Trump's Rhetoric: Emotions and Magic
We need to move beyond formal arguments to understand Trump's appeal and find ways to counter it.
In 1989, I taught for a year at Purdue University-Calumet, located in Hammond, Indiana, just south of Chicago. The area was once one of the leading producers of steel in the world with an abundance of what were considered good manufacturing jobs—the kind of job that began to disappear in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1973, the United States produced 111.4 million tons of steel. In 1984, this dropped to 70 million tons. Although production rises and falls, northwest Indiana and other centers of steel production have experienced severe economic decline, making a difficult life untenable in ways that it is hard for many Americans to understand. In communities like this, the American Dream was always a bit tainted. In the last fifty years, the dream seems more like a fraud.
When I was teaching in steel country, one of my students wrote an essay about why so many members of her family had cancer. Through brilliant research, she found that her family home was built on top of a slagheap, the toxic waste from the steel plants. Another student told me: “I don’t care about saving the whales. I’ll never see one.” In October, my wife and I bundled up our two young sons and took them outside to enjoy what we thought was an early snow. Once outside, I held out my hand to catch a few flakes and noticed they were gray. I was confused. Then, I slowly realized this was pollution from the steel mills. We rushed the kids inside and I started applying for jobs in less toxic regions. My students were less mobile. They had been in the area for generations and would likely be there for generations to come.
In the spring, a few colleagues and I observed a graduate teaching assistant’s composition class. The students were doing oral presentations on a book of their choice. One student spoke about Trump: The Art of the Deal. At the time, I hadn’t even heard of Trump, but this student had managed to find his book in a town with no bookstores before he could order it on Amazon. He probably drove about fifteen miles to buy it at a B. Dalton, which at that time survived by stocking best-sellers and L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. The student spoke about how much he admired Trump because “he made something of himself.” After the report was finished, a colleague leaned toward me and said, “Yea, he took a few million dollars and made something of himself.” This snarky comment, typical of “sophisticated” academics, was loud enough for the student to hear. His face turned bright red.
I mention this anecdote because it explains a great deal about Trump’s appeal with an important segment of his audience. Many working-class Americans in cities and rural areas, in the communities around steel plants and coal fields, on family farms that are close to bankruptcy, feel that their America, the America where they could “make something” of themselves, has disappeared. While most of us view Trump as so privileged that it was almost impossible for him to fail, many white Americans who feel stuck in a place of limited opportunities see Trump as an emblem of what they want to believe is still possible. For them, he is embodiment of the American Dream, opposed to a vague class of elites (for example, smug college professors) who seem to say, “You can never enter my world.” It is easy to miss the emotional identification between the American who lives in a community that is palpably deteriorating, who see no way out, and a real estate magnate who seems to have everything. We see the gulf between Americans who have worked debilitating jobs for generations and a man who owns his own Boeing 757, but they want to find the similarities, no matter how faint, between their present and the narrative arc of Trump’s success story, which becomes a path to a better future. As Trump built his brand, he presented himself as a hardworking, self-made businessman. He never said how much money he inherited from his father. He never talks about his businesses that ended in bankruptcy or lawsuits. To the student in steel country, probably the first of his family to even attempt college, Trump offered secret knowledge for the price of a single, accessible book.
Kenneth Burke, philosopher, critic, and rhetorician, says that all persuasion is primarily an act of identification. The identification is created by both speaker and audience. Trump has consciously created an image of himself—rhetoricians call this ethos, he calls it a brand—that Carl Jung would call archetypal. For a large section of his audience, he embodies the word that he almost never uses—hope. They want to become him. He is their path to success. If this identification between the working class and a billionaire seems fantastical, it is because we are seeing it through our own stories, our own path to a more modest success, the kind of path mapped by a high school guidance counselor. In their experience, as they observe the lives in their community, it is this traditional, middle-class path to success seems fantastical. Trump’s success and television shows like Dallas, modern adaptions of the Horatio Alger story, seem more within their grasp.
