What Makes Trump & MAGA So Cruel? A Psychiatrist Explains

                                              

Dr Russell Razzaque exploring the psyche of MAGA.

He explains that authoritarianism isn't a stable personality trait. It is activated by fear. When we are fearful we feel the need for someone to be an authority. Trump is an expert at stoking fear and fabricating scenarios that engender fear. He presents himself as the man who can make America great again, by eradicating all that threatens.

The unifying factor for MAGA is a sense of loss of status. The MAGA majority are white males who used to have a dominant status within the social hierarchy. As women and immigrants and other groups of the oppressed become empowered by democratic social progress those who previously had an automatic right to superior status feel that these democratic processes are a threat to them. 

They want a return to their former status of dominance. That is what Trump promises them as he sets about disenfranchising all those who have risen through the enactment of democratic values. 

All that Trump has to do is push others down. He is not required to create policies that benefit the whole of America. 

The psychology of this, pushing others down, so that those who feel resentful can feel good about themselves again and reassert their right to dominate, won't make America great again, but instead devolve into a dark dystopia that benefits no-one.

Somehow democracy has to deepen and become a place in which everyone can feel valued and at liberty to be the best they can be. The democracy project is not over, but needs to acknowledge its past failings, become wiser, stronger and even more compassionate. 

Anne Applebaum on the Trump revolution

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                                              Anne Applebaum in conversation on The Paul Wells Show after the release of the paperback version of her book Autocracy, Inc. in which she has written a new preface after the re-election of Donald Trump as President, whom she describes as 'a president who is not especially interested in democracy or democracies'. Applebaum points out that the preface was written a few months ago and while trying not to be fearmongering, admits that it is now somewhat of an understatement. America is under President Trump sharing many of the same practices and behaviours of autocracies. American foreign policy is being sacrified to the will of the President and his family. 

She points out that during his campaign 'he talked about his enemies as vermin' and 'by enemies he meant democrats and judges and journalists', 'using the kind of language that has never been used in US presidential politics before'. 

The fact that a lot of people must have chosen not to believe it, she sees as a lack of imagination in that Americans are so confident in their system that they cannot imagine it being undermined to this degree. 

Another point that Americans may not be able imagine and that Applebaum makes clear, is that automatic trust and faith in the United States from democratic nations has gone and won't come back. Democratic nations can and will form political and trade alliances that do not include America.  

 

In plain view

In her 2024 book, Autocracy, Inc., written before Donald Trump was invited by more than half of American voters to become president again, Anne Applebaum, columnist for The Atlantic, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and Pulitzer Prize winner for Gulag: A History, provides a bleak breakdown of the level of collusion and corruption occurring among autocratic nations.

The final chapter in her book, Epilogue: Democrats United, ends with the following paragraph:

'There is no liberal world order anymore, and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real. But there are liberal societies, open and free countries that offer a better chance for people to live useful lives than closed dictatorships do. They are hardly perfect. Those that exist have deep flaws, profound divisions, and terrible historical scars. But that's all the more reason to defend them. So few of them have existed across human history; so many have existed a short time and then failed. They can be destroyed from the outside and from the inside, too, by division and demagogues. Or they can be saved. But only if those of us who live in them are willing to make the effort to save them.'

America, the most powerful democracy in the world, is at present being destroyed from the inside by division and a demagogue. On the morning of 19 August 2025 the President phoned in to Fox & Friends.  A fawning host expressed amazement that Trump had gotten the UK and European leaders to the Oval Office so fast. Trump replied that it happened like that because, 'We've become the hottest country in the world. Everyone wants to be here.' Or it may be as reported in The Atlantic, 'After the two leaders met [Putin and Trump in Alaska on Friday], Trump announced that working toward a full peace deal—not an immediate cease-fire agreement, which Kyiv wants—would be the best path forward. This alarmed European leaders, who rushed to be by Zelensky’s side in Washington today in a remarkable show of solidarity and an equally impressive feat of logistics.' (Vivian Salama and Jonathan Lemire)

When the host tried to get serious and bring Trump's attention to the fact that his experience in making deals has been in real estate, which is not the same as making peace between nations, he launched into a monologue in which he vividly portrayed the taking of other nation's territories by force and then ending the violence as real estate deals. Crimea was a beautiful piece of real estate that Obama gave away and because it was given, Ukraine can't have it back. Israel 'gave away a big percentage of their ocean front property in order to have peace. How did that work out? Not so good.' In referring to the Gaza Strip as real estate he has been consistent. Whereas his concern about starving Palestinian children and Russian missile attacks on citizens wavers and the way he describes situations changes as his inclinations shift and shift they do, rapidly. 

