enter a period when reality and the ability to know it will be under assault like never before. If we are going to be effective warriors against MAGA post-truth and the pillage and plunder that is the aim of the coming regime, we have to tolerate keeping our eyes open. In that spirit, I have penned this take on one of the most resilient fictions of the Trumpocene. So, please bear with me. Grab a glass of wine, a beer, or a bottle of Pepto-Bismol (best not to mix them), and read on.

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Trump’s fraudulent claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential contest have been one the most lucrative grifts of his long career in con artistry. Not only did he scoop up millions of dollars in donations, but other Republicans, like the oleaginous Ted Cruz, could raise funds by hitching their wagons to that useful fable of unearned grievance.

However, there was far more than economic profit to be extracted from what has been widely referred to as the Big Lie by fact-based journalists and scholars. It also serves key psychological functions for Trump. It helps him in his ceaseless Sisyphean struggle to see himself as a winner and offers an opportunity to dominate others, two goals that, for him, are inextricably linked.

Loyalty and the Big Lie

Trump has been famously indifferent to his appointees’ criminal backgrounds, history of treasonous behavior, or pattern of sexual predation. In fact, if they have gotten away with it as he has, it confirms they possess the kind of psychopathic cunning and ruthlessness that makes their criminal resume gold when it comes to joining the Trumpworld elite. But personal loyalty to him eclipses all other considerations.

A significant aspect of displaying loyalty is affirming what Trump wants to believe about himself—that he has always been the biggest winner. His loss in the 2020 election is the most intolerable fly in that grandiose ointment, the narcissistic wound that will not heal. So, election denial has become the most essential article of faith, a non-negotiable requirement for any appointment in the Trump administration-in-waiting.

.Trump’s 2024 victory was legitimate. However, for the former president, ever the size queen, the small margin (1.5%) by which he won has not been enough to make him a winner in his own mind. As it was the smallest popular vote margin since the 19^th Century, he had to inflate it into not just a mandate but a “massive” one. Fellow Republicans who seek to be favored in the MAGA court must describe his victory in similarly tumescent terms.

However, denying his 2020 loss and overstating his 2024 victory will not erase what he knows to be true. Likewise, surrounding himself with solicitous courtiers and groveling sycophants will not suffice. That is why Trump has promised a campaign of vengeance and history rewriting to assuage the shame that refuses to lose its death grip (an affliction my book describes in greater depth). Those who investigated and prosecuted him for acts that marked his loser status (trying to overthrow an election) must themselves be investigated and prosecuted. “They are the overthrowers; he was elected” is the incantation Trump demands his followers and associates repeat endlessly.

See Through His Eyes, Not Yours

From 1984: “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston? Four. And if the Party says that it is not four but five – then how many?”

Testimony given under oath to the January 6^th Committee established that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election. So, all the efforts I described to establish a counter-narrative and get his base and staff to echo it will not enable him to unknow the truth. But what he can do is to get the non-true believers among Congressional Republicans and those applying to serve in his new administration to say what he wants them to say, to repudiate what they might know otherwise and declare with as much manufactured sincerity they can muster that only Trump knows what is true.

A top needs his bottoms. That surrender of self-hood is an even greater affirmation of his power than basking in the adoration of his credulous base of zealots – worshipers he has openly viewed with contempt. He is preoccupied with domination in a party that has made it the greatest of virtues. Bullying the GOP into epistemological submission by offering themselves up as megaphones for the Big Lie (MAGA-phones, if you will) helps Trump see himself as the kind of winner that an electoral victory never could.

The Scam Sanctified

Originating in Trump’s narcissism, election denial in the MAGA cult has become what evolutionary anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse calls a sacred value. Sacred values can be found in political movements and religions across all cultures and historical periods. MAGA is both a religion and a political movement. It is a faith-based politics that rejects the need for evidence and prefers Fox-promoted quasi-biblical fairy tales to objective reporting, even when it results in unprecedented libel penalties. It is also a political religion, one that views Trump as God’s chosen agent on earth.

Sacred values are conscious, explicit beliefs linked to the group and its leader, enabling members to fuse and transcend their separate identities. People in such groups are sometimes willing to die and kill for them. Whitehouse is especially interested in the role religious beliefs play in the structure and function of social groups, such as how they provide cover and legitimacy for secular rulers. Thus, sacred values have tremendous power to mobilize obedience in the service of the group or the leader who, like Trump, claims to rule by divine sanction.

Political psychologist Lilliana Mason calls such values identity-saturated beliefs. Issues like abortion, climate denial, and the Democrats’ “theft” of the 2020 election are thus viewed with a kind of theological reverence. Anyone who questions them is denounced as a heretic and sets themselves up for trolling or death threats.

Now that election denial has been sanctified as an unquestionable MAGA catechism, it may very well outlive Trump. I can imagine local bars in red counties like where I reside filling with celebrants on Freedom Fighters Day, toasting the patriotic heroes of January 6^th. Rural churches will hold annual vigils commemorating the martyrdom of Saint Ashli Babbitt, gunned down by thugs of the Deep State as she prayed outside the Capital in the company of all the other peaceful protesters of the stolen election.

Even after the naked Emperor is interred, we may hear his devoted subjects remember his resplendent finery with great fondness. Lore and wishful thinking have already become official tribal history for the GOP. If the architects of Project 2025 have their way, that will be the story all America’s school children will be told.

We are currently witnessing a shitstorm of pearl-clutching indignation and anguish among both the liberal and conservative commentariat over Joe Biden’s pardon of his son, Hunter. While a flawed, tragic, formerly drug-addicted, at times sleazy, and legally culpable perpetrator of non-violent crimes, Hunter Biden is also a victim of selective prosecution. That is the assessment shared by former Attorney General Eric Holder and former lead prosecutor in Robert Muller’s Special Counsel Office, Andrew Weissmann.

Nevertheless, promoters of false equivalence are pushing the familiar “Biden’s-just-as-bad” meme. This wrongheaded moral incoherence is being absorbed into the already unfolding project of normalization by the MAGA regime-in-waiting and those who seem all too eager to capitulate to it even before the coronation.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s recent pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago comes to mind. They insisted the aim of their audience with the man they’d called a fascist and a threat to the country was not an effort at more Trump-friendly rebranding but merely “to restart communications.”

Tom Nichols argues that Biden’s actions will give Republicans an excuse to overlook Trump’s egregious pardons to come. He seems to be hallucinating a Republican Party that, since 2016, has done something other than enable a corrupt mob boss. Nichols speaks as if the GOP weighs the ethical rectitude of a decision in accordance with the norms established or affirmed by Democrats. Jonathan Chait, who has witnessed a decade of Trump’s open sadism and promises of violent retribution, claims to be utterly mystified by Joe Biden’s assertion that the one goal of a future MAGA justice department would be to persecute Biden and his son.

Biden’s only mistake in this episode was initially saying he wouldn’t pardon his son. He could and should have left that decision open. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems important to point out the obvious truth: pardons are lawful prerogatives used with only those found guilty of crimes, not moves to bypass legal accountability. And there is precedent. Other presidents, namely Lincoln, Clinton, and, of course, Trump, have pardoned family members.

Lincoln's pardon of his Confederate sister-in-law, Emilie Todd Helm, clearly destroyed his legacy.

For some folks, Biden’s decision seems like a troubling failure of moral integrity. It is true that we once lived in a country where the rule of law, not the law of rulers, prevailed, where the ruthless pursuit of partisan advantage or vengeance rarely drove investigations and prosecutions. Not using the pardon power to benefit one’s family, friends, and loyal consiglieri was a laudable ethical position. However, we don’t live in that country anymore. Thanks to the Supreme Court right-wing majority, which now functions as a panel of unaccountable MAGA ayatollahs, the US has officially mutated into a nation governed by autocratic caprice. After January 20 of next year, that devolution will be consolidated.

Trump’s impunity for crimes of treason, rape, corruption, and fraud – and the fact that half the voting electorate admires him for it – demonstrates that the rules and principles that once governed this country (at least aspirationally) no longer abide. His own pardons of fellow criminals and traitors further affirm that.

