Trump’s Fascist Perversion

Fascist Leaders and Their Followers

At his Mar-a-Lago press conference on January 7, 2025, Trump was asked a variety of questions by a group of reporters. Fear of Trump had taken hold of the journalists. One female reporter dared to ask a question concerning Trump’s policies on women. She was shouted down by a male journalist before she could finish her question and get an answer. None of the journalists dared to ask Trump the most pressing and crucial question: “Are you planning to destroy US democracy and to become a dictator on Day One, as you have declared?”

In 1948 the Polish-born American psychoanalyst Gustav Bychowski (1895-1972) published a book titled Dictators and Disciples in which he studied the lives and personalities of Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, Maximilien de Robespierre, Adolf Hitler and Iosif Djugashvili Stalin. Not surprisingly, Bychowski found that these dictators shared some common psychological characteristics, such as excessive narcissism, “aggressive hatred” and lust for power.

Bychowski explored the psychological dynamics taking place between dictators and their followers. He thought that after major wars or revolutions, the “collective ego” of some nations, having lost its feeling of security and having regressed to a primitive stage of emotional development, sought an idealized leader who presented himself as omniscient and omnipotent. The dictator replaced the collective “ego ideal” which had been shaken by the social crises preceding his dictatorship. The group accepted the new ruler because it found outlets for its “repressed sadomasochism.” Aggression was rationalized ideologically and by projection.

Bychowski found that because of the collective regression, the imagined infallibility of the dictator restored a sense of security and faith to the nation. The relationship between the masses and the dictator was reciprocal. The masses made the tyrant feel omnipotent, and he made them think they were the strongest and best nation in the world. It was a process of mutual identifications. The tyrant and his followers were bound by ties of common guilt and anxieties that were defended by delusions of grandeur and persecution.

Bychowski failed to make a clear distinction between individual and collective dynamics, often ascribing to the large group the same psychological processes and defenses which operated in the individual. His work was amended and expanded a few decades later by the Cypriot-Turkish-born American psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan (born 1932), who developed a new psychoanalysis of large groups, such as nations. Volkan demonstrated that large groups had a psychology of their own, including large-group identity, shared narcissism, psychological borders, chosen trauma and chosen glory, trans-generational transmission, regression in times of conflict, leader-follower dynamics, and vulnerability to propaganda.

We now know that most autocrats suffer from severe emotional disturbances going back to their early life, that they have malignant narcissistic personalities, that some of them suffer from borderline personality disorder, that they have an insatiable need for mirroring by their followers, and that their addiction to boundless power is no less self-destructive than an addiction to drugs, alcohol, or sex. I shall attempt to demonstrate that Trump’s addiction to power is an emotional perversion that can be traced back to his early life.

The Fascist Playbook

In 2020 the American historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat (born 1960), an expert on fascism, published a book titled Strongmen which complemented Bychowski’s Dictators and Disciples. She showed that Trump’s threats of military action against other countries and his plans for US territorial expansion were taken right out of the fascist playbook. Fascist ideology has always emphasized territorial expansion and military action as core elements of its world view and of its political agenda.

The fascist playbook was “written” by Benito Mussolini. Exploiting widespread social and economic unrest after the First World War and the Italian nostalgia for the “glorious” past, Mussolini inflamed the Italian masses to fight for the conquest of Libya, Ethiopia, or Greece, and to restore the glory of the ancient Roman empire to Italy. The intellectuals were persecuted. In America the fascist playbook includes attacks on the four pillars of democracy: the universities, the non-profit organizations, the mass-communication media, and organized labor.

Hitler learned his fascist playbook from Mussolini. Germany is a large and spacious country. In 1933 there were sixty-six million Germans, much fewer than today’s eighty million. There was no shortage of living space. Yet Hitler had made the German expansion to the East, due to the purported lack of German Lebensraum, a cornerstone of Nazi Party ideology. The notion of the lack of living space was just as delusional as those of the Aryan race and the Jewish Question, yet to Hitler they were all too real. In 1938 Hitler annexed his native Austria and the Czech Sudetenland to the German Reich. In 1939 Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, setting off the terrible Second World War, in which anywhere from seventy million to eighty five  million people were killed, including six million Jews who were murdered by the Germans, and over five million German soldiers and civilians. Hitler overran and subjected most of Europe before being pushed back by the Allies. The war ended with Hitler’s suicide and with Germany’s collapse.