'During the 2012 presidential election campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney declared that Russia 'is, without question our No 1 geopolitical foe. They fight every cause for the world's worst actors.' Obama's mocking response was, 'The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War's been over for 20 years.' 

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Mitt Romney spoke on CNN. He said he remains concerned about, 'president after president' — including Obama, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — 'who were resetting relations with Russia, hoping as they looked in the eyes of Vladimir Putin they could see a responsible person.'

'John McCain was right. He said he looked into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw the KGB,' Romney said of his late former Senate colleague from Arizona.  'And that’s what we’re seeing: a small, evil, feral-eyed man who is trying to shape the world in the image where once again Russia would be an empire. And that’s not going to happen.'

That is why European leaders and the world's press were present for Zelensky at this second meeting at the White House. This is not an agreement for a land swap, a real estate deal, but a fight for the life of democracy. It may be imperfect, and the actors within it flawed, but they are trying overall through open debate rather than propaganda, indoctrination and bullying to maintain a world in which humanity can live in peace to become the best they can be.  

While Trump likes to boast that Putin is his friend, it should not be forgotten, as Trump has clearly not forgotten, that his attempted dealings with Zelensky were a part of Trump's 2020 impeachment trial. He had delayed the release of congressionally approved security assistance for Ukraine as part of an effort to pressure Ukraine to announce an investigation of his political rival, Joe Biden.

In 2016 at the Hinkley Institute of Politics Forum at the University of Utah, Mitt Romney said regarding Trump:

'I believe with all my heart and soul that we face another time for choosing, one that will have profound consequences for the Republican Party and more importantly, for the country.

His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgement to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.'

In the impeachment of 2020, Mitt Romney became the first member of a major party to ever vote for the removal of a president from his own party. 

When he announced his retirement in 2023 he derided his own party's voting base for falling for a 'populist demagogue' and said that it's pretty clear that the party has embraced this populist demagogue message.  

In the introduction to her book Applebaum describes Russia as 'the inventor of the modern marriage of kleptocracy and dictatorship' and that the invasion of Ukraine was not only about acquiring territory, 'but also to show the world that the old rules of international behavior no longer hold.' 

Has not Trump also, over and over, clearly demonstrated that he too has those same kleptocratic and dictatorial aspirations? 

Peace on Earth

 

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? by Paul Gauguin, 1897

 

'Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.

For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.'

These are the opening words of the 2023 film Oppenheimer written for screen and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

The first known documentation of the myths of Prometheus and Pandora are in Theogony and Work and Days written around 700BC by the Greek didactic poet Hesiod. 

Prometheus was a supremely clever Titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals so that they would survive. 

In 1939 scientists in the United States began to investigate if the newly recognised fission process could be harnessed for military purposes. By 1940 it was known that Nazi Germany had the same idea. Unlike the Nazi research program in which scientists had to compete with each other, in the Manhattan Project and later at Los Alamos under Oppenheimer's direction, scientists from Britain, the American scientists and scientists who were refugees from fascist regimes all co-operated, sharing knowledge and resources, as well as living together.  

By time the US had developed the bomb, Germany had surrendered unconditionally and it was found that they had not been close to developing a nuclear weapon. However, though to all effect defeated, Japan had not surrendered and fearing that an invasion by land would be horrific, President Truman wanted the bomb tested in the desert of New Mexico before he met with Stalin at the Potsdam Conference. He needed to have something as leverage. At the time it was not known that information about the bomb had been secretly passed on to Moscow by the physicist Klaus Fuchs. While still at the conference Truman demanded an unconditional surrender from Japan. The rejection of this ultimatum resulted in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Oppenheimer named the test site Trinity, an allusion to a John Donne poem, Sonnet XIV which begins: 'Batter my heart, three person'd God'. Another of the Holy Sonnets, VII, begins thus:

At the round earth's imagined corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinitude
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.

Before Roosevelt's death, before Truman became President, before the Potsdam Conference: On January 6, 1945, a tired and frail President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave what would be his last State of the Union Address to the 79th United States Congress.

As Anglo-American-Soviet forces were closing in on Berlin, the President sent out a message warning the nations around the globe that the peace of the world can only be made and kept if countries are willing to respect, tolerate, and understand one another’s opinions and feelings. 

'The nearer we come to vanquishing our enemies the more we inevitably become conscious of differences among the victors. We must not let those differences divide us and blind us to our more important common and continuing interests in winning the war and building peace. International cooperation on which enduring peace must be based is not a one-way street.'