Fantasy is an appropriate word because, from one perspective, we are dealing with homeopathic magic. In The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, published in two volumes in 1890 and later expanded into twelve volumes from 1906-1915, Sir George Frazer analyzed the intersection of ritual, myth, and magic. He described how, with homeopathic magic, power can be transferred through physical contact with others or objects associated with them. In many nonindustrial tribes, people secretly bury clippings from their hair or fingernails because these objects could be used to enact a curse against them. A husband and wife have sex in their newly seeded field to transfer their fertility to the soil. Wearing the red Trump MAGA hat has a similar effect, as does attendance at one of his rallies. Recently, Trump sold pieces of the suit he wore at his booking in Georgia. This is oddly primitive. In the Middle Ages, sinners bought splinters of wood that, they were told, sometimes by priests, came from cross on which Jesus was crucified. This would, they believed, be a ticket into heaven. Homeopathic magic happens, to some degree, with all politicians and famous people. This is why politicians shake hands and kiss babies. The selfie taken with a famous person is the new magical touch.
In the “Identification” chapter of On Symbols and Society, Burke says that magic could be considered a form of “primitive rhetoric.” He describes rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” We could add, that identifying with words and other symbols—the American flag, the MAGA hat, the Trump T-shirt, the anti-Biden bumper sticker—is a form of magic and, thus, all forms of rhetoric, even sophisticated and “objective” forms like the rhetoric of science, have some magic in them. This identification promises a transformation that is as fantastical as changing base metal into gold. When it happens, we are often left astonished.
In political speeches, discourse is not as rational as we might hope. As long as human beings are still human, the rational will never operate apart from emotions and even what we thought were long-abandoned rituals. It is by looking into the emotions of a typical Trump speech that we begin to make sense of his appeal.
The energy of a Trump rally, especially in the 2016 campaign, surprised everyone, and even astute political observers, both reporters and academics, are still struggling to understand how he was able to break political and social norms. Commentators on MSNBC, for example, kept saying “this is unprecedented” and “I am shocked but not surprised.” With each breech of political correctness, each violation of a norm, they said, “This surely is the event that will turn supporters away from him.” They didn’t understand the rallies, which seemed to be fueled by anger and meanness, more like a mob. While the emotions at work might seem simple and flat, a simple release of long repressed anger, it is actually complex and textured, a cluster of emotions that work together within a particular context, a moment in history.
Aristotle’s discussion of pathos or emotional appeals in the Rhetoric provides some insight. Aristotle probably wrote this section of the Rhetoric for another project and then incorporated it later without fully developing it. It nonetheless remains surprisingly sound, even when we consider recent research on the mind, including brain scans. When I taught the Rhetoric in graduate seminars, students typically slogged through Book I and then came alive with the discussion of emotions at the beginning of Book II.
Aristotle’s discussion of emotions still resonates because his treatment is social and rhetorical. Even though it was written two and half millennia ago, we can still see us, our lives, our families, our workplaces, in his discussion and how we might apply it. He discusses the connection between signs (words, behaviors, and physical objects) and emotions; these signs both indicate the emotion and evoke it. The signs, thus, become a means to analyze what an audience is feeling and to intensify or dampen it. For example, Aristotle says that shame is an emotion that we experience in public. Trump is adept at shaming opponents with a single sign, as in “Little Marco.” With “little,” a single word, Trump obviates the physical (Marco Rubio is short), suggests the unseen (he likely has a small penis), and dismisses him as a serious candidate (he is weak).
As Aristotle discusses a range of emotions useful to an orator, he discusses pairs of emotions. Early in Book II, Aristotle moves from anger to calmness to show how one emotion can counter another. For example, in the calmness section, he discusses how sharing a meal can counter anger. However, the pairs are not always opposites, as many commentators on the Rhetoric say, and they work together in ways that are surprising. On a few occasions, he points out how two emotions, like emulation and contempt for others, support each other. The person who emulated seems more worthy as others are diminished. Trump consistently glorifies himself (“I am rich, really rich”) as he shows contempt for others (“Biden is corrupt, so corrupt”). The MAGA hat is certainly a sign that says, “I am a member of a clan, special, even protected, because I am standing beside Trump.”
At the foundation of Aristotle’s discussion is a view of identity that is not at the core of Greek philosophy, or how we view its tradition, including how we tend to view Aristotle. We tend to think of the Ancient Greeks as creating the view of “man” as a rational being. Aristotle, whose works on logic were not seriously challenged until the twentieth century, is part of this heritage, but his treatment of emotions in the Rhetoric is arguably the origin of psychology in Western thought. As Heidegger wrote in Being and Time: “It is not an accident that the earliest systematic interpretation of affects that has come down to us is not treated in the framework of ‘psychology.’” Aristotle’s treatment of emotions, he continues, is the “the first systematic hermetic of everydayness of Being with one another.” This “everydayness” is “public,” and the orator “must understand the possibility of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright.”