Charles Kushner, father of the president-elect’s son-in-law, thug developer, and convicted felon imprisoned for witness retaliation, was pardoned and nominated as ambassador to France by Donald Trump.

Hunter Biden, were he not pardoned, would likely be among the many political prisoners Trump has in mind to incarcerate and torment. Those not guilty of a crime will surely have one invented for them. Joe Biden’s pardon could not possibly sully a justice system that will soon be transformed into a retribution system. To do otherwise would be akin to extraditing an American citizen who had committed a non-violent crime in Russia and expecting Putin to preside over something resembling justice.

I’m not saying that those who oppose the new fascism should dispense with ethical constraints, but neither should they demonstrate their integrity by sacrificing family and friends to a regime obsessed with sadistic vengeance. When Kash Patel’s FBI-cum-Gestapo agents show up to arrest a family member for crimes against the Leader, I will not demonstrate my honest character by directing them to the hiding place.

On November 5^th, MAGA voters knew what they were getting, but some pretended they didn’t want it – the violent purging of the racially “impure,” the control and punishment of women, a leader that would relieve them of freedom’s burdens, and a ruthless, sadistic, and unrestrained daddy who “alone can fix it.”  For the pro-Trump majority of the voting electorate, those were the features of their chosen candidate, not bugs. The claim that inflation and the well-heeled Democrats who didn’t care about their woes made them do it is a story they tell themselves, pollsters, and self-flagellating liberals.

That’s as persuasive as the good Germans of the Nazi era who said they had no idea that the Holocaust was unfolding and had no hostility toward Jews (except, of course, for those conniving Jewish bankers who ran the world). They just wanted to lower the price of bread, create more living space, and make Germany great again. Before digging into the deeper motives of the MAGA majority, the economic justification must be debunked.

The Public Opinion Reality Belied by the Economic Fable

Among the mainstream punditocracy, there has been an immediate rush to present Trump’s reelection as a rational economic choice. Because rent and the price of food have gone up, the argument goes, people overlooked Trump’s authoritarianism, promises of violent retribution, racism, hatred of women, and the mass death and economic loss from climate catastrophes he vowed to worsen with an orgy of “drill, baby, drill.”

We are also supposed to accept at face value that Trump voters took no notice that while Harris had specific plans to address the economic suffering and anxieties of working and middle-class Americans, Trump had no plan other than removing even more of the tax burden on the wealthy.

In their desperation to not problematize voters themselves, after the election, many journalists exhibited the same hysterical blindness regarding the Trump campaign’s promise to add a tax on to all imported goods through tariffs and jack up produce costs by deporting the workforce that picks it, reduce social security benefits, reduce access to Medicare, and increase drug prices. These proposed measures were not whispered but loudly proclaimed. And still, we are supposed to believe that a majority of Americans elected a fascist because of economic anxiety. This is not to deny that inflation, as a contradictory and rationalizing story, played a role in how voters thought and talked about their choices at the ballot box.

Some economists have noted the public opinion disparity between voters’ negative view of the economy as a whole and their more positive perception of their personal financial circumstances. Many voters think the economy is terrible, but their local one is good. The unsurprising source of that disparity is right-wing disinformation about the Biden economy that proliferated on social media and propaganda outlets like Fox. One study found that even the perception of one’s personal economic situation can be shaped by one’s information sources. Those whose understanding of the world came from conservative networks and publications thought they were paying more for food and gas.

One TikTok video with 2.3 million views falsely claimed that the US was in a “silent depression,” Americans had historically low purchasing power, and inflation-adjusted wages were lower than ever. Evolution has primed us to take seriously threat information offered by our fellow tribe members, whether true or not. Our built-in conformity bias primes us to repeat lies even if we don't believe them.

Of course, two different things can be true here. We can genuinely perceive the economy as bad even if our own circumstances are fine. And we can be motivated to camouflage our less noble motives (racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and sadism) to ourselves and others with a more socially acceptable story – that our votes are simply about the economy. While many voters have been happy to tell the latter story and journalists have been happy to repeat it, it is only in the actions and rhetoric of MAGA that the former motives are revealed.

Moreover, a vast body of social science research, summarized in my book, shows that conservatives tend to score higher on measures of disgust sensitivity, xenophobia, ingroup loyalty, deference to traditional authority, need for sanctity, and preoccupation with purity. They also have what psychologists call a social dominance orientation—a preference for hierarchical rather than egalitarian relationships between groups. It is a way of viewing other groups that makes it acceptable to steal the resources, labor, and bodies of groups deemed below yours in a value hierarchy. While these traits do not make the choice of a fascist candidate inevitable, they are psychological predispositions that render it more likely.

Instead of a coherent and plausible economic plan, what MAGA did offer ordinary citizens was a simple narrative about who was responsible for their plight (immigrants and the Democrats who let them in) and what to do about it (deport them and jail the leader’s critics). It wasn’t just that Trump’s economic fable was so persuasive. Voters latched on to it because they needed a psychological cover story to justify acting on their less savory impulses, impulses Trump modeled and sanctified.

As I document in my book, the reality behind Trump’s camera obscura economic fiction is that those who live in GOP-dominated counties are more likely to be poor, sick, and have truncated life spans. It turns out that the most reliable path to poverty is electing Republican officeholders.

Just Wait Until Your Father Gets Home

My book examines the trauma bond that cements Trump’s supporters to him. In that form of malignant attachment, dependency and fear are fused, not unlike the grip held by a mob boss, perpetrators of domestic violence, cult leaders, and many autocrats. The leader is both the protector and the persecutor. If you, my dear readers, think that might be an interpretive overreach, I offer a recent Tucker Carlson riff for your consideration. He clearly has his finger on the pulse of MAGA’s authoritarian masochism he helped to cultivate.

At a Trump rally in October, Carlson compared Americans to “a 2-year-old smearing the contents of his diapers on the wall” and “a hormone-addled 15-year-old girl slamming the door and giving you the finger.” He continues, “Dad comes home and he’s pissed. He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them because they’re his children. … And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl, and it has to be this way.” When Trump eventually arrived at the podium, his ecstatic audience shouted, “Daddy’s home!” And soon, he will be in the White House, paddle at the ready.

Unfortunately, this is not a kink unique to MAGA but is, in part, the culmination of over fifty years of “biblical parenting,” which has been documented by Talia Lavin in her new book, Wild Faith. Research psychologists Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad showed that conservatives are not only fond of inflicting corporal punishment on children but spanking itself helps to create conservatives. The role of the authoritarian family as a contributor to widespread support for fascism was identified by Wilhelm Reich as far back as the 1930s. Cognitive linguist George Lakoff, especially in his work on the power of metaphors, demonstrated how conservatives have long conceived of government as a harsh and punitive father.

White Supremacists of Color

While white men may have been the most avid converts to the Trump personality cult, ethnic minorities and white women also found a way to embrace the leader of the new “unified Reich.” Like the Nazi designation of the Japanese as “honorary Aryans,” a plurality of voters of color seemed to be moved by the promise that Trump would elevate them to honorary white status, which meant having their own group of devalued others to dominate and shame. They were presented with the opportunity to disidentify with and punish immigrants. They could now feel disgust for others instead of being the object of it. For non-white men in particular, the pitch was that he would make them gender tops as consolation for being racial and class bottoms.

Trad Wives and Ladies Against Women

For some white women, being protected, whether they liked it or not, was an offer they couldn’t refuse. Apparently, a future of being broodmares for the state did not trouble them. According to the explainers of the political punditocracy, the eagerness of so many American women to drink the Kool-Aide of MAGA’s Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church) was the price of eggs.

Center-Left Enabling and Normalization of MAGA Fascism

Even though the New York Times expressed skepticism about the president-elect’s economic plans, its reporter discussed the nostalgic rewriting of the first Trump economy as if it were a mindset of reasoned self-interest. As researchers like Liliana Mason have shown, Republicans hated the “Obama economy” until two weeks after the beginning of Trump’s first term, when it was called the “Trump economy.”

Liberals persistently referred to Trump as a “strongman” as if that were a criticism. Instead, it gifted him with the image he so desperately sought to present. In a New York Times article, voters cited that persona as a motive for electing him.

