Trumpism is Emotion With No Intellect

Donald Trump’s Administration is the greatest threat to the nation since the Civil War.

Donald Trump’s “ambition is to replace the international rule of law with the law of the jungle.” — Stewart Patrick (2025), Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Capitulation

The wealthiest law firms in the US caved in to Donald Trump’s obviously illegal coercion in order to make more money, again reminding us that the focus of those who manage the law is profit, not justice.

The wealthiest universities caved in to Donald Trump’s coercion to protect their prestige, reminding us that the focus of those who manage “truth” is power, not knowledge.

As so it’s gone through other industries and branches of government forced to capitulate to their own evisceration, most of whom had no power to defend themselves. I’m watching from mental health, a historically self-serving cottage industry.

Why So Serious?

I think of the Joker’s famous line, “Why so serious?”, which was an invitation to wake up and recognize insanity. I recall the artist Laurie Anderson being so disgusted with the way history was taught that, when she found herself teaching art history, she just made it up. To her dismay, she found her students memorized her outlandish stories without question. Is anyone here thinking? Why so serious?

It was with relief that I saw David Brooks (2025), columnist for the New York Times, write “America Needs and Uprising That is Not Normal.” He says:

“These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.”

Trumpism is definitely the greatest threat to progress we’ve seen since the Civil War, but unlike that episode, this one has global implications. I feel obliged to address the current fiasco. I have resolved to enlist my pen to the cause.

Where Have You Been?

We’ve seen this building for decades. If you thought this comes from a lack of knowledge, you are mistaken. It’s rooted in fear, prejudice, and hate, elements that now fester in the pre-war 21st century.

Donald Trump is not about reason, truth, facts, or reality. He's a perverted expression of emotion with a lust for power. He represents the reappearance of the Caligula-like rot that destroyed the Roman empire.

Democracy is an uncertain structure that wobbles on weak knees, undigested information, and equivocal involvement. People are basically provincial and the larger and more remote the issues, the less interested and involved they are.

With disengagement comes ignorance and parochialism, and the more isolated the population, the more ignorant and provincial they become. It is supposed that education counters this, enabling a democracy to be both representative and effective. But our system of education was not designed to prepare us to think beyond nuclear communities. It was designed 200 years ago in the pre-industrial age.

What passes for education today has created a population unprepared to understand corporations, demographics, knowledge, technology, power, media, money, or literature. There is a smaller percentage of today’s population who is literate than was literate in the US in the 1700s.

When people are this unprepared they are disabled. They freeze or fight when forced into a threatening world. They react by inventing boundaries to protect themselves, such as national, linguistic, cultural, economic, or religious boundaries. This is what precipitates wars and this has been gestating for decades as the world has become more interconnected but people have not.

We Definitely Are Being Attacked

National self defense was the rallying cry of the Trump supporters I listened to at my local garage in 2016, and those people are feeling even more isolated and under threat now. In truth, they have no idea what’s going on, only that their security is increasingly unimportant and their assets are vulnerable.

It is a central truth of psychology that humans are more guided by fear than opportunity. This follows from the observation that if you ignore the current threat you may not have the next opportunity. Another unfortunate truth is that it’s easier to see threats than opportunities.

For people whose vision is limited, that may be all they see: the threats that have emerged in their adulthood versus the security they remember as children. You may notice that within your own circle it’s the adults who have survived traumatic childhoods who are more interested in learning and change, while those who have lived sheltered lives tend toward ignorance as bliss.

At first we think those who struggle are less able, but it turns out that those who struggle learn more and, as a result, do better in the present and can create a better future. This seems ironic if you hold to the misunderstanding that everything is for the best and everything moves in the right direction. This version of global stupidness is naturally fostered by those who are not struggling. They mistake comfort for security and stability for evolution.

What Is Evolution?

Evolution is not the same as growth, these two are distinctly different. Growth is a continuation of the existing pattern. Growth follows the plan. Evolution diverges from the plan. It should not be mistaken for growth because it involves periods of radical rearrangement. Those periods of rearrangement look like chaos because they don’t follow the program.

Chaotic evolution is analogous to a transition between organized states. This is called a phase transition in physics: a total rearrangement driven by global forces not evident at the local level. In the social context, moving through chaos requires a different mindset from what’s needed during periods of growth. A larger mindset is just what we don’t have.

Emotional thinking is the way we see things in their entirety. Emotional thinking is neither as accurate nor controlled as rational thinking, but it takes less effort and is more inclusive. You have to think to be rational, you don’t have to think to be emotional, which explains why Trumpism is popular.