In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ethos (identity), logos (logic), and pathos (emotions) work together, not independently. Heidegger understood this, and he understood how gossip and emerging forms of mass media caused a “leveling down” of das Man. Yet, he seemed incapable of applying this insight to his own life and his later membership in the Nazi party. I mention Heidegger’s view of Aristotle because he points not just to the importance of Aristotle’s discussion of emotions but also to how this section of the Rhetoric needs careful interpretation—its own hermeneutic. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is his lecture notes, not a work polished for publication, on oral rhetoric in public settings. He often points us in directions without fully developing the strategy, which he might have done in his lecture or on long walks with his students. He focuses on one medium, speaking. It is, thus, important to expand his thoughts by applying it to other media, especially social media.
What we should preserve is the importance of seeing an audience as a bundle of seemingly conflicting emotions that feed each other. This will help us to see the Trump phenomenon in new ways and even suggest new strategies for countering it. Cicero wrote, as he reworked Aristotle a few centuries later, that we should “fight fire with fire,” that is, emotions with emotions. Said differently, rhetoricians need to study emotions and, in light of more recent research into the mind, forms of irrationality, including narcissism and sociopathy.
Aristotle begins with anger, and that is a good place to begin with Trump. As Daniel J. Gross says, in The Secret History of Emotion, Aristotle’s discussion of anger and other emotions is “psychosocial.” It “presumes a contoured social world of emotional investments,” a world of unequal power and unequal vulnerabilities. We experience anger, Aristotle says, when we have been slighted or belittled by a particular person. The slight that evokes anger might seem minor to an observer because it has come at the end of a long stream of similar insults. Aristotle clearly recognized that anger might build over an extended period, perhaps, even a lifetime. I will return to this idea later to discuss how emotions, which are typically transient states can become calcified into a persistent trait, which then becomes a frame for how one interprets—or misinterprets—even the most mundane of events.
With each emotion, Aristotle discusses the “state of mind” of the person experiencing it. Within rhetoric, the audience’s state of mind makes them either more or less receptive to the speaker’s arguments. A number of psychologists have recently been focusing on mental frames and how these frames influence one’s interpretation of the world. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle clearly recognizes mental frames—before the term existed. The person who is angry, he says, feels distressed because some desire has been thwarted. This “longing for something and not getting it” could relate to an array of social situations, but for Trump supporters it is often the feeling that others in America, minorities or recent immigrants, seem to have advantages that they have been denied. They might feel that Blacks are given admission to prestigious universities or Koreans are given loans to open a corner grocery store. If you came of age believing that both the physical and emotional worlds have limited resources, then, as these other groups win, you lose. This anger feeds a meanness or ill-treatment toward these groups. This release of anger, interestingly, brings pleasure. Aristotle clearly points out that we enjoy feeling angry. That is, in part, why it is such a useful emotion for speakers.
In the anger released at Trump rallies, political correctness plays an important role. Political correctness, which began in the 1950s with the Civil Rights Movement, has restricted the expression of the resentment felt by many white Americans. As Trump attacks political correctness, which he does almost every time he speaks, he provides permission to speak the unspeakable, to acknowledge long-repressed anger, and to enjoy being mean, which is at odds not just with political correctness but also the Christian instruction of many Trump supporters. Trump has made American “great” again in the sense that he has provided a space that is like the America before political correctness.
How does he do this? By modeling a behavior that we have not seen from politicians since George Wallace ran for president as an independent in 1968, crazy enough but still respecting some political norms, or maybe since Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat in 1948, with frequent use of racial slurs. Trump not only violates the norms of political correctness and common decency; he also normalizes narcissism and sociopathy. Trump does not have a traditional stump speech and rarely reads form a teleprompter, even when he was president. Rather, he speaks in the moment, sometimes for a couple of hours (Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, and Castro all possessed this skill), feeding the crowd and feeding off the crowd, typically without a script and certainly without a filter. He is at his best speaking before a large crowd. Aristotle doesn’t write anything about the dynamics of a crowd, perhaps, because he thought of rhetoric as only happening between a speaker and a crowd that was about the size of a jury. In Ancient Greece, a jury consisted of 500 males over the age of thirty. It might be argued that Trump’s rhetoric only fully manifests itself before a large crowd, a crowd of thousands, and that MAGAs only find their identity as members of a crowd.