Of course, the feckless Merrick Garland was a primary culprit in making Trump seem invincible. His invertebrate timidity led him to pursue legal accountability far too late to have any impact other than making Trump look untouchable.

The November 7, 2024, headline in the Times was another example of rhetorical complicity with MAGA fascist framing, “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the US.” That is, of course, precisely how the global billionaire class would like to present itself and its new oligarch president-elect – as scrappy warriors for the little guys against the female-dominated, educated, and multicultural deep-state.

The Fascist State of Mind and Fascist Manhood

To fulfill the vision of a fascist state, it helps if a significant plurality of the population has a “fascist state of mind.” Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas coined that term to denote a mind intolerant of opposition. It is a mentality that clings to certainty – religious, ideological, and moral – to ward off conflictual emotions and complex thoughts. It constructs a rigid and monolithic sense of self comprised of black-and-white categories into which the ambiguities of sexuality, gender, race, and identity are crammed. Such a mind erects walls to keep out the alien, the strange, and the unfamiliar.

Purging the mind of dissident feelings and ideas makes it much easier to impose censorship on others. Annihilating unwanted parts of the self is a good rehearsal for eradicating tribal outsiders in the social and political world.

One iteration of this authoritarian state of mind is something we could call fascist masculinity. For men, dominating, subduing, and banishing the aspects of oneself construed as feminine, such as empathy, tenderness, compassion, and caretaking, is perfectly congruent with the subjugation of women in the world. If those traits are devalued in oneself, it only makes sense to devalue those who seem to be the “natural” embodiment of such qualities.

The notion of manhood as dominant, hard, straight, high status, and purged of tender “feminine” traits is what researchers label “hegemonic.” It is held by women and men and is more predictive of support for Trump than partisan identity, sex, race, or education. It is also highly associated with racism, homophobia, sexism, and anti-immigrant attitudes. This species of masculinity has long been a feature of fascist identity, from Mussolini’s army of thugs to the proto-Nazi soldiers of Weimar Germany who would go on to serve Hitler. As we can all observe, it is now a central feature of the men who comprise the MAGA manosphere and the trad wives who revere them.

Conclusion

I have listed a mere handful of the qualities that have enabled the Trump base to be the fascist followers he needs. Others could be added. Nevertheless, it is clear that justifying economic motives aside, they elected him because he was the fascist leader they craved. They longed for him because of the combination of who they already were and who he and others helped them become.

A character in Walt Kelly’s comic, Pogo, once famously proclaimed, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” While the verb and pronoun may not agree, it is hard to argue with the observation.

This analysis is not a rebuke of MAGA voters, although I do feel a barely containable fury that their self-defeating zealotry has the potential to take us all down. My aim is for those of us in the pro-democracy coalition to understand what we are dealing with. Yes, Trump supporters are hobbled by their cult membership, but liberal compassion for their plight alone will not be an effective strategy for ending the reign of a corrupt and psychopathic oligarch.

Be this guy.

By all accounts, the fully Trumpified GOP and its Russian allies are engaged in many legal and illegal schemes to disenfranchise Democratic voters and mal-inform the Republican segment of the electorate. However, those efforts may, in the end, turn out to be unnecessary. Polls agree that about half the country already wants Trump returned to power. That means that half the country wants a Fuhrer on day one. Little about Trump’s corruption, white supremacist worldview, history of sexual predation, and plans to end democracy is secret. So, to endorse him is to endorse all of that.

It would be nonsensical to acknowledge that the former president is a fascist but, as some pundits have done, claim that his voters are not. “Fascist” is not simply an epithet for someone we don’t like. It is a meaningful descriptor of a worldview and set of policy aims that either fits or does not. We cannot let our empathy for Trump supporters’ collective psychic wounds, economic stresses, status anxiety, delusional nostalgia for the former president’s years in office, and misplaced sense of grievance blind us to their eager willingness to be foot soldiers for MAGA. Fascist Trump followers driven by a life of cruel humiliations and financial hardship are still fascists. If they think you are “poisoning the blood “of the nation and the source of their problems, they will happily see you swing from the nearest lamppost.

By all indications, they are thrilled at the prospect of an autocrat ruling without restraint: jailing and executing his opponents, censoring books, shutting down media that criticize him, kidnapping the children of non-white immigrants and deporting millions of others, returning women to the status of male property, appropriating the military as his personal militia, and aligning with the world’s dictators to relegate democracy to the dustbin of history. I want to reiterate that none of these plans are covert; they have long been Trump’s explicit promises. The MAGA base knows what it’s getting. For the literate wonks among them, like JD Vance, “Project 2025” is gratifying fascist policy porn, not a manual for implementing a program of grim dystopian oppression.

The psychology underlying the widespread reverence for Trump and his vision of a fascist future is complex and multifaceted, which is why so much of my recent book is devoted to addressing it. Here, I will limit my focus to only one aspect of that psychology: the compelling effect of Trump’s legal, political, and social impunity.

Impunity is a quality that helps us understand why the revelations of Trump’s crimes and corruption have failed to dampen his followers’ adoration of him and have even increased it. What half the country might regard as traits too disabling for him to function as a business or political leader turn out to be fundamental to his brand, both before and during his time in office. Put more starkly, Trump’s psychopathology – his narcissism, sociopathic entitlement, unquenchable vengeance, verbal incontinence, and unrestrained impulsivity – along with the failure of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the justice system more broadly to place meaningful limits on him, have been critical to his success and what his followers most adore about him.

Impunity has defined Trump’s success as a business and political conman, putting the shine on his brand. The fact that he has been openly corrupt, lying, racist, predatory, and cruel – and until recently never been held to account or made to pay a significant price – is what half the population finds repellent and infuriating. It is also what the other half continues to experience as powerfully seductive and admirable.

Sociologist Brooke Harrington describes Trump’s ability to evoke “aspirational impunity” in his base. In this mindset, the rule of law, taxes, and military service are for suckers and losers. Once this premise is accepted, Trump’s corruption is admired, envied, and coveted instead of disqualifying. Whether he’s grabbing a woman’s crotch, a bag of Saudi or Russian cash, or fraudulent tax deductions, the important thing is to avoid accountability for it. The Supreme Court has told him that when you're the President, they must let you do it.

Harrington argues that the financial elite expects to be above the law but relies on the law to control the non-wealthy chumps saddled with a disproportionate tax burden. The elite are thus free to use the public infrastructure without having to fund it. Rather than simply resenting and demanding a change in that inequity, many working and middle-class conservatives envy and long for that privilege themselves. So, cultivating this aspirational impunity not only helps members of the economic elite like Trump remain unaccountable but also makes ordinary people admire them for getting away with it.

One way of thinking about Trump’s moral impunity is the role he plays as a “permissive super-ego” for qualities that would engender disapproval and rejection by the liberal half of the country – sadism, xenophobia, misogyny, bigotry, and corruption. He functions as the sociopathic daddy who says, in essence, “Be cruel, violent, and bigoted, just like me. And I will love you even more for it.” He famously made the false promise to protect his violent rally attendees from any legal consequences if they assaulted protestors in the crowd.

Trump also derives a significant benefit from his notorious impulsivity. He consistently exhibits a near-total lack of inhibition.  Trump will say or do whatever comes to mind without regard for the consequences, which generally never ensue. On the one hand, it is part of what generates outrage, revulsion, and fear among those outside the MAGA cult. Every Trump hearing, investigation, and indictment fills the liberal half of the country with the fleeting hope that justice will be done and his impulses constrained. Such hopes are predictably dashed when corrupt and cowardly MAGA politicians and judges find new and creative ways to grant their leader impunity.

On the other hand, the base admires and adores Trump’s impulsivity. They glory in his willingness to offend people with racist or misogynist remarks, attack opponents with puerile schoolyard insults, threaten violence against his enemies, praise Nazis, and voice admiration for Arnold Palmer’s genitalia. They see those as expressions of authenticity. He can say all the things they dare not utter. He can do things that ordinary citizens would be punished for. Up to this point, despite a few unfavorable legal judgments, Trump has been unstoppable. Even before he survived the assassination attempt, he was viewed as invincible, something to which his followers could only aspire. That makes it easy to see him as an undefeatable and ruthless warrior for all their grievances, a superhero who will smite all those who threaten to impede their own fantasies of omnipotence.