Roosevelt could sense that Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” was crumbling rapidly and he knew that further decisions between his allies and him about military strategy would no longer be necessary. Instead, the leaders of the victorious nations would soon have to sit down to present their agendas, give their opinions, and make political decisions in a collective attempt to secure a lasting peace in a world without Hitler and the Nazis. 

https://potsdamconference.com/the-potsdam-conference-1945-introduction/

'You can lift the stone without being ready for the snake that’s revealed.' This adage was spoken twice, though with different meanings, in the film Oppenheimer.

 

 '... we have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing. By so doing, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man ...'

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Address to the American Philosophical Society, delivered 16 November 1945, University of Pennsylvania, PA

 

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/robertoppenheimeratomicbomb.htm

 

'Science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life, both materially and in ways of the Spirit. As well. It's extended the range of questions in which man has a choice. It has extended man's freedom to make significant decisions. No one can predict what vast new continents of knowledge the future of science will discover. But we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they think, free to think what they must, science will never regress, and freedom itself will never be wholly lost.'

 

https://wayground.com/admin/video-quiz/67b82d56a4c39e8b563b7c62/j-robert-oppenheimer-speaking

 

'The main challenge of the 80 years since the Trinity atomic test has been that we do not possess the cognitive, spiritual, and emotional capabilities necessary to successfully manage nuclear weapons without the risk of catastrophic failure.'

 

Jeffrey Goldberg, August 2025, 'Nuclear Roulette', The Atlantic  

 

'Over the past 80 years humanity has been saved repeatedly by individuals who possessed unusually good judgment in situations of appalling stress.' One was Stanislov Petrov when he responded with skepticism to an attack warning. In September 1983 he was the duty officer at a Soviet command centre when there was a report that the US had launched five missiles at Soviet targets. He knew that the detection system was new and not fully tested. He also understood that an attack would consist of a lot more than five missiles. It was later discovered that a Soviet satellite has misinterpreted the interplay of clouds and sun over Montana. Another was John Kelly who served as White House chief of staff for part of Trump's first term, during the period when Trump was actively taunting Kim Jong Un. Somehow Kelly talked Trump into stepping away from that path and instead becoming, on Kelly's suggestion, the first president to positively reach out to North Korea.

 

Herbert Hoover, Republican President 1929-1933, wrote in an open letter in 1951:

'The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.' 

 

 

Inequality is driving everything

The Trading Game

 

Ana Ramirez de Arellano 'Skyscraper Madrid' Flickr creative commons.

 

 

Gary Stevenson, 2024, The Trading Game, Penguin Random House, UK.

'We thought the banking system was broken, but fixable. We thought confidence had collapsed, but would recover. But what was really happening was that the wealth of the middle class — of ordinary hardworking families — and almost all the world's largest governments — was being sucked away from them and into the hands of the rich. Ordinary families were losing their assets and going into debt. So were governments. As ordinary families and governments got poorer, and the rich got richer, that would stream the flows of interest, investment and profit from the middle class to the rich, compounding the problem. The problem would not solve itself. In fact, it would accelerate, it would get worse.'

'... it would grow out of control. It wasn't a crisis of confidence ... It was inequality. Inequality that would grow and grow, and get worse and worse until it dominated and killed the economy that contained it. It wasn't temporary, it was terminal. It was the end of the economy. It was cancer.'

'The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house. The rich use that money to buy the rest of the assets and then the problem gets worse every year. The middle class disappears, spending power disappears permanently from the economy, the rich becoming much ... richer and the poor, well, I guess they die.'

The people of America feel that something terrible is happening to them that they cannot control so they fall in step with an angry man and become the useful idiots of the master of doublespeak — Trump.  A 'big, beautiful' domestic policy bill is passed. 'I liken it to a death march through a series of choices that nobody really wanted to be making' said Oren Cass who is the chief economist of the right-leaning think tank American Compass. The bill cuts taxes for the wealthy, increasing government debt, which is partly off-set by taking food away from the children of the poor. 

As Gary Stevenson discovered when through being smart (everyone thinks that if you come from a poor background that you are stupid) and getting a place at the London School of Economics, no one really understands economics. The people who study economics are almost all from privileged backgrounds. What could they understand?

There is an awful lot of swearing in the book — pages of print could have been saved. People swear a lot because they are angry and they feel powerless. But there are also elegant sentences, 'I was finding it increasingly difficult to separate my contempt for Rupert from my face.' '... he wore glasses more alive than his eyes, with a soul that seemed yearning for death.' 

It was during his time in Japan, that Gary Stevenson began to increasingly suffer the effects of losing his humanity because money had become his world. There are beautiful descriptions of his time in Japan trying to save himself in a country that embodies polite restraint. 

He understood that it is essential that the problem of inequality be addressed.

GarysEconomics YouTube 

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