One of the best discussions of crowd psychology is Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, published in 1960. Canetti won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981. He writes: “The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge.Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it. This is when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal.” The crowd’s need for a discharge comes from what Canetti calls its “inner life”: “One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd is the feeling of being persecuted, a particular angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies.” As Trump mocks political correctness and crosses its limits, he grants permission for his audience to do the same. Released from restrictions, his audience discharges anger that, for some, has been building for decades of not speaking resentments and not criticizing their “enemies,” at least in public.
The enemies are the secondary players in the drama of a typical Trump rally: the liberal elite who look down on Trump and his followers, the all-too-present threats to America (in Trump’s view, immigration, ISIS, and incompetent politicians), the press and their fake news, and protesters or critics (some present, some not) who question Trump’s motives, morality, or wisdom. Each enemy evokes a different emotion, as I will point out, yet all of the emotions feed the same vortex and the central emotion—fear—and that emotion fuels the anger.
We are angry at things we fear, that is, Aristotle says, things that seem beyond our control. Always in the background of a MAGA rally is Trump’s dystopian view of America’s future. American is in decline. Businesses cannot operate due to government regulations. Toilets don’t flush properly. The deductibles for healthcare are too high. Most importantly, immigrants are flooding our borders. As Kenneth Burke often points out, people are united in the “barnyard” of politics when they share a common enemy—a scapegoat. In this age of political correctness, even Trump will not make Jews or Blacks the scapegoat, at least, directly. Immigrants, however, are not a protected class, so they can be employed to coalesce fears about the Browning of America. If America is under siege, if it is broken, then Trump can present himself as the one person who can fix it. He elevates himself as someone who should be admired as the Ancient Greeks admired their warriors. This makes sense to people who feel powerless as they face a dismal future.
Trump’s supporters, Aristotle would say, emulate him. Aristotle’s description of emulation will take a little updating. He says that we emulate those who are brave and wise and those who hold positions of prestige, such as, generals and politicians. In the Athens of Aristotle’s time, this makes sense. In our time, bravery is a less crucial skill (our military is professional and voluntary), wisdom is less important than technical skills (children with computer skills, like Mark Zuckerberg, become icons), and politicians are less respected than business executives (Trump sells himself as the dealmaker). Aristotle also says that we emulate those “whose praises and encomia are spoken by poets and prose writers.” No poet has sung the praises of Trump, as far as I know, but he has consciously constructed his brand in both traditional media and social media, even to the point of calling reporters while pretending to be someone else so that he can praise himself. Tony Schwartz, Trump’s coauthor on The Art of the Deal, describes him as pathologically in need of constant praise. After he lost the 2020 election, he reportedly had Natalie Harp, an assistant, ride beside him in his golf cart with an iPad to read aloud—chant—positive comments about him, that is, encomia from social media. She has earned a nickname, “the human printer,” because she travels with him, carrying a printer in a duffle bag, so she can supply Trump with a steady stream of printouts, lavish praise from the “poets” of the Internet. Trump often talks about how Putin and other “strong leaders” like him and how he likes anyone who likes him. He has courted praise his entire life. He devours it like the huge chocolate cake served at Mar-a-Lago, and he is never satiated.
Aristotle associates emulation with contempt, not as opposite emotions, more as complementary emotions. Aristotle says that those who emulate or wish to be emulated typically show contempt to others. As other are diminished, the speaker is elevated. In his speeches, Trump shows contempt for “elites.” This group includes the mainstream press and anyone who criticizes him as well as his opponents. He doesn’t demonstrate his contempt by criticizing their policies; he dismisses them with a modern version of the Homeric epithet: Low-Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hilary, Sleepy Joe. This is where Trump’s humor emerges: It comes from contempt, and it makes both him and his followers feel superior to anyone who is not among them.