And should he be reelected, the MAGA justices of the Supreme Court have ensured that his despotism will be untrammeled. By encouraging his followers’ fusion with him, Trump cultivates the fantasy that one day, they too can be wealthy, unaccountable predators who can say whatever they want to anyone and assault whomever they choose and, like him, suffer no consequences. In the meantime, they will have to content themselves with trolling and punching down at Trump-designated targets.

As Ezra Klein has observed, the first Trump administration was not as disastrous as it could have been because the former president was surrounded by inhibitors who blunted many of his worst impulses. Of course, that would not be the case if there were a second Trump term. He will exercise the absolute power with which the high court crowned him. And his fascist base will sing their new God-king’s praise.

While the Fox News/GOP post-truth indifference to facts and the passions of his fascist base may propel Trump back into power, it may also be their undoing. As is the case today, only an accusation will be required for the new MAGA lynch mobs to identify and attack or kill suspected traitors. In a world of normalized paranoia, circular firing squads are a predictable outcome. The relentless search for demons and the disloyal could be even more unslakable than the witch-hunts of medieval Europe, the purges of Stalin’s Russia, or the terrorism of Hitler’s Black Shirts. The neighbors you’ve known for decades could be the “enemy within.” Or, they could conclude that you are.

“Dana, you have correctly pointed out a few occasions in which I have modified my positions and for my running mate, Tim Walz, times when he felt compelled to correct imprecise wording. In doing so, you have identified one of the greatest strengths of our candidacy and future administration – our ability to recognize how we need to improve and thus learn from experience, something our opponents have shown themselves unable to do.

For some politicians, old age does not grant wisdom but renders them brittle, inflexible, and unable to change. If they are also fragile, thin-skinned narcissists, they can’t even acknowledge having made a mistake. True leadership requires the humility to change course and seek the guidance of experts. That is another area where Mr. Trump’s arrogance makes him unfit to govern. He cannot admit that his knowledge is incomplete. As we have all witnessed, if generals, meteorologists, or infectious disease experts challenge his misinformation, he rages, doubles down on his ignorance, and threatens to fire or prosecute them for disloyalty.

Because my policy positions are driven by the values that have always been my moral compass, they sometimes must be reevaluated to ensure they still serve those values. If a policy fails to enhance freedom, economic well-being, national security, or environmental protection, I will always change it to achieve those ends.

My opponent also changes his positions, sometimes at a dizzying pace, as he is doing now on abortion and IVF. However, his moral compass, if you can call it that, always points in one direction: his self-interest, which is whatever maximizes his power, wealth, and ability to exact vengeance. At one moment, he boasts about his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned women’s reproductive freedom. At another, when state-mandated pregnancy for rape victims looks like it could be a political problem, he backs away from that.  When anti-choice fundamentalists express anger at his unprincipled wobbling, he goes back to proclaiming that a woman’s uterus is indeed government property.

So, thank you, Dana, for allowing me to sharpen the distinction between the values that motivate our policy positions and the self-serving, amoral drivers behind our opponents’ changing decisions.”

Foundational to right-wing tribalism, the focus of my new book, is the desperate need to retain one’s membership in the group at all costs. For most conservatives, especially MAGA Republicans, acceptance requires homogeneity. To be liked by others requires being like others, to have few markers of difference – especially when it comes to race, religion, sexuality, and gender identity. They need impermeable psychological and literal walls to segregate like from unlike. To paraphrase psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, they hold it together by keeping things apart. Their xenophobia informs more than a set of policies. It is an organizing worldview. Strangers need to be kept out. And even strangeness itself must be banished. There is no room for weirdness.

Republicans must sing from the same hymnal, worship the same deities (Trump and Jesus), and, on talk shows, utter whatever the line of the day seems to be. When they do act wacky, it is done collectively so as not to appear weird. Such was the case when GOP delegates all donned auricular panty liners as if they were MAGA crucifixes – symbols of reverence for the sacrifices of their savior candidate whose ear was nicked in an assassination attempt. Looking ridiculous does not draw ridicule as long as it is en masse.

Interestingly, the focus on MAGA weird has emerged only since the selection of the GOP’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance. Although Trump's behavior, rhetoric, and appearance would meet many people’s criteria for weirdness, it’s been baked in for eight years. While his words continue to appall many, no one is surprised. His lunacy, rants against democracy, anti-science screeds, and bloodthirsty calls for vengeance have long ago ceased to be novel. However, there is something jarring about hearing the same fascist wack-jobbery come out of Vance’s mouth. Somehow, as inured as many of us have become, we can now hear the customary nonsense anew. Channeled through him, MAGA misogyny, racism, and the normalization of domestic violence seem to be drawing more attention and fresh revulsion. Vance has restored strangeness to MAGA.

The deeply weird Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, Trumpworld’s Mein Kampf, combined with the public pronouncements of its lead author, Kevin Roberts, and other missionaries of MAGA, lay out with crystalline clarity the step-by-step path to the dystopian future envisioned by GOP policy wonks – state-mandated pregnancy, deportation of immigrants, internment camps for dissidents, ending Social Security and Medicare, accelerating carbon extraction, staffing the federal government (including law enforcement agencies) with political loyalists instead of public servants, and substituting the Christian Bible for the constitution. Like JD Vance’s cringy utterances, including his incendiary call to arms in the forward he wrote for Roberts’ upcoming book,  the publicity garnered by that document has provided a similar wake-up call to voters who may have been sleep-walking toward Trump 2.0. Unfortunately for the former president, the Heritage Foundation manifesto for a Cro-Magnon America has been getting poor ratings, which has prompted a desperate but unconvincing effort on his part to distance himself from its proposals. Even though it was put together by 140 of Trump’s closest allies, he insisted he had no idea who had assembled it.

Right-wingers have always striven to appear mainstream and even define what it means to be “middle of the road.” They have claimed to speak for the “silent majority” or “average Americans.” However, their stylistic and policy weirdness now stands out in sharp relief. The more people learn about the plan for a MAGA future, the more they oppose it. The vision offered up by Project 2025 is that of political outliers. The extremity of its ambitions makes it marginal; it promotes a world few want to live in. In the past, those ideas only surfaced as a garnish on Trump’s incoherent world salad. They were slogans, not blueprints. Now, they are readable intentions in unambiguous, hard-to-ignore black and white. Their notions are, by definition, weird; they are statistically and ideologically fringe.

For liberals, by contrast, “weird” can be a badge of honor, a playful way that left-wing tribes celebrate their heterogeneity and non-conformist novelty. Blue cities have proudly adopted it as a signifier of their identity. Bumper stickers that call for their fellows to “Keep Portland [Austin, Berkeley, et cetera.] Weird” can be found in liberal urban areas nationwide. That was the case even in the wholesome hippie town where I spent several decades, Fairfax, California. More than a few bumpers were adorned with the words “Fairfax: Mayberry on Acid.” That bumper sticker remained popular long after it stopped matching reality.  The town’s gentrification and the influx of career-focused tech bros, their CEO spouses, and their ever-upwardly mobile kindergartners who had resumes far longer than my own did not stop the townsfolk from continuing to let their freak flag fly. Unlike red cities, for Fairfax, the image of psychedelic-enhanced eccentricity and bohemian goofiness only increased real estate values. In blue America, weird can be a charming virtue. So, when we wield it against MAGA, we needn’t worry about retaliation in kind. That sort of boomerang just makes us smile.

Partisan differences in weirdness mask radically distinct notions of freedom. Left weirdness is about the freedom of self-expression – playful and creative acts of individuation that don’t harm or infringe on the autonomy of others. Right weirdness is about the freedom to dominate – to rule over and be worshipped by those below. It also expresses an entitlement to subjugate and persecute those whose identity markers taint them as “inferior” outsiders, like immigrants, women, non-whites, and sexual minorities. Conservative weirdness is revealed in the bizarre practices and fetishes of authoritarians. Project 2025 is their political Kama Sutra, a collection of positions that mandate the rest of us be their bottoms. There is nothing funny about the world they want to create. So, we must laugh at them. For those like Trump, brittle baby-men who would be kings, ridicule is their Achilles heel.

