The Lucas Bean Show

Why Conservative Men Who Hate Education Cannot Spell

There is a pattern so consistent it has stopped being funny.

The men screaming loudest about how useless college is are always the ones who cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. The politicians leading the charge to ban books are always the ones who have clearly never finished one. The commentators mocking scientists and doctors and professors are always the ones whose own intellectual credentials begin and end with a cable news appearance.

This is not a coincidence. It is not irony. It is a documented psychological phenomenon that one of America’s greatest historians spent his career trying to explain. And once you understand it you will never be able to watch a conservative attack a teacher or a scientist or a university without knowing exactly what you are actually watching.

What Hofstadter Found

In 1963 historian Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University published Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. The book won the Pulitzer Prize. It remains one of the most important examinations of American culture ever written. And its central argument was not what most people expect.

Hofstadter was not writing about stupid people. He was writing about resentful ones.

His central finding was that anti-intellectualism in America was never primarily about ignorance. It was about status. Specifically it was about the specific psychological pain of feeling looked down on by people with more education, more credentials, and more cultural authority than you. And the response to that pain was not to close the gap. It was to attack the people on the other side of it.

Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as the resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.

Read that definition carefully. Resentment. Suspicion. Minimization. These are not the responses of people who simply disagree with expert conclusions. These are the responses of people who feel threatened by the existence of expertise itself. People who experience a doctor’s recommendation or a scientist’s finding or a teacher’s lesson not as information but as an implicit judgment about their own worth.

When you feel stupid in the presence of educated people you have two choices. You can do the hard work of becoming less ignorant. Or you can decide that the educated people are the problem.

One of those choices is difficult and humbling and takes years.

The other one takes about thirty seconds on social media.

The History Nobody Talks About

Hofstadter documented something that most Americans prefer not to acknowledge. Anti-intellectualism is not a new development in American life. It is not something that appeared with Trump or Fox News or social media. It has been a recurring feature of American culture since the founding.

The Puritan tradition that shaped early American culture valued spiritual life over intellectual life. Practical knowledge over theoretical knowledge. Common sense over expertise. The farmer who worked the land was more virtuous than the scholar who studied it. The preacher who felt the spirit was more trustworthy than the theologian who analyzed it.

This tradition never disappeared. It went underground during periods of American confidence and re-emerged during periods of American anxiety. Hofstadter documented its peak moments: the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s, the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s, the fundamentalist backlash against evolution in the 1920s, the McCarthyite purges of intellectuals in the 1950s.

Every time America felt economically threatened, culturally displaced, or socially anxious, the resentment of educated elites surged. Every time ordinary people felt looked down on by people with more credentials and more cultural power, the attack on expertise intensified.

Trump did not create this. He inherited it. He recognized it. And he weaponized it at a scale that Hofstadter could not have imagined in 1963.

What It Looks Like Right Now

The modern conservative war on education is not a policy disagreement. It is Hofstadter’s anti-intellectualism running at industrial scale with a political party behind it and a media ecosystem amplifying it.

Pew Research found that 59 percent of Republicans believe colleges and universities are negatively impacting the country. Not specific colleges. Not specific programs. Universities as a category. The entire project of higher education as a net negative on American life.

Think about what that means. The same political movement that tells working class Americans they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is simultaneously telling them that the institutions best positioned to help them do that are the enemy.

Book banning has reached levels not seen since the McCarthy era.Pen America documented over 3,362 book bans in American schools during the 2022 to 2023 school year alone. The books being banned are not manuals for violence. They are novels. History books. Books about the experiences of people whose lives differ from the people banning them. Books that ask young people to think about the world from a perspective other than their own.

Teachers are being surveilled, reported, and fired for teaching history accurately. Scientists are being dismissed from government advisory panels for presenting data that contradicts political preferences. Doctors are being attacked for following evidence based medicine. Librarians are receiving death threats for stocking books that someone somewhere found uncomfortable.

This is not a debate about curriculum. This is a sustained, organized, politically funded attack on the institutions that produce and transmit knowledge. And it is being led by people who have decided that the existence of expertise is itself an insult to people who do not have it.

The Shame Underneath the Rage

Here is what Hofstadter understood that most political analysts still miss.

The rage is not the primary emotion. The shame is.

Anti-intellectualism is not what angry people do. It is what embarrassed people do when they cannot admit they are embarrassed. When a man who never finished high school is confronted daily with evidence that education matters, that credentials open doors his lack of them will not, that the people he was taught to distrust actually know things he does not, the cognitive dissonance is unbearable.