Emulation and contempt reveal an important part of Trump’s rhetoric—indeed, the rhetoric of all “strong” leaders—that is often missed. The concept of the “totalitarian personality,” as I will discuss in another essay, is often used to explain why Trump’s audience is willing to become subservient. We can view MAGAs as examples of the “totalitarian personality,” people who possess a rigidly hierarchical view of social structures, including the family, and who are willing to accept a lower position within that structure. This is accurate in many ways, but it also misses a key feature of the appeal. As Trump’s supporters emulate him, they adopt his beliefs and values, his behaviors, his words and phrases, not to serve him—although loyalty to the man is important—but to become him. As they emulate Trump, they rise with him and above those he shows contempt. Aristotle does not speak of emulation as a form of homeopathic magic, but the Greek word for emulation, Zelos, which conveys both a sense of zeal and mimesis or imitation, arguably does. Imitation is a means of forming an identification with another. We cannot emulate without being persuaded. A form of persuasion. The kind of persuasion where you adopt the beliefs and values of the person you emulate. A group identity that is absolute and without any tolerance for diversity or individuals.
The opposite emotion of emulation is envy. This is the dark underbelly of emulation that drives much of its expression. We can see the connection to emulation when Aristotle says that people are “emulous who think themselves deserving of goods they do not have.” Trump is not only a successful businessman. He has, they believe, worked for his money, And, equally important, he is also willing to share his knowledge. (Those who complete an initiation ritual typically receive secret knowledge from the priest. The secret knowledge is often that there is not really any secret knowledge.) He is emulated, but elites, like Hillary Clinton, are envied and resented because their success seems to come from a position of privilege. During the 2016 campaign, Trump often criticized Hillary for earning huge speaking fees from Wall Street. His wealth was earned; hers is the sign of a conspiracy.
One of the most interesting aspects of envy, in Aristotle’s discussion, is that he opposes it to pity. This brings up another aspect of Aristotle’s treatment of emotions that does not receive much commentary: Certain emotions support each other, like emulation and contempt, which means that a person can flow through these emotions easily. It is easy, for example, to move through anger, contempt, and envy, almost as if they were felt simultaneously. If Aristotle were writing in a post-Freudian age, he might have said that an audience could experience one emotion subconsciously, like envy, while experiencing a different emotion consciously, like emulation. Equally important, some emotions negate other emotions. It is not easy to move from envy to pity. This move requires a shift in identity, perhaps even years of therapy.
Pity, not surprisingly, is absent from Trump’s rallies, and this is part of the evolution of his ethos or brand. In the first chapter of The Art of the Deal (yes, I did buy and read it—not without some shame and drinking), Trump/Schwartz provide a detailed description of one week in the life of Trump, the businessman, husband, and father. This chapter is meant to convey that Trump is important (other important people seek his advice), he works hard (in a typical day, he has a dozen meetings and makes 50-100 phone calls while sleeping only six hours), he is a good father (he always takes calls from his children, who were very young at the time), he can fix what others cannot (others could not renovated the ice skating rink in Central Park, but he managed to complete the job), and he is compassionate (he helps a widow who is danger of losing her farm to raise $40,000). While all of this seems inflated (how is it possible to make 50-100 phone calls each day?), the anecdote about Trump showing compassion for a widow in Georgia seems unlike the Trump we see at rallies. Certainly, the image of Trump in The Art of the Deal is a more conventional approach to building ethos. Trump/Swartz construct Trump the brand as the Good Man. At his rallies, he is the strong political leader, and he focuses entirely on negative emotions that do not allow for the expression of positive emotions like pity or empathy.
In March 2024, when continuing military support for Ukraine was stalled in congress, a reporter asked a Trump supporter a series of questions about why Trump supported Putin but not Ukraine. The woman said that Putin was a good man. When asked about the Ukrainians killed in the war, including children, the woman replied, “I don’t care about them.” To many Americans, most of whom support Ukraine, this lack of concern for human suffering seems callous and narcissistic. But, in the climate of a Trump rally, there is no room for pity. This makes Trump’s mocking of a handicapped reporter more comprehensible, although certainly not acceptable. This also suggests a simple test for our own political rhetoric: If my depiction of those I argue against does not allow for pity—or a the more humane emotion, empathy—then my rhetoric is flawed. I am, in my own way, mimicking the emotions of a MAGA at a Trump rally. I have become my own enemy.