At a rally in a Pennsylvania town its MAGA mayor, Jondavid Longo, refers to as “blood-red Trump country,” Donald Trump, the GOP’s apostle of political blood lust, gets bloodied by an attempted assassination. While he walks away with a minor injury, a bystander dies instead. Two others are severely wounded. It is an odd echo of those unmasked Trump fans who, years earlier, perished or ended up tethered to ventilators because they attended a rally presided over by the pandemic minimizer-in-chief. MAGA martyrdom has been the sad fate of more than a few of his worshipers.

Trump, on the other hand, always seems to endure. Even fate appears to have granted him immunity. He will live to lie and threaten murder and mayhem another day. After a bullet grazed his ear, his first instinct was to raise his fist, apparently in photo-op defiance of all those liberals and deep-staters he claims are determined to persecute him. Shortly after being whisked away by Secret Service agents, he posted on his social media platform, “I will never surrender.”

Finally, his story of being the crucified savior of his flock seems to find momentary confirmation. Doubtless, he will turn his near-death into an entrepreneurial opportunity, a chance to generate the next bad-boy campaign tee-shirt meme for MAGA swag emporiums across the country. Of course, the reality is the inverse of his crucifixion narrative; his devotees died for him, just as they have always done.

As an avid promoter of violence against tribal enemies and unfettered access to the ballistic machinery to carry it out, it is ironic but perhaps inevitable that he would become the target of it. Before the end of his first term, the former president’s name had been explicitly invoked by at least 54 perpetrators of assault. Since then, he has been the apparent inspiration behind many more violent incidents, including murder.

Thanks, in part, to Trump’s incitement, the specter of partisan barbarism looms large in the public imagination. An Amazon search turns up well over a dozen books examining the possibility and consequences of a second American civil war. While weirdly apolitical, a major Hollywood movie graphically depicts the sanguinary horror show that such a conflagration would entail. If Trump loses, he promises a “bloodbath,” and if he wins, “retribution.”

A Supreme Court majority recently ruled that presidents are now kings who can remove dissidents to political dungeons or place their heads on spikes, depending on the leader's passing whim. Goodbye, rule of law. Hello, the law of rulers. A growing number of Americans plan to flee the country if their partisan tribe loses the election.

Dread is the affect of the moment. Residents of blue and red regions of the country seem to be flooded with uncontainable political anxiety. According to a recent survey, around 40% of Americans acknowledge feeling increasing fear in the face of the upcoming elections. In another, it was 60%. An American Psychiatric Association poll found those surveyed more anxious about the election (73%) than they were about gun violence (69%).

Those two concerns might be hard to disentangle, as MAGA militias may find reasons to shoot people perceived as enemies whether Trump wins or loses. Anecdotally, I can attest to the growing apprehension bordering on panic among several of my patients. Whether in their nightmares or waking lives, they are haunted by visions of the future dystopia that the wrong electoral victor could wreak.

As a clinician and an observer of political culture, I think citizens on both sides of the political chasm are riven with fear about the election’s outcome. However, what frightens them varies starkly depending on which political tribe they are aligned with.

Liberal Panic

Democrats and left-leaning independents, those whom I would group in the liberal pro-democracy coalition, objectively have a lot to worry about. The plans for the right-wing counter-revolution against voting rights, racial equity, health and safety protections, social security, presidential accountability, and women’s bodily autonomy have been laid out explicitly in the Heritage Foundation’s now-infamous Project 2025 document. However, this is not just aspirational; it is now being enacted by the MAGA majority in the Supreme Court. They are not waiting for Trump to ascend to the throne. What liberals fear has already begun unfolding.

Trump’s vow to jail or execute political opponents, create immigrant internment camps, plunge the nation into debt to pay back billionaire campaign donors with tax cuts, degrade the quality of the air, water, and food supply through radical deregulation, and punish any woman who fails to surrender her uterus to the state are promises that will be carried out. Unlike his first administration, there will be no “adults in the room” to impede his actions. As the MAGA justices have ruled, presidents are henceforth sovereigns accountable to no one.

Trump-World Terrors

The fears of those in the MAGA tribe are quite different. I would include under that heading the entire Republican Party, its voters, associated think tanks, billionaire benefactors, and multiple armed terrorist and militia groups (some of whom, like the Proud Boys, are even running for political office). They have been disproportionately affected by a development unfolding for decades in this country: the ever-growing geographical and informational self-segregation of political partisans.

Over many decades, we have seen a dramatic increase in the growth of what researchers call landslide counties. Those are counties where one of the two presidential candidates won an overwhelming majority of the votes. There has also been an increase in neighborhoods where residents rarely or never encounter members of the other party.

Correspondingly, partisans have confined themselves to information ghettoes, ideological media silos that tend to view news like any other commodity; it has to make the consumer feel good. This often translates into telling people what they want to believe. It is essential to emphasize that these developments have not been symmetrical between partisan tribes, as I document in my book. Liberal citizens are likelier to live in a neighborhood with a mix of partisan residents. They also tend to be exposed to a broader range of media outlets, including centrist and center-right information sources.

The upshot for conservatives is that they are fed a steady diet of lies, conspiracy theories, and demonizing stories about liberals, immigrants, and non-white people unmodulated by any disconfirming information. Living in a manufactured state of perpetual terror about criminal invaders, mosquito drones carrying Covid vaccines, cannibalistic pedophiles in high office, and swarthy immigrant hordes seeking to replace them and steal their jobs, it is no wonder conservatives believe they can never have enough high-capacity military weapons.

Of course, real and sometimes overwhelming changes are occurring – climate disasters, breathtaking technological innovation, pandemics, terrorism, cultural upheavals, and scientific discoveries that subvert various reassuring beliefs. Unfortunately, the fear generated by that reality is being displaced and projected onto those right-wing fantasy targets I just listed because it has utility for those who stand to benefit economically and politically.

The assassination attempt against Trump will be a political godsend for him, someone whose whole campaign story has been about his putative victimization and brave retaliation against it. It was aided enormously by the reliably stenographic news media, which uncritically repeated Republican framing of the event, including the non-stop broadcast of Trump’s triumphalist fist-shaking. They are helping the GOP construct an inspiring and reassuring narrative for the base and those credulous undecided voters who long for a salvific hero.

At last, the evil forces that strike fear in the heart of MAGA have taken concrete form in the now vanquished body of a flesh and blood perpetrator. Of course, the story of a lone gunman, especially one who is a local kid registered as a Republican and whose AR-15 was likely purchased for him by his Libertarian father, will not satisfy. If there isn’t a larger conspiracy of villains behind him, it must be invented. It may frighten Trump’s true believers, but it will also be a tale that contains their anxiety. Fantasies of malevolent cabals have always been a useful way to create order out of terrifying uncertainty and chaos.

In prior electoral contests, the stakes were relatively short-term. Concerns were centered around who would be empowered to set policy and the country's direction for the next few years. To say the stakes now are existential has become the pundit cliché du jour, but that doesn’t make it any less true. The question that terrifies both sides is which group will exterminate the other. However, with the singular exception of that lone assassin, one side has far more guns and the willingness to use them.

The fallout from Biden’s debate self-immolation and the MAGA justices’ recent coronation of Donald Trump reveal starkly divergent notions of political leadership. More specifically, they illustrate the disparate moral lenses through which those on the right and left make sense of the world and determine how it should be run. As I describe in my new book, Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America, social scientists who study moral reasoning have found that conservatives and liberals are guided by profoundly different ethical “instincts.” Researchers call them moral intuitions.

Three of the most powerful psychological drivers that shape conservative politics are ingroup loyalty, deference to traditional authority, and social dominance. Actions are morally right if they benefit the group, preserve the power of the tribal leader, and lead to the conquest or control over subordinated outgroups.