He cannot admit the gap because admitting the gap means admitting he is on the wrong side of it. So he closes the gap differently. Not by crossing it but by denying it exists. By insisting that the people on the other side are not smarter or better informed but simply arrogant. Elitist. Out of touch. Enemies of real Americans.

The louder the attack on education the deeper the shame underneath it.

This is why the men who cannot spell are always the first to call scientists stupid. It is not because they genuinely believe scientists are stupid. It is because calling scientists stupid is the one move that makes the gap disappear without requiring any work. If the scientist is stupid then being unable to understand the science is not a failure. It is a virtue.

This is why they mock college degrees while demanding respect for opinions they cannot defend. The mockery is not intellectual disagreement. It is status protection. If degrees are worthless then not having one is not a disadvantage. It might even be an advantage. Common sense over book learning. Street smarts over ivory tower nonsense.

This is why they ban books they have never read and attack teachers they have never met. The books and the teachers are not the threat. The knowledge inside them is. Knowledge that might make their children ask questions they cannot answer. Knowledge that might make their children see the world differently than they do. Knowledge that might make their children leave.

What This Requires

Understanding Hofstadter’s framework does not lead to sympathy. It leads to clarity.

The conservative war on education is not a good faith policy disagreement about how best to educate children. It is a psychological defense mechanism that has been organized into a political movement and funded by people who benefit enormously from a less educated, less informed, more resentful electorate.

An educated population asks harder questions. Demands better evidence. Is harder to manipulate with simple stories about complex problems. Recognizes propaganda when it sees it.

An uneducated population does not.

The people funding book bans and attacking teachers and defunding universities are not doing it because they genuinely believe education is bad for America. They are doing it because an educated America is bad for them specifically. For their power. For their profits. For their ability to keep telling people that the problem is somewhere other than where it actually is.

And the people doing their dirty work, the men screaming about elites and mocking scientists and banning books, are not the masterminds of this operation. They are the product of it. People whose legitimate feelings of being left behind and looked down on have been channeled into attacking the one thing that might actually help them.

It is easier to burn the library down than to admit you never learned to read it.

And the people handing out the matches are counting on exactly that.

Watch on YouTube

Sources

Yes spelling is also a metaphor in this video for education

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Knopf.

Hofstadter, R. (1965). The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Knopf.

Pew Research Center. (2019). Sharp Partisan Divisions in Views of National Institutions. Pew Research Center.

Pen America. (2023). Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools. Pen America.

Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498.

Taber, C. S., and Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755-769.

Motta, M. (2018). The dynamics and political implications of anti-intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 46(3), 465-498.

There is a pattern in the faces at Trump rallies that most political analysts never talk about.

Not the anger. The anger is obvious. The anger is the whole aesthetic of the movement.

What sits underneath the anger is harder to name. A specific kind of pain. A lifetime of suppressed emotion that has been handed a permission slip. A group of people who were never taught to feel anything except rage finally being told that rage is not just acceptable. It is righteous. It is strength. It is the entire point.

Understanding how that happens requires going back much further than 2015. It requires going back to childhood.

What Bowlby and Ainsworth Found

In the 1950s psychologist John Bowlby began building what would become one of the most important theoretical frameworks in the history of developmental psychology. Bowlby’s central argument was that the bonds formed between children and their caregivers in the earliest years of life are not incidental to human development. They are the foundation of it. The way a child is treated in those years determines how they will handle emotions, relationships, and stress for the rest of their lives.

In the 1970s developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth built on Bowlby’s work and designed a laboratory procedure called the Strange Situation experiment. Through years of observation in Uganda and Baltimore she identified distinct patterns in how children responded to separation from and reunion with their caregivers. Those patterns, she found, were not random. They were the direct product of how reliably and sensitively caregivers had responded to the child’s emotional needs.

Bowlby and Ainsworth called these patterns attachment styles.

Attachment styles are the emotional and relational patterns a person develops in childhood based on how their caregivers responded to their needs. They are not just childhood behaviors. They persist into adulthood and shape how a person handles intimacy, vulnerability, conflict, and stress for the rest of their life.

Ainsworth identified four attachment styles. Secure. Anxious. Disorganized. And the one that explains everything about the MAGA movement.

Avoidant.

What Avoidant Attachment Actually Is

Avoidant attachment does not develop randomly. It develops in response to a specific kind of parenting.

These are children who grew up with caregivers who treated vulnerability as a character flaw. Crying got you mocked. Asking for help got you punished. Showing weakness got you hurt. Expressing emotion was not met with comfort. It was met with contempt, dismissal, or worse.

