Psychopolitical Review

The chronological entirety of Trumpism—campaigns, victory and policy—is anchored by a behavioural coup. Donald Trump’s enduring political success can be viewed as an extension of a vast normalisation spree underway before his first presidency. By 2015, Trump had fulfilled the MAGA precondition: to normalise politically everything he previously normalised in entertainment. Two presidential cycles after this impressive feat, he is successfully plying the same ruse.     

There is a design to Trump’s stream-of-consciousness gimmick, which can be described as a cross between old money, American professional wrestling and The Wolf of Wall Street. Its essential features are detailed below:

Destroy the narrative
Trump cannot engage in nuanced political discourse but overcomes this through his persona. He creates—whether in victory or defeat, high praise or aggressive criticism, seriousness or levity—a generalised vulgarity, using it to smash and recast any narrative. This enables him to avoid deep engagement.

He will not accept a situation that pressures him to prove he is well-informed or has an understanding of conventional political systems. Therefore, he is always one coarse statement away from wiping the slate. He is virtuosic at making something about what it isn’t, personalising any matter and making sure he becomes the primary object or as close to it as possible. An issue or another individual can never become the entire story because he Trump will inject it with a personal crudeness through which his gimmick becomes some of the subject matter.

His ramblings allow his base to revel in the gimmick as a digital collective—an in-group. No issue-based point of nuance can survive this tactical narcissism. 

Through aggression, confusion or presenting the tangential as the locus of a matter—all pillars of his gimmick—he breaks existing narratives. This is effective in deflections, tarnishing someone’s image or managing damage to his own.

During his first campaign, when leaked audio of him boasting about his sexual predation surfaced, he tried to redirect the narrative towards Bill Clinton, saying his own ‘locker room talk’ paled in comparison to the retired husband of his opponent. He went on to win. After meeting new Syrian President Ahmed al Sharaa, he chose to define him—‘young’, attractive’, ‘tough’—in a way that steers away from his past links with those responsible for 9/11 and Washington’s withdrawn $10 million bounty on his head.

Similarly, his first response to Signalgate was to distract from its scandal, instead attacking The Atlantic, which broke the story, as a ‘magazine going out of business’ writing about things the president ‘knows nothing about’. 

Everything has alternative causation; an alternative inference. His unfulfilled promises are presented as a result of Joe Biden’s unassailable failures; allegations against him only reflect the deceit of legacy media; his criminal record is nothing but the vengefulness of his opponents. 

Modifying narratives, spreading extreme rumours and dismissing established facts (as big as an election result) is not easy. It needs an image and environment. And a radical psychological intervention: politics needs to shed a certain serious texture, so the public can interpret it through Trump. It needs for voters to feel they have been kept from facts. It needs them to question, within the context of a culture war, what facts are—an essential part of the MAGA precondition. 

This requires wild and permanent theatre.

Trump’s entire behavioural range is predicated on the idea of being a consumable spectacle and so, when heightening and relocating the stakes of a situation into an incendiary mess, he is doing something very particular: using his gimmick to slowly blur the gap between public and viewership. He annihilates existing conventions and forces his adversaries to enter what can be described as a Trump contest, making politics simulate the primal spectacle of reality TV. 

If his words and actions transpire before the gaze of a critical public, it could make him seem like an uncouth, issue-shirking imposter. But it occurs before a viewership—a gaze rigged to interpret flamboyance as a political solution. In his custom theatre, only Trump’s alternative facts can contend and he has complete ownership of narrative.      

During the 2015 primaries, journalist Megyn Kelly grilled him over using words like ‘fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals’ in reference to women. ‘Only Rosie O’ Donnell’ said Trump, to wild laughter and applause. Instantly, he ended the narrative of morally investigating a head of state aspirant and demonstrated the power of his charm offensive. The MAGA takeaway was that Trump is steely and likeable; he does not retract or express weakness; he does not fumble and scrounge around for an insincere, face-saving platitude like establishment politicians. He owns it with mischief.

For the MAGA base, misogyny is bad but Trump is a disarming rogue who is firing the imagination—he has extreme watchability—and that outweighs outrage.  

The ethics narrative was overwhelmed and the incident ended up showcasing Trump’s ability to escape tight corners and his ‘based’ appeal to his electorally vital, anti-woke admirers. 