In the MAGA epoch of right-wing politics, the traditional Republican ethos of “law and order” means that the leader is the law and gives the orders. Whether something is considered a crime has nothing to do with the act but is determined by who commits it. Trump may have directed a coup, stolen classified documents, extorted a foreign leader, abducted immigrant children, sexually assaulted women, given pardons in exchange for loyalty, sold influence, accepted bribes, ordered the incarceration of opponents, and perpetrated numerous fraudulent schemes during his career in business and public life. But they are not crimes because they are his actions. And now the MAGA justices that serve him and enable his impunity have conferred legal grace on his psychopathic entitlement.

The Supreme Court majority is not the only enabler of Trump’s autocratic and corrupt schemes.  His actions, which would be crimes if anyone else committed them, are also celebrated by the MAGA electoral base. They are seen as bold acts of defiance against the enemy.  The Trump Georgia mugshot t-shirt became one of the hottest items in fascist fashion. He has told his followers that what he does for himself is really a selfless act that benefits them. His cultic leadership has successfully appropriated those three moral foundations into the sanctification of his authority. Loyalty to him is conflated with loyalty to the group. And their group is the nation. Thus, he becomes the authority who can never be questioned and whose power can never be challenged. Serving him has become an explicit raison d'être for cult members. Life is meaningless without him. If that sounds like tendentious hyperbole, I offer you exhibit A below.

Even the conservative National Review was gobsmacked when this Trump or Death banner began to appear at MAGA rallies and swag booths. “What does it say about our country that there is a market for flags that declare, ‘Trump or Death?’” As one participant enthused, “This is my favorite flag.” He reminded the interviewer that the slogan is not just a call for suicidal sacrifice but could also be read as a threat. “It doesn’t necessarily mean my death; it could also mean your death.” Either way, the cause worth dying or killing for is not a lofty emancipatory principle such as Patrick Henry’s Liberty but, ironically, a king.

In contrast, liberals are driven by very different moral concerns – care for others, fairness, and equity. That care often extends to those outside the tribal boundary, which is generally more inclusive. Unlike MAGA conservatives, liberals view the nation as encompassing more than their political tribe to include all citizens. Moreover, they believe parties and their leaders should serve the country, not just themselves. Democratically elected authorities should be respected, not deified, and their powers constrained by the popular will. Autocratic and unaccountable authority is wrong, partly because of the unfairness inherent in depriving others of agency. Leaders who arrogate to themselves unearned privileges and who claim moral impunity defy the liberal principle of equity.  

This framework helps us understand the strikingly different responses by Democratic politicians and voters to the cognitive implosion of their own leader. While grateful for Joe Biden’s contributions over many years and respectful of his office, their loyalty is to the country and fellow citizens, not the party or its leader. There is a lively debate among Democratic partisans about who has the best chance of defeating an aspiring autocrat and protecting the country from the fascist counterrevolution the GOP is longing to enact.

The call to replace the party’s leader on the presidential ballot may not be successful. But it is a challenge to impaired authority that would never occur among Republicans, a party whose criteria for being a member in good standing is slavish fealty to a corrupt cult leader. Trump’s frequent effusions of incoherent word salad do not trouble them. His audiences cheer his rageful gibberish and laugh when they discern an intended joke.

Those few brave GOP souls who dare to issue a challenge, criticize his performance, or question his license to commit crimes can expect death threats and a lifetime of living under the protection of private security services. Both of the two major presidential candidates may be sundowning in their own ways, but only Democrats are willing to call out the leader of their tribe. That is because they feel loyalty toward the nation as a whole, not just a partisan subgroup.

Grandpa is crossing the double-yellow line and heading for the oncoming MAGA panzer tank. All the backseat passengers are panicking, but Grandma is smiling and unperturbed. Grabbing the wheel would be rude, and insisting he pull to the side and hand over the keys might be humiliating. Yet, the vision of being crushed under the relentless metal tracks of the approaching assault vehicle is becoming increasingly vivid by the moment.

Since the debacle of Thursday’s debate, the Democratic Party's official stance has stood in stark contrast to the reality we all witnessed. They've been trying to muster as much performative optimism as they can, downplaying the significance of what was plainly visible. Biden was just under the weather. Debates don’t really sway voters. Remember, even Obama had a rough first debate. And let's not forget that Trump is a repulsive, lying psychopath loved only by his base. (No argument with the latter. If you can bear to understand more about that toxic symbiosis, my new book, Hatreds We Love, has just launched.)

What they are trying to ignore, and most viewers couldn’t deny, was the graphic and undeniable display of the president’s cognitive decline at the debates. What we saw was far worse than the most deceptively edited Fox News clips of his bloopers and befuddlement. He confirmed the worst fears of Democratic voters and gave the Trump campaign team a nearly inexhaustible font of clips of Biden’s cringy bungling, excerpts that will require no editing to cause maximum political damage.

It’s truth-telling time. This has to start with those closest to him: his wife Jill and his closest advisors. They must say to him: Joe, you have served your country with honor and distinction. You have achieved much in your four years in office. But your difficulties in the debate are due to neurological challenges, not a random bad night. They may wax and wane but will continue to make defeating Donald Trump and thus protecting the country from fascism difficult. Unlike Trump, you have never placed personal ambition above the country's interests. Ending your candidacy now and releasing your delegates to create room for someone from the next generation to compete for the nomination and fight to protect our freedoms would be the most patriotic thing you can do.

Liberal journalists and fact-based media are divided, although a significant plurality, if not the majority of New York Times op-ed columnists, along with the editorial board, are advocating that the Democratic Party hold an open convention. If, in the coming weeks, polls show a growing and enduring loss of support for Biden, Dems may find themselves forced to confront the obvious. There is no risk-free path forward. But there is no more hazardous one than keeping Biden behind the wheel.  

In his ethnographic account of the culture of Trumplandia, Undertow, journalist Jeff Sharlet notes that most Trump rallies opened with a Black or Hispanic preacher. He describes attending one in Florida, where about two-thirds of attendees comprised various Latino nationalities. While observing a white supremacist gathering to honor Ashlie Babbitt, the Jan 6^th terrorist who was fatally shot as she crawled through a broken window at the Capitol, Sharlet noticed that half those assembled were non-white, as were most of the speakers.

In 2016, 8 percent of Black voters supported Trump. In 2020, that number rose to 12 percent. In May of this year, 17 percent of the African Americans sampled said that if elections were held at that time, they would vote for Trump.

Those shockingly counter-intuitive observations by Sharlet, along with the survey results, seem utterly implausible in light of Trump’s avowed embrace of white supremacy in word and deed. In their efforts to make sense of those developments, some pundits have pointed to the failure of Democrats to pass legislation and implement policies that deliver meaningful change to the lives of non-white US citizens, such as substantive police reform and voting rights protections. Some Black people, in particular, feel like they have worked hard to put Dems in office but are forgotten between elections. And so, the argument goes, they are expressing their bitter disappointment by supporting Republicans.

However true it may be that Democratic politicians have done far too little for their non-white constituents, as an explanation for why some people of color align with MAGA, it is absurd. The thinking would have to be: You Democrats failed to protect us from the party of racist predators. Therefore, we are going to support the party of racist predators. I don’t find that very persuasive.

A different way to understand MAGA’s budding rainbow coalition is as a result of a win-win sales pitch to both white and non-white potential Trump worshipers. By welcoming non-white people into the MAGA cult, white followers can see themselves as non-racist. Despite homicidal rhetoric aimed at non-white immigrants and the delusional racist panic over the “Great Replacement,” some Hispanic and Black citizens are accepting the invitation to join the church of Trump, receive his grace, and enjoy the fiction of Republican “color blindness.” The message to potential cult members of color is: “We’re all the same; you’re just like me.”

This enables blackness and brownness to be erased instead of attacked. It is love conditional on invisibility. While that may sound like an unappealing annihilation of identity, which it is, we have to remember that one of the unexamined privileges of whiteness is rarely having to think about race. If you’re white and pulled over by a cop, it’s no big deal; have your license and registration ready. If you’re black, move and speak very carefully, or you could be taking your final breath within minutes.