So the child learns the only way to survive is to shut it all down.

Stop feeling. Stop expressing. Stop asking for help. Stop needing anything from anyone.

The child who masters this survives their childhood. But they pay an enormous price. They grow up unable to talk about their feelings because they were never allowed to have feelings. Unable to be vulnerable because vulnerability was dangerous. Unable to connect with other people on any real level because connection requires exactly the kind of openness they learned to destroy in themselves.

But the emotions do not disappear. They get repressed. Buried. Pushed down below the surface where they sit and accumulate pressure for decades.

And repressed emotions always find a way out.

For people with avoidant attachment that outlet is almost always the same.

Rage.

Anger is the one emotion that never required vulnerability. You can be furious without exposing yourself. You can attack without admitting you are in pain. In the minds of avoidant people expressing rage looks like strength. It feels like control. It is the one emotional release that fits inside the armor they built as children to survive.

In reality it is the most visible possible signal of how much pain is underneath.

What Trump Understood That Nobody Else Did

Most political movements ask something of their followers. They ask for engagement, for sacrifice, for participation in something larger than personal grievance.

Trump asked for none of that.

Trump did not ask his followers to be vulnerable. He did not ask them to examine themselves or to do the difficult psychological work of understanding why they are in pain. He gave them something far more immediately satisfying.

Permission to be furious.

At immigrants. At liberals. At academics. At journalists. At anyone he pointed at on any given day.

For people who spent their entire lives believing that emotions were weakness, a political movement built entirely around rage is not politics. It is the first time in their lives they have been given permission to feel anything at all without being told it makes them weak.

The rally is not a political event for these people. It is an emotional release. A pressure valve. The one place where the feelings they buried decades ago can come out without judgment, without vulnerability, without the risk of being seen as weak.

That is why the loyalty is so absolute. That is why facts do not move them. That is why pointing out policy failures or broken promises has no effect. You are not competing with a political argument. You are competing with the only emotional outlet many of these people have ever had.

Trump did not just find followers.

He found the most emotionally damaged people in America and gave them the one thing they never had.

Permission to feel something.

What This Actually Means

The avoidant attachment pattern does not just explain why people are drawn to Trump. It explains the specific texture of the movement.

The obsession with toughness. The contempt for anyone who expresses pain or vulnerability. The mockery of crying, of therapy, of any acknowledgment that human beings have interior lives that require care. The specific cruelty directed at people who ask for help, who admit weakness, who show emotion in public.

These are not random political positions. They are the projection of a lifetime of being told that vulnerability is shameful. The people who were mocked for crying as children grow up to mock others for crying. The people who were punished for asking for help grow up to punish others for needing it. The people who were taught that emotions make you weak grow up to build a political movement that celebrates emotional suppression and calls it strength.

The rage is real. The pain underneath it is real. The childhood that produced both is real.

But the targets are wrong.

The immigrants did not produce the avoidant attachment pattern. The liberals did not produce it. The academics and journalists and deep state and elites that Trump points at every day did not produce it.

The caregivers who taught these people that their emotions were shameful produced it. The culture that told an entire generation of men that vulnerability was weakness produced it. The specific failures of love in specific childhoods that sent specific people into the world without the tools to connect with anyone produced it.

Trump did not heal any of that. He exploited it. He took people who were already in pain and gave them a target instead of a solution. He handed them rage as a substitute for the grief they were never allowed to feel. He built a movement on the emotional wreckage of people who deserved better than what they got as children and are now taking it out on everyone around them.

Too bad they are angry at the wrong people.

Because the people who actually hurt them are not at the border.

They are in the memories these followers have never been allowed to process.

Sources

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Basic Books.

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 3: Loss, Sadness and Depression. Basic Books.

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., and Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Ainsworth, M. D. S. (1970). Attachment, exploration, and separation: Illustrated by the behavior of one-year-olds in a strange situation. Child Development, 41(1), 49-67.

Mikulincer, M., and Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change. Guilford Press.

Fraley, R. C., and Shaver, P. R. (2000). Adult romantic attachment: Theoretical developments, emerging controversies, and unanswered questions. Review of General Psychology, 4(2), 132-154.

There is a pattern so consistent it stops being coincidental.

Gas prices went up. They blamed Biden.

Tariffs started killing small businesses. They blamed the media.

Retirement accounts started collapsing. They blamed the deep state.

Their communities are worse off than they were four years ago. They blame immigrants. They blame professors. They blame journalists. They blame you.

Never Trump. Not once. Not for a single thing.

