On Not Resisting the Temptation to write about Trump

I had been wanting to write something about anarchism – or Lawrence Ree’s most recent book “The Nazi Mind” or even a post about “contextual analysis” of which Rory Stewart is such a good exponent. 

Instead, I have been seduced by this post about Fascism in America from a site 

called The Rational League to speculate about the state of Donald Trump’s mind 

– and that of his MAGA followers.

You can’t negotiate with someone who sees compromise as surrender. You can’t persuade a person out of beliefs that serve as emotional armor against uncertainty and fear. And you certainly can’t build a functioning democracy when 30–40% of the population interprets equality as an attack, and compassion as weakness. This is the psychological blind spot at the heart of MAGA, and it explains why even policies that make life objectively worse for their own communities are still embraced if they reaffirm authoritarian values or hierarchical dominance. The MAGA movement thrives because it supplies this audience with what they crave: certainty, submission, identity, and an enemy. And once they have that, they will defend it, even to the detriment of their health, their economy, their fellow citizens, and democracy itself. That is why no policy rebuttal, no moral appeal, and no set of facts will shake them. These are not flaws in their thinking; they are features of it.

The history of authoritarianism teaches us that these minds will not course-correct. They require a society designed to check them, constrain them, and strip their ideology of legitimacy. If we fail to do that, their psychological needs will continue to override our collective needs. They will vote against healthcare, education, the environment, and equality, not because they are evil, but because fear and order are more important to them than fairness or truth. And once again, as before, they will drag civilization backwards. Not in a fiery revolution, but with the silent obedience of billions, marching to the steafdy beat of “order,” “tradition,” and “the way things ought to be.” The warning is simple: if you do not stop authoritarianism when it is soft and delusional, you will face it later when it is brutal and unapologetic.

Europe, of course, has seen this before – there was a flood of books in the early 

1950s trying to make sense of German behaviour in the 1930s, books like The 

Authoritarian Personality ed Adorno et al (1950) with a later edition – see the link 

- in 2019 and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951. 

At Glasgow University in the early 1960s (when I studied Politics and Economics) 

I had a Romanian tutor (in political sociology) Zevedei Barbu who held me spellbound 

as he introduced me to Weber and Michels, drawing on his own experience (which 

I didn’t know about at the time) of Democracy and Dictatorship – their psychology 

and patterns of life which he published in 1956. He was, after all, a psychologist 

by training. Bob Altemeyer was another psychologist (Canadian this time) who 

published 50 years later The Authoritarians (2006) which I found very confusing 

since it focuses more on the details of his psychological experiments and fails to 

mention Adorno let alone Barbu. 

But he’s published 2 further books on the theme Authoritarian Nightmare – 
Trump and his followers J Dean and R Altemeyer (2019) and a short (60 page) 

addition in the light of 3 important books Updating Authoritarian Nightmare (2021). 

The post with which I start quotes extensively from the first of these books and led 

me to another interesting book on the subject The Politics of Antagonism – security 

narratives and the remaking of political identity (2024) by a writer on war and 

international relations - Georg  Loefflemann 

This book demonstrates how populist security narratives served as the driving force 

behind the mobilization of Republican voters and the legitimation of an ‘America First’ 

policy agenda under the Trump presidency. Going beyond existing research on both 

populism and security narratives, the author links insights from political psychology on 

collective narcissism, blame attribution and emotionalization with research in political 

communication on narrative and framing to explore the political and societal impact of a 

populist security imaginary. Drawing on a comprehensive range of sources including key 

interviews, campaign and policy speeches, presidential addresses, and posts on social 

media, it shows how progressives, political opponents, immigrants, racial justice activists, 

and key institutions of liberal democracy collectively became an internal Other, 

delegitimated as ‘enemies of the people’. Developing an innovative conceptual‑analytical 

framework of nationalist populism that expands on established concepts of political 

identity and ontological security, the book will appeal to students of critical security studies, 

critical constructivist approaches in International Relations, and US politics 

A final article worth reading is Collective Narcissism and Weakening of American democracy Oliver Keenan and AG de Zavala 2021