MAGA Republicans offer people of color a kind of racial transubstantiation. They are told, in essence, “You can be white if you repudiate your blackness and brownness. You can be a dominator if you deny your history of subordination. Let us give you whiteness by association.” For the moment, at least some voters of color seem to be drinking from that poison chalice.

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Identity Makeovers

Over the centuries, one conservative strategy deployed by powerful and wealthy white people to retain their unearned privileges and undermine forces of egalitarian resistance has been to get whites without wealth to shift their tribal identity from one based on class to one marked by race. In the US, we can date that back to colonial Virginia. From 1676 to 1677, the colonies were rocked by Bacon’s Rebellion, an uprising by an alliance of Anglo-European settlers whose families had only known serfdom and an assortment of free and enslaved Africans. It culminated in torching the elite center of power in Jamestown and forced royal Governor William Berkeley to flee. It was an insurrection that terrified the ruling authorities.

After that, and for the first time, the word “white” appeared as a term denoting race. Along with that was birthed a new and enduring strategy to protect the ruling elite from underclass upstarts. Whiteness became a signifier of racial privilege with the hope it would eclipse the poor white settlers’ lack of economic and political privilege. Now, they could imagine themselves as superior to another group. Of course, that new category of identity, race, also provided the perfect justification for enslaving Africans, not to mention every manner of colonial atrocity in the centuries that followed.

This deliberate divide-and-conquer approach to preventing class rebellion endures to this day and involves what the scholar Martha Bireda calls the “promises of whiteness.” As a white person, you can count on holding a top place in all status hierarchies, having privileged access to social and economic opportunities, wielding power over non-white people, and having a high degree of legal protection, if not impunity, for your actions.

MAGA Republicans are employing a similar ruse to persuade people of color to trade in their ethnic and racial identity for a political and transracial one – the kind of “honorary whiteness” I described above. By joining MAGA, the implied message is that the promises of whiteness can be transferred regardless of color – a status that brings to mind the unofficial “honorary Aryan” designation that Hitler reportedly granted the Japanese in World War II.

To men of color, MAGA offers an analogous proposition: you can transmute racial humiliation into gender domination – trade being a bottom in a world of white supremacy for being a top in a regime of male dominance. Some have eagerly accepted that invitation, such as the Black MAGA Lt. Gov. of North Carolina, Mark Robinson, who, in addition to denying the Holocaust, has come out as an aggressive opponent of female reproductive choice. At the state’s 2021 GOP convention, he insisted that once a woman becomes pregnant, whether through rape or incest, “it’s not [her] body anymore.”

One consequence of accepting the promise of whiteness can be the transformation of others in one’s own group into devalued targets of hatred. This can happen with surprising ease. Unfortunately, there is nothing about being in a subordinate group that guarantees empathy and compassion for those of the same race or ethnicity.

Well-intentioned liberals over the centuries have sometimes attributed a unique nobility to subjugated non-white people. However, white noble savage fantasies are hard to sustain in the face of any close examination of the history of colonialism. Multiple historical accounts make it clear that no group is immune to the seductions of power and privilege. That is especially the case when there are status differences among those who are oppressed.

In Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, she cites the example of free Black planters in French-colonized San Domingue (what would later be Haiti), who held a quarter of the colony’s enslaved Black Africans. They made strenuous efforts to form alliances with white slaveholding plantation owners. Citing their common interests and promising to keep enslaved Blacks in line and prevent rebellions, they hoped to be recognized and respected as equals.

Alas, their “honorary whiteness” turned out to be counterfeit currency. When attempting to cash it in, they were violently rebuffed. One spurned black planter retaliated for the rejection by instigating a rebellion, which was handily defeated. He was publicly tortured to death by being “broken on the wheel,” a gruesome 18^th-century French punishment that featured the fracturing of all the condemned's limbs before being put to death.

The Trauma Bond to MAGA

That grisly example brings into sharp relief one of the more powerful psychological adhesives that can keep white and non-white people alike bonded to the MAGA cult: trauma bonding, a dynamic discussed at length in my new book. It refers to the paradoxical way cult leaders enforce loyalty. Such leaders generate a sense of threat and present themselves as the only ones who can protect members from that danger.

However, the threat is not just something external to the group but also emanates from the leader. Like a mob boss who rules over a gang of subordinates, the leader cultivates an attachment cemented by both fear and love. It is a relationship in which dependency is fused with terror, something we recognize in cases of child abuse, domestic violence, and abductor-hostage situations.

While the MAGA cult will embrace you as a loyal member, any perceived disloyalty will turn your erstwhile comrades into a relentless lynch mob, as we have witnessed repeatedly since Trump’s rise to political prominence. To his flock, he is both a messiah and a menace. His message to potential non-white inductees is, in essence: “You can join us as cherished honorary white people or perish as disloyal people of color. And only by stomping on those below you (immigrants and other targets of MAGA hatred) can the boot be kept off your neck.”

In other words, by aligning with MAGA, a person of color or an individual from an ethnic minority can trade being hated by others for being a hater of others. Rather than being threatened by powerful enemies, one can become the powerful enemy threatening the vulnerable. Instead of being a pleading and humiliated beneficiary of the “mommy state,” one can be a defiant and proud attacker of it. Don’t be the vulnerable African American election worker Ruby Freeman, who was hunted, tormented, and threatened by MAGA terrorists for daring to count votes in Georgia. Instead, be Enrico Tarrio, the Afrocuban leader of the “Western Chauvinist” terrorist group, the Proud Boys – the paradigmatic example of that oxymoronic identity, the white supremacist of color.

Instead of being one of the Asian and Hispanic Americans murdered in a mass shooting at an Allen, Texas mall, one could be the shooter, Mauricio Martinez Garcia, an Hispanic white supremacist hater of minorities, and go out in a blaze of race warrior glory. Instead of being among the Jewish Democratic political candidates who have had to fend off antisemitic attacks from Republicans, one can be Stephen Miller – the Jewish Trump aid, close collaborator with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, and architect of his boss’s Himmler-like child abduction policy. The psychoanalytic term for this is identification with the aggressor. – a process of becoming like the perpetrator in order to escape the experience of victimhood.

It is unclear what it would take to break the spell for those vulnerable to induction into MAGA to realize that the promise of whiteness will never be kept. Like the workers Trump has stiffed, the customers he’s conned, the wives he’s betrayed, the students he’s swindled, and the voters he’s defrauded, at some point, MAGA cult members of color may wake up and understand that their fidelity to Dear Leader may not protect them indefinitely. Their “whiteness” could be revoked. And, the merest perception of flagging loyalty could land them in one of Stephen Miller’s planned internment camps, where they would join the ranks of other enemies of the state, such as the immigrants, political opponents, and journalists that Trump and the entire GOP are vowing to punish.

When Kristi Noem first bragged about shooting her puppy, Cricket, in the face, little did she know that, politically, she was shooting herself in the foot. Similarly, she surely did not expect that murdering her male goat because (shockingly) it had a strong goat smell and was thus “disgusting” would lead her hero, Donald Trump, to terminate Noem’s political life by saying he was “disgusted” with her. Of course, his disgust was not over the South Dakota governor’s callous brutality but a response to her cluelessness about “public relations.”

In retrospect, she was not crazy to assume that a story about her cruelty toward cute animals would be catnip to the sadistic Trump base. While an overwhelming majority of Americans were appalled by the killings, Trump supporters were pretty evenly divided on the issue. While the gamble to out-MAGA her competing VP contenders turned out to be a catastrophic miscalculation, it is instructive to consider why it would have seemed a good idea in the first place.

That episode caught my attention because it vividly illustrates key features of contemporary conservative psychology. I expound on these more fully in my forthcoming book, Hatreds We Love: The Psychology of Political Tribalism in Post-Truth America. Those defining traits include costly signaling, sadism, and disidentification with non-human animals.