If you have been trying to understand how that is psychologically possible, you are asking the right question. Because it is not stubbornness. It is not stupidity. It is a documented biological defense mechanism that activates when the brain is faced with a specific kind of unbearable threat.

Understanding it will not make you feel better about what is happening. But it will make you stop being confused by it.

What Festinger Found

In 1957 psychologist Leon Festinger at Stanford University published his landmark research on cognitive dissonance. Festinger studied what happens inside the human mind when a person holds a belief that is directly contradicted by evidence. What he found was not what most people expect.

The brain does not update the belief. It experiences the contradiction as psychological pain and then constructs whatever justification is necessary to eliminate that pain. The belief survives. The evidence gets reinterpreted, dismissed, or attributed to a hostile source.

Festinger’s research has been replicated across decades and cultures. It is one of the most robust findings in the history of social psychology. The human brain is not a truth-seeking machine. It is a self-protecting machine. And when the truth threatens the self, the self wins almost every time.

Festinger’s work points to something I call dissonance-induced blame shifting.

When a person makes a decision that ends up causing themselves and others harm. Sometimes that decision is too central to their identity to admit they were wrong (high narcissistic trait people).

The brain of a narcissistic person protects itself by making inward blame physically intolerable. Admitting fault poses a severe threat to their deeply held sense of perfection and superiority, which can lead to overwhelming shame, self-loathing or even a psychological “collapse”.

So the brain cannot direct the blame inward, too itself. So it directs it outward. It finds a target. It constructs a narrative in which the harm was caused by something or someone external. And it defends that narrative with the same intensity it would use to defend a factual belief, because to the brain, the narrative is the belief.

This is exactly what you are watching in MAGA supporters right now.

Why This Is Different

Most people can admit when they were wrong about a politician.

You vote for someone. They disappoint you. You shake your head, adjust your view, and make a different choice next time. The politician was a decision you made. A bad decision is embarrassing but survivable. You were wrong about one person. You update and move on.

For Trump supporters it did not work that way.

Voting for Trump was not just a political decision for most of his base. It was an identity declaration. It was the moment they told their family at Thanksgiving what they stood for. It was the hat they wore, the posts they shared, the friendships they ended, the arguments they had at every holiday dinner for four years. It was the thing they staked their judgment and their credibility and their sense of self on in front of every person they knew.

Admitting Trump was a catastrophic mistake does not mean they were wrong about one man.

It means they were wrong about themselves.

It means the judgment they staked everything on was broken. It means the people they argued with and dismissed and called stupid were right. It means every relationship they damaged, every family dinner they ruined, every friendship they lost was for a lie they told themselves.

The brain will not allow that. Not for most people. Not without an extraordinary amount of psychological pain and support and time.

So instead of looking inward it looks outward.

For a target.

And that target is you.

What the Blame Actually Is

They are not angry at you because you are wrong.

They are angry at you because you keep pointing at the damage. And the damage proves they did this.

Every time you cite a statistic about tariff costs, you are not delivering information. You are delivering a threat to their psychological survival. Every time you point out that prices went up, you are not making an economic argument. You are forcing them into contact with evidence that they caused harm to themselves and everyone around them.

The blame shifting is not irrational from the brain’s perspective. It is the only move available. If the harm was caused by Biden, the media, the deep state, immigrants, professors, or you, then they are not responsible for it. If they are not responsible for it, their judgment was not broken. If their judgment was not broken, they are still who they thought they were.

The logic is circular and self-sealing. Every piece of evidence that contradicts it becomes more proof of the conspiracy. The deeper the damage goes, the more powerful the enemy must have been. The more powerful the enemy was, the more justified the original decision looks in retrospect.

This is why facts do not work on them. Not because they are unintelligent. Because facts were never the battlefield. Identity was.

What Comes Next

There is something underneath the blame shifting that does not get enough attention.

They know.

Not consciously. Not in a way most of them could articulate. But somewhere underneath the performance of certainty, they know that something went wrong and that they were part of it. The blame shifting is not the response of a person who feels nothing. It is the response of a person who feels too much and has no way to process it that does not destroy them.

The accountability that is coming, economic, political, social, is going to make that feeling harder to suppress. When the tariffs hit their own businesses. When the retirement accounts keep shrinking. When the promises keep not materializing. The dissonance is going to get louder.

Some will break through. It will be slow and private and painful and it will happen without announcement. They will not post about it. They will not apologize publicly. They will just quietly stop showing up the way they used to.

Most will not break through. Most will go deeper. The enemy will get bigger. The conspiracy will get more elaborate. The blame will get louder and more desperate as the evidence gets harder to ignore.