Emotional reactions have their place. Emotions are motivating. They’re often the mindset of last resort. We get emotional when we’re frustrated and don’t know what else to do. But what emotions teach us is not the reward of being emotional but the negative consequences of it. In that, they lead us back to being reasonable and informed. This is just what we need now.

If there’s one good thing about Trumpism it’s the transparency of the lying, exploitation, and misdirection. It takes little insight to see its evil nature. It’s unfortunate that even this small amount of insight is beyond the reach of most Americans.

This is yet another example of “the burned hand learns best” paradigm. In this case, many of the hands that will be burned have already been burned and have already learned, they’re just not the ones in power. This is the fundamental misfortune of those who are ignorant or disenfranchised. They will be burned again.

The Ecology of the Zeitgeist

An ecological analogy would be to compare American democracy with an aging, untended forest littered with dead fall and leaf litter. Any issue can be a spark, and Trumpism, which is a pathological version of populism, is the forest fire.

The analogy may seem strained, but the time scales are about right: forest decay takes centuries, fires conclude within weeks, and recovery takes years. The prospect of some kind of recovery is the only positive element in the context of this situation.

One of the first stages leading away from emotion is reflection. By its holistic nature, no emotion arrives alone. In this case the first motivating emotion was anger. This anger has spread from those who first felt most threatened. These people were the most susceptible to Trump’s lies.

Anger is now appearing in the activist segment of the population, those who recognize the breadth of the mendacity and its destructive motivation. In the case of Trumpism, the destruction is indiscriminately wrought on all institutions. The motivation is selfishness and misanthropy, a general dislike of people. What else should you expect from a pathological liar, felon, and sex offender?

The population has still not recognized that everyone is a target of Trump’s dislike. Many still believe they’re on the positive side of the equation. There is no positive side, there is no plan, reason, or justification other than the greed of the few and disrespect for all.

The Forest is Burning

We are still in the forest fire stage. In this stage, those who are exposed are burned, and connecting elements are broken. What survives is what’s protected. The forces that survive are those most protected, which are those with the most power and resources.

Trump presumes these surviving elements will be his cadre of supplicants but these only represent the group with the most money. They do not have the most resources overall, and they certainly lack knowledge or recognition of the larger rules under which the system evolves.

Most Trump supporters will be taken to slaughter along with his adversaries. Just as the Jews of Germany couldn’t conceive of themselves as victims of the state, neither will most of Trump’s. But if you understand that expropriation is the object, then you’ll realize that your assets are just as much the target as the less protected assets of the powerless and disenfranchised.

You Are A Target

Make no mistake, Trumpism has nothing to do with antisemitism, nationalism, white power, peace, or efficient government. Its goal is straightforward theft, and this will remain hidden as long as people accept the lies they’re fed. There is no virtue behind the Trumpist movement. It’s simply a few perverted monsters running amok in a coop of sleeping chickens.

The tripartite organization of executive, legislative, and judiciary government was designed to keep balanced powers aligned. It was not designed to reestablish the breakdown of order. We are seeing the legislative branch caving in to Trumpism. Its lack of awareness is part of the reason we have Trumpism in the first place.

The judicial branch does not have the responsiveness or the resources to counteract the executive branch on the same timescale. The executive branch has tactics that manifest results over periods of days or even hours. The judicial branch is designed to react slowly, over a period of weeks and months.

The country was never designed to rebalance itself in the event of an internal crisis. Civil unrest is the only feedback that can operate on this timescale. Trump has threatened to call upon the military if the populace turns against him.

This is Your Issue, Make Yourself Heard

The only protection against a police state is a division in the military’s ranks, or more guerilla-like tactics on the part of the population. This didn’t work in Germany or Chile, but it might work in the USA because there is no outside force propping up the government.

Flooding the judiciary with lawsuits against Trump is one guerilla tactic, removing all support is another. A third is motivating more people to think, speak, and react. I’m acting to support this third track.

I’ve taken the risk of calling attention to myself because this is how consensus develops. You can do this too, and you have a positive effect when you do. You may think you have no power and your speech has no effect, but that’s not true. People’s attitudes are like water, like an avalanche, and they entrain each other.

Inviting others to join your opinion creates a groundswell that gains momentum. It is not long before actionable opportunities appear. Rivers carve the landscape over time and avalanches wipe out forest fires in an instant.

If you’re experiencing distress in the current environment you might recognize politics to be the cause. Or maybe you don’t, but it is. In either case, if you’d like to gain stability and direction, pick a time to schedule a free call by clicking this link:

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References

Brooks, David (2025 April 17). “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html

Patrick, Stewart. (2025 Feb. 19). “The Death of the World America Made.” Carnegie Endowment. https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/02/trump-executive-order-treaties-organizations