In politics, a “costly signal” is a message that shows you are a tribal member so loyal that you will do or say something guaranteed to offend, horrify, and alienate the opposition. When Noem highlights the animal slaughter episode described in her book as a selling point, she is, in essence, claiming, “I’m so MAGA (and worthy to run alongside Trump) that I’ll kill my own dog and goat and brag about it. And I’m happy to drink all the liberal tears that will be shed over it and welcome their hatred!” In other words, such a message signals tribal loyalty so unwavering that one is willing to burn all bridges to tribal outgroups.

Some costly signals may be too expensive in the end.

While this attempt at costly signaling failed and became costly in the wrong way, it raises the question of what it is about the intended MAGA audience that made it seem like it would be an effective messaging plan to begin with. Even though some current and former Republicans expressed revulsion at Noem’s actions, it is notable that most of the conservatives who spoke out about it were anti-Trump apostates. Others, like Steve Bannon, Don Jr, and Trump, criticized Noem for making a tactical error. Bannon said bragging about killing a puppy was “too based.” Based, in MAGA slang, describes an appeal to the base. It is one that defies the putatively delicate sensibilities of liberals by being “politically incorrect,” which in Trump-world generally translates as sadistic, racist, and misogynist trolling or violent punching down at devalued outgroups. Doing so has largely been low-risk for those seeking to consolidate one’s status in the Trump cult. After all, the leader himself famously claimed he’d have impunity for murdering someone on Fifth Avenue. He has long been an advocate for cruelty and violence, such as placing alligators in a moat on the Southern border to shred the flesh of asylum seekers or shooting suspected shoplifters on sight.

Perhaps if she’d been male, Noem’s performative cruelty would have generated only liberal revulsion. While none of the Trump cult’s ladies’ auxiliary members, like Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, are especially warm and cuddly, animal abuse may be a form of cruelty that Republicans can accept only in men.

The puppy murder illustrates another quality intrinsic to MAGA identity: sadism, which is often expressed as a taste for humiliating domination, death threats, trolling with gratuitous puerile insults, and violent punishment and execution. The urge to be cruel is a trait that is usually coupled with the conviction that doing a bad thing means you are bad (like going after chickens instead of pheasants, in Cricket’s case) and, therefore, an evil creature that cannot change. Training or education to alter the qualities that lead to bad behavior is pointless. For humans, disloyalty to the cult leader is one of the worst MAGA sins for which the death penalty is often the go-to threat, as Mike Pence learned all too well. Beyond that, sometimes all it takes to be bad and earn torment is simply belonging to the wrong out-group, especially non-white immigrants.

One of the clearest examples of racialized sadism was Trump’s immigrant kidnapping program, which was the brainchild of the ex-president’s senior advisor, Stephen Miller. It bore the anodyne name of Family Separation. Under that program, babies and young children were literally torn from the arms of their asylum-seeking parents, some never to be seen again because no plans had ever been made to reunite the ruptured families. “We need to take away the children,” said former Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The aim, he explained, was to frighten away those contemplating making the perilous trip to the US. Once abducted by Trump immigration officials, many children languished in filthy and crowded holding cages for months, like the “animals” of Trump’s xenophobic imagination. “These aren’t people; these are animals,” he once declared about immigrants crossing the Southern border.

That rhetorical animalization has been central to the efforts of autocrats across the ages and aspiring ones like Trump to dehumanize their enemies, especially those who function as ethnic scapegoats. That strategy of devaluation only works for those who see non-human animals as more like things and less like living beings with rich cognitive capacities, deeply felt emotions, and complex inner lives. As I document in my book, that is an attitude much more common in conservatives and was clearly expressed in Kristie Noem’s justification for shooting Cricket, who was killed because she was “useless,” disposed of like a broken toaster.

Noem, like so many others on the Right, is the sort of fundamentalist Christian who interprets the Biblical mandate to exercise dominion as the right and necessity to subjugate and dominate other animals. From that perspective, animals are things to be used, exploited, or discarded, as with any other resource. That is a very different reading from the one liberal Christians take from the Bible – that dominion means that humans must be stewards of the natural world and care for other creatures.

While Trump has no affection for animals beyond those that end up on his dinner plate, he was initially hesitant to speak out about Noem’s killing spree. However, he threw her under the MAGA bus when the reviews came in – popularity being the magnetic north of his moral compass. After her ratings plummeted and her utility vanished, she was put out of his misery just as poor Cricket had been for Noem.

Nevertheless, she has adopted her mentor’s approach to bad reviews – denying the veracity of her own words. When asked on Fox to justify the murders of her puppy and goat, she simply declared the reports to be “fake news.” As with Trump, she insists that if one’s own words generate disapproval, the fault lies in those reporting it.

Some may view the carnage as merely the unavoidable sum of the IDF’s cost-benefit analysis: how many civilians must die for every Hamas fighter killed. However, accepting that story requires ignoring the explicit aims of Netanyahu’s allies. Some of them have called for the nuclear annihilation of Palestinians. Others have recommended starvation as the best and final solution to the Palestinian problem.

The Mass Grave, c 1945 by Pablo Picasso

To protest that grotesque state of affairs, groups opposing Israeli war crimes have described their movement as “pro-Palestinian,” an appellation eagerly adopted by journalists across the political spectrum. It is a label driven by an earnest desire to express solidarity with the besieged civilians of Gaza. However, that framing (in contrast to one that is “pro-human rights”) unintentionally invites incorporation into the narrative of Israel’s ethnic cleansers: the war is a zero-sum tribal conflict from which only one group can and should survive. The moral barricade established by that rhetoric positions antagonists in a battle over whose civilian bodies must be protected and whose can be sacrificed.

By depicting their effort to stop Netanyahu’s exterminationist campaign in terms of the ethnicity of the victims, protesters undermine themselves. The tribal frame is the Right’s linguistic Trojan horse; once taken in, the battle is lost. It enables journalists to engage in all manner of intellectually dishonest reporting – eliding the movement’s extensive Jewish support, portraying critiques of Zionism as anti-Jewish, and rendering opposition to the war as pro-Hamas.

A classic example is Michael Powell’s Atlantic piece on the Columbia occupation. While he grudgingly acknowledges a Passover celebration within the encampment, the only Jewish students with whom he speaks are Zionist critics on the outside who denounce the “antisemitism” of the protesters. For him to do otherwise would rupture the tribal narrative.

It must be acknowledged that a minority of Left opponents of Israeli apartheid measures initially celebrated the Hamas mass murder of Israelis as a righteous act of liberation, something I analyze in my forthcoming book on political tribalism, Hatreds We Love. That was likely driven by a desperate longing for heroes who could lead the charge in the Manichean tribal imagination of a few naïve militants. But it seems pretty clear they have been almost entirely eclipsed by a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-national coalition of anti-Gaza-war activists. They do not equate Zionism with Judaism, anti-Zionism with antisemitism, or Palestinian civil rights with the oppression of Jews. Those are the cynical conflations of the pro-apartheid Right, like Elise Stefanik and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Then there is the chant uttered at nearly every Left protest against Israeli actions, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Its origins are as ambiguous as its meaning, a rhetorical Rorschach. To Palestinians and most Israel critics, it refers to a future landscape where Palestinians have political autonomy and full civil rights. To some Jewish Israelis and supporters of Netanyahu in the US, it is a slogan that denotes a wish that the region be free of Jews, an Arab call for a new Holocaust.

When a chant is so fraught with conflicting interpretations, using it in protests is political malpractice – an invitation to be defined by your opponent. It brings to mind the fate of the unfortunate meme “defund the police” that was uttered at protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of cops. Intended as a call for economic leverage in the campaign to enforce accountability in law enforcement, it became weaponized by the very forces seeking to exonerate cops who kill unarmed Black people.

The cluelessness of Left messaging aside, at the present moment, it is primarily supporters of Israeli policy that have been able to overlook or rationalize genocide. To make efforts by the MAGA Right, Democratic proponents of Israeli moral exceptionalism, and fundamentalist holy warriors of all persuasions more difficult, protesters must shift the focus to a universalist, trans-tribal perspective. We must talk about human rights, not group rights. We must make it clear that the slaughter of civilians is an abomination – not because they are Palestinian or (in the case of the October 7 attacks on Israelis) because they are Jewish but because we are all part of a global interdependent community of people bound by a shared right to life.