For the rest of us the answer is not to argue harder. It is to understand that we are not in a debate. We are watching people protect themselves from a truth their brain has decided is unsurvivable.

They are not angry at you because you are wrong.

They are angry at you because you are right.

And somewhere underneath all of it, they know it too.

Watch on YouTube

https://youtube.com/shorts/95ESWfi7ksE?si=y6cUBmbPqOJ4k_Ha

Sources

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., and Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails. University of Minnesota Press.

Tavris, C., and Aronson, E. (2007). Mistakes Were Made but Not by Me: Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Harcourt.

Miller, D. T., and Ross, M. (1975). Self-serving biases in the attribution of causality: Fact or fiction? Psychological Bulletin, 82(2), 213-225.

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5-33.

There is a question that has been sitting in the middle of American politics for twenty years and nobody has answered it honestly.

Why can’t Trump stop talking about Barack Obama.

Not occasionally. Not when it is politically relevant. Constantly. At rallies that have nothing to do with Obama. In interviews where Obama’s name has no reason to come up. In executive orders written specifically to erase policies that were working. In a years long campaign to convince the world that Obama was not born in America that continued long after a birth certificate was produced and every court that reviewed the claim rejected it.

This is not strategy. A strategist would have moved on. This is not politics. A politician would have found a more useful enemy by now. This is not ideology. Ideology does not explain why a sitting president spends rally time relitigating the accomplishments of a man who left office years ago.

This is psychology. And once you understand the specific mechanisms driving it you will never be able to watch Trump mention Obama’s name again without knowing exactly what you are seeing.

The Mirror

Start with the most uncomfortable truth in the script.

Trump does not hate Barack Obama.

He wants to be him.

Heinz Kohut at the University of Chicago spent his career studying what happens when a person who has built their entire identity around a false sense of superiority encounters someone who is genuinely superior. Not performatively. Not through inheritance or accident or bluster. Actually, measurably, undeniably superior in the qualities that produce real respect.

Kohut found that for people with fragile constructed self-images, that encounter does not produce admiration or motivation. It produces a specific and devastating kind of pain that he called narcissistic injury.

Narcissistic injury is the psychological wound a person experiences when confronted with someone who has the qualities, achievements, and admiration they believe should belong to them. It is not envy in the ordinary sense. It is something more destabilizing. It is the collision between the false self a person has constructed and the living proof that the construction is false.

Obama is self-made. Trump inherited everything and then spent decades performing the role of a self-made man.

Obama is respected across party lines, across cultures, across countries by people who have nothing to gain from respecting him. Trump is defended only by people who need something from him or fear what happens if they stop.

Obama is calm, contained, and at peace with himself in a way that no amount of money, power, or media coverage can manufacture. Trump has had all three in abundance and has never for a single public moment appeared calm, contained, or at peace.

Every time Trump sees Obama he sees the proof of everything he is not. That is not a political grievance. That is a mirror. And the mirror shows the truth. And the truth is the wound that drives everything else.

The Envy

The wound produces something specific.

Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying what happens when people with inflated but fragile self-images encounter someone who possesses what they believe they deserve. His findings overturned the assumption that aggression comes from low self-esteem. What he found was that the most dangerous and persistent aggression comes from people who think very highly of themselves but whose self-image has no stable foundation.

When that self-image is confronted with someone who genuinely has what the narcissist only performs having, the response is not reflection. It is not motivation to improve. It is rage.

Baumeister called this threatened egotism. The fragile self-image does not absorb the challenge. It treats it as a survival threat and responds accordingly.

Trump wanted the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama won one.

Trump wanted to be regarded as intelligent. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, wrote two books that were regarded as works of genuine literary merit, and spoke in public with a precision and nuance that Trump has never approached.

Trump wanted the kind of public love that does not require a rally or a media apparatus or a carefully managed information environment to sustain. Obama had it without trying. He still has it. It follows him into private life and it has not diminished.

Trump has spent his entire public life chasing a version of respect that Obama carries effortlessly. And the chasing makes it worse. Because you cannot chase your way into being someone you are not. You cannot buy the qualities that produce genuine admiration. You cannot take them by executive order. And somewhere underneath all the noise and the performance and the relentless self-promotion, Trump knows it.

That knowing is the wound that never closes.

The Rivalry

When a narcissist cannot become the person they envy they move to the only strategy left.

They try to destroy what they cannot have.

Not because destroying it gives them what they want. The destruction never produces relief. It never closes the wound. It never makes Trump more respected or more admired or more at peace. He knows this because he has been trying for twenty years and none of it has worked.