Trump’s re-election in November 2024 was a global disaster. In February of that year he had been voted the worst president in US history by 154 academics from various disciplines who study US presidential politics. During his first presidency Trump had denied global warming and climate change as a “hoax” and removed the environmental protection regulations that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had put in place. Trump also pulled the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change. His reckless treatment of the environment accelerated global warming and brought about natural catastrophes.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who had grown up in Pacific Palisades, California, saw her entire childhood go up in flames during the wildfires that swept the Los Angeles area in January 2025. She wrote, “Now, the church where I went to preschool, my public elementary and high schools, the public library where I worked, the public tennis courts where I spent so many hours, the homes I grew up in, and everything else is gone.” Climate change causes widespread dislocation and migration. Ben-Ghiat added that “By 2050, 200 million people could be displaced from low-income countries, and the total number of people who must leave their homes due to climate-caused disasters worldwide could rise to 1.2 billion. Given this situation, it is beyond tragic that America is about to return to ’governance’ by an individual dedicated to plunder and extractive capitalism in all its forms and whose first administration stood out for its hostility to climate change mitigation.”

Like Mussolini and Hitler, Trump is following the fascist playbook. By endlessly repeating his slogan of “Make America Great Again,” and by promising “a new Golden Age” in America, a convicted felon and inveterate liar is about to rule the most powerful nation in the world. He will turn the US from a democracy into an autocracy in which the citizens will lose the protection of the judicial system. Trump’s ally Elon Musk bought up Twitter, renamed it X, and did away with fact checks. Musk has succeeded in getting Mark Zuckerberg to remove fact checking from Facebook as well, which will allow Trump to use disinformation to control and manipulate the American people.

The Delusion of Invincibility

On Tuesday, January 7, 2025 Trump asked a New York State appeals court to stay his January 10 sentencing by the New York State criminal court for his conviction by a jury on 34 felony counts in May 2024. The sentencing by Acting Justice Juan Merchan had been postponed several times. The appeals court, presided over by Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer, denied Trump’s request. Trump wanted to avoid his sentencing at all costs. Having succeeded in having all other criminal indictments against him dismissed or delayed indefinitely, he wanted to erase his criminal conviction.

On January 8, 2025, Trump filed an emergency application with the US Supreme Court to halt his sentencing by the New York State court and to postpone it indefinitely. Trump’s lawyers argued in their application that his sentencing would cause “grave injustice and harm” — not to Trump but “to the institution of the Presidency and [to] the operations of the federal government.” Trump’s lawyers deliberately ignored the most crucial and obvious fact in the case, namely that the Supreme Court had granted Trump immunity for his “official acts as President” but not for the crimes for which he had been convicted in New York State, which he had committed before he was first elected President in 2016.

The obvious threat to US democracy of Trump’s application being granted by the US Supreme Court could not be overstated. Along with his almost unconditional support from the Court, Trump’s loyal nominees for US Attorney General and for FBI Director will enable him to control everyone and everything in the US and to do pretty much whatever he pleases. This could include pardoning other convicted criminals who are his allies while prosecuting and jailing “the enemy within,” meaning his political opponents, like Liz Cheney.

Fortunately for the US and for all humanity, on January 9, 2025, the Supreme Court denied  Trump’s application by a thin margin of 5 to 4 justices. The majority that denied Trump’s application included Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and the Court’s four female justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The minority that dissented consisted of the court’s most conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh (who had himself been charged with sexual crimes in his youth). They noted their dissents without providing reasons. Surprisingly, one of Trump’s appointees, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, had joined the majority vote. It was her vote that at least temporarily saved US democracy.

In its brief unsigned order denying Trump’s application, the five-justice majority noted that Trump was not facing jail time, and that he could still challenge his conviction “in the ordinary course on appeal.” Although Trump had argued that being sentenced ten days before his inauguration would distract from the presidential transition, the majority of justices on the Supreme Court bench held that “the burden that sentencing will impose on the president-elect’s responsibilities is relatively insubstantial.” American democracy was saved by this decision. Trump was no longer above the law, and he was not invincible.

At Jimmy Carter’s state funeral on January 9, 2025, attended by all five living US presidents (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden) Trump was seated in the second row, beside Barack Obama. Trump kept talking to Obama, who at one point smiled politely. Later, after seeing a video of their interaction, Trump said “It did look very friendly, I must say. I didn’t realize how friendly it looked […] Boy, they look like two people that like each other. And we probably do.” This was a gross denial of reality. Obama derided Trump, and had said so publicly.

On January 10, 2025 Trump was sentenced to an unconditional discharge by Acting Justice Juan Merchan of the New York State criminal court. Trump would not face any jail time, no fines or probation would be imposed, but the conviction would remain on Trump’s criminal record. The previous June Trump had been video-interviewed by a female probation officer as part of the preparation for his sentencing. Trump had told the probation officer that he was above the law. This delusion of grandeur, typical of paranoid tyrants, would lead him to an endless series of appeals, trying to undo his conviction and his sentence.

Conscious and Unconscious Motives

While Trump’s conscious motives for seeking absolute power may seem obvious,  his unconscious ones are much less so. We might begin by asking why, in fact, Trump has an overwhelming need for boundless power. As the American political scientist Harold Lasswell (1902-1978) found in his Psychopathology and Politics (1930), more often than not the politician’s craving for power hides behind it painful early feelings of powerlessness and helplessness.