Similarly, the narrative of a genocide is bizarrely recast as a real estate matter; an election loss is an exercise in determining how many false votes were counted. 

The MAGA base plays along, even insurrects, based on the new narrative, which, if Trump has no proof for, is invariably something ‘a lot of people believe’.   

Overload, disorient and celebrate the obnoxious
Steve Bannon, the architect of MAGA media, has shared his blueprint: ‘It’s just attack, attack, attack. Keep driving it. Flood the zone… They’re overwhelmed. They don’t know where to turn… ’

This is tailored to Trump. To observe him is to process exhausting data. Bannon’s strategy plays to this: politics is about relentless disorientation. It stresses on volume, frequency and wild misinformation—all in total Darwinian combat. The Alt Right floods the zone.

Trump’s language—in content, grammar, quantity and coherence—is a sophisticated disorienting tool. It is unpredictable and non linear. A petty, narcissistic and comically meandering speech pattern, in the context of the POTUS profile’s dire implications, overstimulates the observer, especially a primary political stakeholder like a US voter.

The manner and substance of the Trump experience baits attention—whichever kind—in such a captivating way that it can cause addiction to political performance. The public, systematically dazed, risks mistaking Trump’s gimmick as the primary object of the political cycle and a section of it may mutate into the MAGA viewership. 

Trump sceptics get dazed too. The more serious Trump’s provocations are, the more it drains them. His audacity coaxes a sense of wonder from a critic—that such an individual exists; that such behaviour is actually transpiring—and can often obscure an unfavourable ethical assessment. His ‘ASMR’ video of alleged illegal migrants being hancuffed and deported, his sharing of an AI image of him dressed as the Pope after the death of Pope Francis and his sharing of a highly insensitive AI video showing him and Elon Musk unwinding on a Gazan beach show his tendency to commit to the obnoxious to a degree that fascination or even levity can replace infuriation.          

Make ‘never before seen’ compatible with ‘great again’
Trump slots events as novel in historical timelines. His language is deeply geared to advocate the greatness or worthlessness of things. This tendency functions most effusively when he makes promises or speaks about his decisions. His political actions are, according to him, unprecedented. The viewership is directed to believe it is special; that it is fortunate to witness the unfolding of a new glory, with respect to which it is tempted to become the in-group.           

Trump’s language is replete with the terms like ‘in history’, ‘like never before’ and ‘never seen anything like it’. According to him, the ‘witch hunt’ against him is the biggest ever, as is any deal he makes; his voters will prosper like nobody ever has—the same way in which his targets will suffer; his virtues are the same as the vices of an opponent—in that the public has never seen anything like it. 

His MSG rally may be widely called racist and disturbing, but Trump, by saying ‘nobody’s ever seen love like that’ and ‘nobody’s ever had a crowd like that’, will sidestep anything by claiming a false or unrelated circumstance: that some sort of record was set.        

Contrasting with the above is the fact that Trump’s gimmick is predicated on the idea of revivals. He extends Barack Obama’s posturing, which sold the idea of ‘change’, to also changing back—a replica of Brexit messaging. 

America, as per MAGA, used to be great, healthy, religious, wealthy and the like. Down the line, these virtues eroded due to the political incompetence of predecessors until Donald Trump came with a hardnosed New York realtor approach and elite deal making skills—to hack wantonly at institutional decay and uphold those things again.    

As MAGA fans live in allegedly unprecedented times, they also experience a satisfying revivalism—a restoration of virtues they discovered were absent once Trump informed them.   

Everything and nothing
Trump covers an unusually wide emotional spectrum. He can shuffle between emotional gravity and boys club humour; he can be a crusader for conservative virtue and then switch to the character of a beauty pageant organiser; the illusion of finesse exists alongside a McDonald’s-loving everyman relatability with a slapstick appeal; the besieger and the persecuted are embodied by the same person. 

There is a seamless coexistence of his noble posturing with his criminal record. His corrective mission against an alleged moral decay lives alongside a consent-free vision of controlling women’s bodies, an appreciation for torture and his desires to serve the 1%, be a dictator and annex faraway countries.