He does it because he cannot stand that it exists outside of his control.

In 2013 psychologist Mitja Back at the University of Munster published research on how grandiose narcissists respond when their primary strategy of admiration seeking fails. He found that they shift to a second strategy. Not competition. Not self-improvement. Destruction.

Back called this narcissistic rivalry. It is the antagonistic self-protective response where a narcissist attempts to devalue, attack, and eliminate the source of the status threat rather than compete with it on merit.

The birther conspiracy is the clearest example in American political history.

Trump spent years telling anyone who would listen that Obama was not born in America. A birth certificate was produced. Investigators were sent to Hawaii. Every court that reviewed the claim rejected it. The claim had no evidence behind it from the beginning and produced no evidence across years of being advanced.

Trump kept going anyway.

Not because he believed it. Because he needed it to be true. Because if Obama was illegitimate then everything Obama achieved was fraudulent. And if everything Obama achieved was fraudulent then Trump did not have to sit with the fact that Obama achieved it and Trump did not. Could not. Will never be able to.

Obama cannot be bought. Cannot be intimidated. Cannot be flattered into compliance or threatened into silence. Cannot be controlled.

That specific quality, the inability to be controlled, is the thing Trump cannot survive in another person. It is the thing that makes the rivalry permanent and the obsession inescapable.

He is not trying to build something better than Obama built.

He is trying to make sure Obama’s name disappears.

That is not politics.

That is the rivalry of a man who lost the competition before it started.

The Trap

Here is the cruelest part of the psychology.

Every attempt Trump makes to erase Obama makes the wound worse.

Dan Kahan at Yale University published research on what happens when a threat to a person’s core identity cannot be neutralized through normal means. He found that the brain does not accept defeat. It does not recalibrate or adjust or find a new approach. It escalates. It constructs increasingly extreme responses in an attempt to eliminate the threat. And each escalation, when it fails, produces a stronger response than the one before.

Kahan called this identity protective cognition.

Obama’s birth certificate was released. Trump kept going for years.

Obama’s policies were reversed one by one. Obama’s approval ratings stayed higher than Trump’s throughout both of Trump’s presidencies.

Obama’s name was scrubbed from government websites and official records. Obama published a memoir that sold millions of copies, won awards, and was read by people in countries around the world.

Obama gave a speech and the entire world paid attention.

Every erasure attempt fails because the thing Trump is trying to erase is not a policy or a record or a name on a website. It is the living proof that genuine dignity, genuine intelligence, and genuine respect cannot be faked, bought, manufactured, or taken by executive order.

Obama exists.

And as long as Obama exists Trump cannot escape what Obama’s existence proves about him.

The trap has no exit. The brain escalates because it cannot accept defeat. The escalation fails because the threat cannot be eliminated. The failure activates the wound. The wound demands another attempt. The attempt fails. The cycle restarts.

That is why he cannot stop.

That is why he will never stop.

The Scapegoat

There is one more mechanism that has been running alongside all of the others for twenty years.

The economy is struggling. Obama’s fault.

Crime is up. Obama’s fault.

Foreign policy is in shambles. Obama’s fault.

A trade war that Trump started is damaging American businesses and raising prices for American consumers. Obama’s fault.

Things that happened years after Obama left office. Things Obama had no involvement in. Things that are the direct result of Trump’s own decisions.

Obama’s fault.

In 1954 psychologist Gordon Allport at Harvard University published The Nature of Prejudice. In it he documented what happens when a person cannot tolerate their own failures and inadequacies. He found that the brain looks for a target. Someone onto whom every failure can be displaced. Someone who absorbs the blame so the person doing the blaming never has to face their own responsibility.

Allport called this scapegoating.

Scapegoating is when a person displaces their own failures, inadequacies, and frustrations onto a target who becomes the symbolic cause of everything wrong, protecting the person from having to confront what they themselves caused.

Trump did not choose Obama as his scapegoat randomly. He chose the person whose existence already wounds him the most. Because the choice serves two psychological needs simultaneously.

It protects Trump from having to admit his own failures. And it diminishes the man Trump can never be. One move. Two needs met.

This is why the scapegoating has never stopped and has never evolved. It has been the same target for twenty years because the target is not chosen for political utility. It is chosen for psychological necessity. Obama is the explanation for everything Trump cannot fix, achieve, or become.

And that will never change. Because Trump will never fix, achieve, or become those things. And Obama will never stop existing as the proof of it.

What This Means

Trump does not hate Barack Obama.

He wants to be Barack Obama.