So far, I have been using Aristotle, focusing on how he sees emotions as socially evoked and how he mixes and matches emotions. While Aristotle’s purpose is to explain how to evoke or counter emotions in an audience, I have been extending his discussion—maybe exploring implications in his text is more accurate, exploring ways to read the Rhetoric—to discuss how one dominant emotion in a speaker’s practice (like anger) can be used with a range of emotions (like, fear, envy, indignation, emulation, etc.) to sustain and intensify it but also to short circuit other emotions (like pity). Now, I am going to shift to Kenneth Burke, who spent much of his career bringing Aristotle’s Rhetoric into the twentieth century. Like Aristotle, Burke saw a connection between signs (both symbols and words) and emotions, and he saw emotions as emerging from social experiences. I will use Burke to discuss how emotions (typically, regarded as states or moods that fluctuate from moment to moment, as in, “he is angry right now”) can calcify to become more like a state (a consistent feature of one’s personality, as in “he is an angry person”). This is, as I said earlier, implicit in Aristotle, although not fully developed. The calcified emotion is tied to a recurrent social situation. As an adaptation to, not necessarily an understanding of or an escape from, the recurrent social situation, people find themselves in narratives that are archetypal. (Carl Jung will also come into this analysis.) While most of us are unaware of being pulled into an archetypal cluster, it will nonetheless affect how we act and how we make sense of our world.
I will begin with fear. In “Motives and Action,” a chapter in On Symbols and Society, Burke says that consciousness evolves from conflict, which often appears in patterns. These patterns coalesce around words and social roles that become motives for future action, which includes how we interpret the motives of others. We are, in short, constructing a world view that constructs a world. Burke writes: “America is precisely the place where, on looking into one’s head, one is least likely to find a store of regularized, stabilized, recurrent experiences imbedded there, except for a few groups of stimuli, not complex at all, such as the lure of a new refrigerator, the fear of losing one’s job, the distinction of smoking a certain brand of cigarette, etc.” While there is much in this single sentence that we could unpack, the central point is that recurrent situations influence not only the words we use repeatedly but also how we see ourselves connecting with others and society in general. This leads, in turn, to the adoption (I am intentionally using “adoption” to pun with “adaptation”) of mental frames that are structured as narratives and built upon archetypal roles. (Mikhail Bakhtin, Carolyn Miller, and others have described genres as evolving from recurrent situations.) Although Burke does not mention archetypes in this chapter, he clearly knew Jung’s work on archetypes.
One of the aspects of Jung’s theory of archetypes that is neglected—one could argue, underdeveloped by Jung himself—is that archetypes appear is constellations of three. As we recognize the constellations, we understand how an archetype is a role in a broader narrative. A victim, for example, fears a destroyer and seeks out a hero. As I explained in Identities Across Texts, these constellations draw people in (if someone is acting like a victim, we might find ourselves wanting to abuse them, even if this is against how we conceive of our conscious identity), or, equally important, our subconscious needs may lead us to adopt one of these roles (if I was abused in my family of origin, I might find the role of victim oddly familiar and even comforting). When Trump says that America has been tricked by China in trade deals and is no longer respected, he is enacting an archetypal constellation: The American people are victims, China is the destroyer, and he is the hero. Why does Trump want to be the hero? Because he is trying to save himself.
We can plug the words and phrases repeated at Trump rallies into this pattern, for example, “fake news.” The mainstream media becomes the destroyer; they do not listen to the victims or speak for them. They are presenting a view of America that is against what, according to Trump, most Americans believe. In this sense, they are victimizing true Americans. As Trump presents his view of America, he is the hero, the one who comes from outside the established structure, and speaks for the victim. He sees, he hears.