His intelligent and situation-oriented projection of diverse emotional states is an asset. Since he understands how to personify radically different temperaments, he also knows how to manipulate the hopes and fears of different demographics. He has pulled off dizzying coups in politics, bringing to each section of voters a different prophetic cadence, even when his own image and public history are at odds with some of the characters he projects. 

The most remarkable of these is how he cultivated appeal among the working class.

Before politics, Trump was best known for The Apprentice, which projected him as the 1%. That was a precursor to his current gimmick, which is the starkest example of the sociopathy of affluence.

Yet, when it came to stock American tropes like elbow grease, blue collar aspirations and the great American factory, he managed to portray himself as a mascot for those things. By speaking a custom language and invoking the hard hat, the doer zeal, an alleged mass loss of income and jobs to foreigners, he created a fanatical base. Crucially, he never failed to tear into ‘compromised’ establishment politicians, with their pliant media and special interest groups—the status quo accused of swindling America; the chief cause of working class pain and the swamp to drain. 

Even though he flaunts wealth, has evolved crony capitalism to where the capitalist had his own department, and passed a tax and spending bill aiding the wealthy at the expense of public services, he still commands loyalty from large parts of the working class.

Another significant duality is Trump’s hawkish mindset and his parallel dovish propaganda. Suggesting ‘taking out their families’ as a solution to militancy overseas, uploading—with a gloating caption—a video depicting the bombing of what could possibly be a large group of Yemeni civilians, threatening to bomb Gaza to ‘hell’ and further destabilising West Asia by ordering the killing of Qassem Suleimani are not the actions of a peacenik.        

But while violence, threats and jingoism are features of Trump’s presidency, he has also found success in cultivating an image of the sole prospect of peace who will diffuse conflicts through a wizardry in ‘deals’. He is after headlines to that effect, which he will make by simply claiming to succeed, regardless of the actual trajectory of Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Palestine or other tense relations. 

Being a bit of everything provides Trump a certain immunity. He has too many inner characters, controversies and shortcomings to be strongly labelled as one in particular. This waters down every judgement of him—nothing sticks, because everything sticks. Too many ascriptions can logically be made and none capture him fully. Trump is immune to labelling and believes he can survive anything—to where he feels his viewership will support him even he is publicly shoots somebody.

Victimized antihero
Trump bullies and slanders his adversaries but also claims to be the most persecuted US president. Any scandal holding him culpable is immediately subjected to reliable talking points—evil democrats, fake media, deep state puppeteering—and termed a witch hunt.         

He has an intuitive understanding of his base and its emotional connect with his gimmick. This is repeatedly leveraged to fend off allegations. The substance of allegations is not something a viewership has to understand. It only needs to live through his gimmick, which says he is despised because he will end a corrupt culture; that he is very wealthy and doesn’t need politics but for his altruism; that the crusty establishment class is not letting him work because he will shut their shops. 

Caricature opponents
Trump is the most prolific namecaller in politics. He has turned pidgeonholing his opponents into colloquially digestable nicknames into a formidable device. Jeb Bush, brother of George W. Bush, had his republican primaries campaign eviscerated after being termed ‘Low Energy’ Jeb. He folded his aspirations shortly thereafter, perhaps empathised with by ‘Crooked’ Hillary Clinton, ‘Sleepy’ Joe Biden, ‘Lying’ Ted Cruz or ‘Tiny D’ Ron DeSantis.

There is no point in returning a similar fire to Trump, because with him, there is always a preceding and subsequent outrage; there is always a more infuriating instance and because he channels his core sociopathy on so many fronts, it is hard to pidgeonhole him. 

Aim for the picturesque
The lore that Trump has carefully fashioned for himself over four decades projects him as a supremely successful realtor from high society. He has a phenomenal awareness of how MAGA wants to see him, which is a shrill variant of The Apprentice. His speech is replete with adjectives to that effect; he is a vocal connoisseur of luxury and material beauty. Trump applies a real estate mentality to his politics. Nouns of every make—whether a building, statement, discussion, event or individual— are ‘beautiful’.

‘Beautiful’ is essential to MAGA. It is constantly injected into situations to hopefully alter perception, distract, deny wrong or pad hollow statements. It ensures that nothing is dry—to add something picturesque immediately adds story to proceedings. It provides a fake anchor to understand things through. Once things are in story form, he can play to his strength: being MAGA’s protagonist.