He wants the natural dignity. The earned respect. The genuine love of people who do not need anything from him. The calm authority of a man who is completely at peace with who he is. The intelligence that does not have to be performed because it is simply present. The legacy that does not have to be defended because it speaks for itself.

And he knows he will never have it.

Not with all the money. Not with all the power. Not with the presidency. Not with the executive orders or the rallies or the media apparatus or the years of trying to make Obama’s name disappear from the public record.

Because those things cannot be bought or faked or stolen.

And the man who has spent his entire life buying, faking, and stealing knows that better than anyone.

For Trump supporters who wonder why he keeps bringing up Obama at rallies that have nothing to do with him: it is not strategy. It is not political calculation. It is a man who cannot escape the shadow of someone who is everything he pretends to be.

For the rest of us: the obsession explains everything. Every irrational reversal. Every unprovoked attack. Every rally where a name comes up that has no reason to be there.

This is not governance.

This is one fragile man watching someone else be everything he will never be.

And being completely powerless to stop it.

Watch on YouTube

Sources

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.

Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. International Universities Press.

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5-33.

Back, M. D., Kuefner, A. C. P., Dufner, M., Gerlach, T. M., Rauthmann, J. F., and Denissen, J. J. A. (2013). Narcissistic admiration and rivalry: Disentangling the bright and dark sides of narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(6), 1013-1037.

Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, misinformation, and the logic of identity-protective cognition. Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164. Yale Law School.

Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley.

There is a conversation happening on the left that needs to stop.

It goes like this. Someone tries to explain Trump supporters. They say they are not all bad people. They say some of them are just scared. Some of them are just misinformed. Some of them just want lower taxes and did not realize what they were signing up for.

And then someone else in the conversation says: it does not matter. They are still responsible.

Both of those things are true. And Hannah Arendt figured out why sixty years ago.

The Trial

In 1963, philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. Eichmann was the Nazi official responsible for organizing the logistics of the Holocaust. The transportation. The scheduling. The paperwork that moved millions of people to their deaths.

Arendt expected to find a monster. She expected someone defined by hatred, driven by ideology, consumed by the specific desire to cause suffering.

What she found was an ordinary man.

Eichmann was not driven by fierce anti-Semitism. He was not a sadist who took pleasure in what he was producing. He was a bureaucrat. A mid-level administrator who followed orders, filled out forms, attended meetings, and advanced his career. He did not think deeply about what his career was producing. He did not think deeply about much at all.

At trial, his defense was simple. He was just following orders. He had done his job. He did not understand why that was not sufficient.

Arendt concluded that he genuinely did not understand. That was her most disturbing finding. Not that he was lying. Not that he was hiding some deeper malice. But that he had so thoroughly stopped thinking about the consequences of his actions that the question of moral responsibility had simply ceased to occur to him.

She called this the banality of evil.

The banality of evil is when ordinary people participate in monstrous things not through malice but through the complete absence of thinking. Not stupidity. Arendt was careful to distinguish the two. Eichmann was not unintelligent. He was thoughtless. He had outsourced his moral judgment to the system above him and stopped asking questions about what that system was doing.

The result was the Holocaust.

What This Has to Do With Right Now

The Trump supporter who just wants lower taxes is not Adolf Eichmann. That comparison would be both unfair and historically imprecise.

But the psychological mechanism Arendt identified is not limited to Nazi Germany. It is a human capacity. It activates whenever ordinary people participate in systems that cause serious harm without stopping to think about what they are participating in.

Look at what has happened under this administration.

Families have been separated at the border and children placed in detention. People with legal immigration status have been deported. Federal agents have been deployed against protesters. Journalists have been targeted by the government. Judges have been publicly threatened for ruling against the president. A war was started with Iran. The president stated publicly that the struggles of ordinary Americans do not factor into his decision making.

These are not disputed facts. They are documented events.

And millions of people who describe themselves as not evil, not hateful, not extreme, who just wanted lower taxes or secure borders or someone to shake up Washington, voted for this, continue to support this, and have never once stopped to ask what they are participating in.

That is the banality of evil operating in real time.

Not monsters. Ordinary people who stopped thinking.

The Distinction That Matters

Arendt’s framework is not an invitation to sympathy. It is an invitation to precision.

Understanding that most Trump supporters are not driven by malice does not reduce their responsibility for what their participation produces. Eichmann’s lack of malice did not restore the lives his paperwork helped end. The bureaucratic distance between his desk and the camps did not make him less culpable for what happened in those camps.

The same logic applies here. The distance between a Trump voter in Ohio and a child in a detention facility does not dissolve the connection between the vote and the outcome. Thoughtlessness is not innocence. It is a choice. A repeated, ongoing choice to not ask what you are part of.