This is also the story of the American Dream, as it has been told since the late-nineteenth century. It is the Horatio Alger story of dime novels, pulp fiction for the masses, a salve for unacknowledged trauma. The stories have a simple plot: A young boy in poverty struggles to rise to middle class respectability through hard work and clean living. Think of the student I mentioned earlier who read The Art of the Deal and admired Trump because “he had made something of himself.” He aspires to improve himself but fears that the American Dream may be dead. The boy is often tested and proves himself through an act of heroism or honesty. Trump supporters are striving to better themselves, to obtain success, but they are constantly thwarted, which creates anger. Although the boy’s self-determination is important, he is often aided by a wealthy older gentleman. Think of Donald Trump and his brand. He says he can fix America, which provides hope, an emotion that exists only in the unconscious of a Trump rally. Because hope seems beyond their grasp, MAGAs desperately need a hero like Trump. This gentleman sometimes takes the boy into his home as a ward; often this includes replacing a ward who was not working hard or who had character flaws. Think of the undeserving elites who Trump often mocks during his rally speeches and the envy his followers feel for them. Trump is helping them find their rightful place in America.
The victim-destroyer-hero archetypal constellations is ultimately about power relations and the hope for a transformation of the power structure. The Destroyer has power over the Victim. The victims hope for a hero who can save them from the Destroyer. The hoped for transformation means moving from being alone and weak to belonging to a group that has power. The problem with this brand of hope is that the hero wants to save victims to gain power over them, essentially becoming the new Destroyer. Victims will remain victims until they realize that they have power to save themselves. The constellation, thus, offers the hope for a transformation that never comes. Its stability is self-reinforcing. Embedded within this pattern is the Big Lie of totalitarianism: “If you are loyal to me because I am your hero, I will save you and only harm those who deserve it.” Burke says the motive behind dictatorships is protection; in other words, when we feel vulnerable, we seek a strong leader to protect us. This is why some Trump supporters are willing to vote for him even though he says he will be a dictator. They believe the dictator will only harm their enemies. After all, they are loyal and have done no wrong. They are the good ones.
We often sanctify our suffering, so many people remain in the role of a victim for long stretches of their lives. If we are uncomfortable with it, we move from suffering to revenge. The victim-hero-destroyer constellation can flip into violence if a person or group of people shift from suffering (the role of victim) into revenge (the role of the hero). When enacting revenge, if it is moderated, that is, within the existing social order, like a lawsuit, the victim may actually become a hero. If the revenge is not moderated, if social limits are broken, that is, manifested as unchecked violence, the victim become the destroyer. This often happens on an individual level when a person who was abused as a child becomes an abuser. On January 6th, 2021, it happened on a group level. For a group, the way out of being victims is revolution, which is why most revolutions produce a new kind of terror and a new class of victimizers. The January 6th insurrectionists saw themselves as patriots enacting a new American revolution.
A slightly different archetypal constellation explains the willingness of fundamentalist Christians to endorse Trump. Even though he is clearly a sinner who refuses to confess, Trump is more like fundamentalist Christians and Christian Nationalists than we might first expect. Since church has been televised from arenas, some churches have become brands that are more easily aligned with capitalism than traditional Christianity. The shift from this Christian brand to the Trump brand becomes more like a merger than a transformation. No revelation required. Instead of victim-destroyer-hero, we have the martyr (Christ, saints, Trump himself, but not anyone outside the tribe), the persecutor (the Devil, the non-Christian Romans, the Devil, and temptation, but not the subconscious), and the witness (Mother Mary, the disciples, but not Jews, the media, or Liberals). From the beginning of his political career, Trump has presented himself as a martyr of mainstream media. Since his indictments have begun to pile up, he is a martyr of the liberal-controlled legal system. Ultimately, the role of the martyr is about purification. On February 24, 2024, Trump spoke at the Black Conservative Federation’s Gala and said, “I am being indicted for you, the Black population.” A martyr is, by definition, a good person, a saint, who has been persecuted unfairly. Trump doesn’t have to compare himself to Christ. He doesn’t even have to say he is innocent. He simply enacts himself as a martyr who is suffering for the benefit of his people. All sins disappear in a mist. Or, do they? The martyr’s sacrifice purifies the martyr and the witnesses, but not the persecutor. The martyr and the witnesses become pure, or what Hannah Arendt calls “good beyond goodness.” The persecutor remains a devil or demon, which means we need purification over and over. This constellation is also self-reinforcing until the witnesses accept their own humanity, that is, become at peace with being imperfect.
It is, finally, important to think about the emotions that are not present at Trump rallies. These words are rarely, if ever, spoken: love, hope, pity, compassion, and forgiveness. They provide a path out of the MAGA movement.
Lots of insight here. Thanks. I especially find interesting your comparing the joining of Trump and fundamentalists as a merger. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.