When the FBI raided his residence over the alleged theft and hoarding of classified documents, Trump said his ‘beautiful home’ is under attack. His meeting with Xi Jinping happened over a ‘beautiful chocolate cake’. His tax and spending bill is ‘big and beautiful’. Border walls, sleeping gas, confederate statues, the ‘city’ of Belgium, Syrian safe zones, white house phones and his temperament have all been deemed beautiful.

He deploys this to weather shaky ground and tide over gaps in his logic; a lingual decoy to weaken focus. For example, a ‘big, beautiful ocean’ separating the US from Europe may suddenly become a point of note in the Russia-Ukraine war. The viewership is subconsciously invited to factor in the ocean and its ‘beauty’ as abstract stakeholders in the situation.

Trump can term Gaza—the site of an ongoing genocide—as ‘beautiful’ property to be redeveloped. He can say this in solutionary terms. And he cannot be laughed away because he is the president of the United States.

Lie outrageously to create and sustain conspiracy theory cults
Trump does not believe in dog whistling. He creates fear psychosis through direct, extreme lies. His strategy to feed fear and conspiracy is to tell lies so jarring that they triggers a sense of safety first in the viewership, which may not find evidence for Trump’s words but won’t take chances when the stakes have been so violently raised.  

He biggest lie—about the 2020 election being stolen—triggered a fatal riot. It has spawned an enduring conspiracy theory. He made the viewership feel the rotten establishment (he did this as the incumbent) has worked levers where it couldn’t see and subverted the democratic process, where in fact the viewership was being precisely goaded into carrying out the subversion. 

With claims like America is getting ‘raped’ by its allies and foreign companies, migrants are eating the cats, schools are performing sex altering surgeries on children without informing parents, Trump gives life to far right conspiracy cults, which work best for Trump since conspiracy theories do not require solid evidence.

In MAGA’s messaging, society is under a multi-pronged attack. If a viewer is conservative, Christian or white, there is a catalogue of inflammatory lies to believe, which will pit them opposite migrants, liberals, the media, communists, the LGBTQ community and other nationalities, races and religions. 

If needed, speak the unspeakable truth
In two instances, Trump has been remarkably truthful. He has invoked certain American realities that both republicans and democrats would avoid. Both times, he has done it to defend himself.

• ‘I think we’ve had plenty of killers too’

In US politics, there is no bipartisan political trope more accepted than ‘Putin is a killer’. When pressed by former Fox News host Bill O’ Reilly to concur with that sentiment, Trump, refusing to take an anti-Putin stance, said, ‘There are a lot of killers… do you think our country is so innocent?’     

He did not specify what he was referring to. It is up to the viewership to decide whether he means the erasure of natives, slavery or innumerable, calamitous foreign interventions.  Only Donald Trump—not dyed in the establishment wool—can feel, accurately, that this is zero cost political behaviour.

• ‘They’re paying us $400 billion plus’

Journalist Jamal Kashoggi was brutally killed in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, with speculation leading to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Thereafter, when asked whether a massive arms deal with Saudi Arabia was compatible with US’ stance on human rights, Trump spoke the unvarnished truth: ‘This is about America First. They’re paying us $400 billion plus.’   

‘I’m not like a fool that says we don’t want to do business with them… If they don’t do business with us… they’ll do business with the Russians or with the Chinese.’

He embodied the US realpolitik—the core, industrial reality—which all US presidents do. Alongside it, he also vocalised how it is acceptable for that reality to dwarf moral considerations, which no US president does. He implied that the deal is the deal; America First is a financial maxim.        

The world’s most prolific public liar occasionally finds refuge in the other extreme.  

Conclusion
Establishment politics is becoming junior partner to the institution of the political gimmick. Falling for watchability—consuming participatory politics rather than critically living it—has caused a large section of the US public to embrace MAGA, which provides comfort, spectacle and an outlet to channel inner regressions.   

Trump is the logical conclusion of a broader American trajectory—its self image as an ideological tribute to muscularity, wealth accumulation and reptilian competition. His politics manipulated the public’s accrued disenchantment with the effect of that ideology: a corporate-friendly plateauing of governance.

The bipartisan establishment made voters feel that politics does not view them as the public. This, in turn, primed them to subject politics to a viewership.