In Trump’s case, a profound  emotional perversion underlies the quest for power. Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I would add that those whose minds are perverted seek power, and those whose minds are absolutely perverted seek absolute  power. I call the perversion that seeks boundless power “the fascist perversion.”

In 2017 the psychoanalyst Danielle Knafo and the writer Rocco Lo Bosco published The Age of Perversion, arguing that human perversions were not necessarily sexual and are much more pervasive than had been thought. Perversions include relational dysfunction, the failure of personal and social integration, and malignant narcissism, characterized by manipulation of others and disrespect for interpersonal boundaries. Perversion is an unconscious defense against anxiety. Perversion includes fixation and rigidity. Perversions are the end-products of a failed developmental process, often rooted in childhood experiences. Sexual perversions include hostility, violence and lack of consent. The fascist perversion manifests itself as the quest for boundless power. Its infantile roots are in the feelings of helplessness and worthlessness.

In Donald Trump’s case human relations, reality and truth are perverted and power takes precedence over everything else. Donald’s mind was perverted at a very early age. He was emotionally abandoned by his mother when he was a toddler, after the birth of his younger brother. His mother had barely survived intensive uterine hemorrhaging and several operations. She had to take care of herself and of her new baby, and had no time or emotional energy left for her little Donny. The toddler Donny felt totally helpless and worthless. His entire world, which had consisted of himself and his mother, had collapsed.

Donald has done anything he could to survive emotionally. He denied his feelings of helplessness and despair and evolved a “false self” as special, unique and great. He unconsciously split his internalized mother into an all-good fairy and and an all-bad witch. His self was split as well, producing a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. His inner world has remained split into all good and all bad objects, and his external world has remained black and white, with no shades of grey.

As a schoolboy Donny was a sassy student and an aggressive bully, which, at age thirteen, led to his expulsion from home and school by his father and to his being sent to a military academy. His perfectionist and disciplinarian father, as well as unfortunate mentors like Roy Cohn, helped shape the young Donald as a “killer,” a man who will do anything, including lying and cheating, to see himself as the “winner” in every transaction with the external world. He and  his father were repeatedly charged by the authorities with discriminating against black people in their housing projects. Their world was literally black and white.

For Donald Trump there are only two kinds of people: good people (whom he likes) and terrible people (whom he hates). He has no hesitation in publicly calling his judges and other eminent people “horrible.” He wants those “horrible” people killed. In 1989 he called for the execution of the Central Park Five, who had been wrongfully convicted of raping a female jogger, and who were later exonerated. Trump has also called for the death penalty for migrants who kill U.S. citizens, for killers of law enforcement officers, for human and drug traffickers, for child rapists, and for General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, who had criticized him. Trump has hinted at placing Liz Cheney before a firing squad.

His murderous rage can be traced back to his very early life. His violent feelings against poor immigrants are unconsciously related to his mother, who was herself a poor immigrant. His overwhelming need to build a Wall between the U.S. and Mexico is due to his lack of clear inner boundaries of the self. Like other people with borderline personality disorder, Trump is totally unpredictable. His instability is the only stable thing about him.

Trump acts like a true Mafia boss. He does not expressly order his fans to commit crimes. Instead, he implicitly incites them to violence. For instance, on January 6, 2021, when he stood in Washington’s Ellipse and incited several thousand fans from all over the U.S. to storm the U.S. Capitol and to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election as President, he told them, “You know what you have to do.” Indeed, his violent fans knew what he wanted them to do. The result was a bloody insurrection that left several people dead on both sides and many others badly injured or deeply traumatized. Several policemen who were on duty at the Capitol that day and who had been overwhelmed by the mob committed suicide in a  state of deep depression. Trump did not care. He has no empathy, never having received any. He did not care about the hundreds of thousands of poor Americans who died of COVID-19 due to his bungling of the pandemic crisis.

Donald Trump is a terrifying case of conscious and unconscious motives deriving from one another while also reinforcing each other, an insatiable addiction to boundless power, and a fascist perversion of truth and reality, resulting in extreme destructiveness (and self-destructiveness). We now have a fascist dictator who may prove more dangerous and more destructive than both Mussolini and Hitler, given the unprecedented power of the U.S. president to do harm, including the power to wage nuclear war.

Trump may be his own worst enemy, but he is also an enemy of democracy, liberty, reality, truth, and justice. He may think he loves peace, but deep in his heart burn the fire and fury of war. Left unchecked, Trump will pervert and destroy American democracy. The few guardrails that checked his destructive power during his first presidency will no longer be there to save America and the world from him. Far from the “golden age” that he promises, the U.S. seems about to enter one of the bleakest, darkest and most dangerous periods in its history.