Arendt’s most important lesson was not about the monsters at the top of fascist systems. It was about the ordinary people at the bottom who kept showing up. Who kept following orders. Who kept telling themselves someone else was responsible for the outcomes.

Those people are the reason fascist systems survive. Not the leaders. The followers who never stop to think.

What Thinking Actually Requires

There is a version of this argument that ends with: so we should be patient with Trump supporters and try to educate them.

That is not where Arendt’s analysis points.

What her analysis points toward is accountability. Not the accountability of monsters, which is easy to assign and easy to dismiss. The harder accountability of ordinary people who made ordinary choices and produced extraordinary harm.

The Trump supporter who never asked what was happening at the border is not off the hook because they did not personally separate a family. The voter who cheered for disruption without asking what would be disrupted is not absolved because they did not personally threaten a judge.

Thoughtlessness has consequences. And the consequences do not become less real because the person producing them stopped thinking before they could feel responsible for them.

You do not have to be evil to make evil possible.

You just have to stop thinking.

The most dangerous people in any fascist movement are never the ones at the top.

They are the ordinary people at the bottom who keep showing up.

And the first step toward stopping them is being precise about exactly what they are doing.

Not monsters exactly.

People who stopped asking questions.

And people who stop asking questions can start again.

The question is whether they will.

Or will their ego force them to remain quiet.

Sources

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press.

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books.

Browning, C. R. (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper and Row.

Paxton, R. O. (2004). The Anatomy of Fascism. Knopf.

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.

There is a moment you have seen a thousand times and probably never named.

A news anchor introduces two guests. On one side, a scientist with thirty years of peer reviewed research. On the other, a man with a podcast and a financial relationship with an industry that profits from people not believing the scientist.

The anchor says: let’s hear both sides.

The chyron at the bottom of the screen gives them equal billing.

The segment runs four minutes. Each guest gets two.

And somewhere in living rooms across the country, a viewer watches and walks away thinking: well, I guess scientists and conspiracy theorists both have a point.

That is not journalism. That is not fairness. That is not balance.

That is the deliberate destruction of the public’s ability to tell the difference between facts and lies. And there is peer reviewed research that proves it.

The Research

In 2022, psychologist David Rapp at Northwestern University published a study in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition examining exactly what happens to a viewer’s brain when a journalist gives equal platform to an expert and someone with no evidence behind them.

The findings were not subtle.

It does not matter that one side has all the evidence. The moment you put them on screen together, the audience’s brain treats them as equals. The visual equivalence overrides the evidentiary reality. Two people on a split screen with equal time and equal billing register in the brain as two equally valid positions, regardless of what either of them is actually saying.

Rapp called this false balance reporting.

False balance reporting is when the media gives equal airtime and equal credibility to opposing views even when one view has the full weight of scientific consensus behind it and the other has none. The result is not an informed audience. The result is an audience that has been systematically trained to doubt what the evidence actually shows.

This is not a minor formatting issue. It is not a stylistic choice about how to structure a segment. It is a mechanism that actively damages the public’s ability to process reality. And it has been running at scale in American media for decades.

What It Actually Looks Like

Ninety eight percent of climate scientists agree that the planet is warming due to human activity. This is not a contested scientific question. It has not been a contested scientific question for a long time. The media puts one of these scientists on television with one of the handful of paid climate deniers whose research is funded by fossil fuel industries and calls it a debate.

It is not a debate. One side has the evidence. One side has a check.

Ninety nine doctors tell you that you need surgery to save your life. The media finds the one doctor who disagrees and frames it as a medical controversy. The viewer goes home and decides to wait and see. The delay costs them their life.

A man with no evidence and no legal standing claims an election was stolen. Sixty one courts reviewed the claim and rejected it. Republican judges, Democratic judges, Trump appointed judges: all of them reached the same conclusion. The media puts this man next to an election official and gives them equal time. The viewer walks away thinking both sides have a point.

One of them does not have a point. One of them is lying. And the camera treated them identically.

Why The Media Does This

The tempting explanation is incompetence. That journalists are confused about what balance means. That they have been trained to present both sides and never learned to distinguish between a genuine disagreement and a manufactured one.

That explanation lets the media off too easily.

The people running these networks are not confused. They know exactly what a climate scientist is. They know exactly what a paid denier is. They understand the difference between a peer reviewed study and a talking point funded by an industry lobby. They make the booking decision anyway.

Because conflict drives views. Because outrage drives engagement. Because a four minute segment where two people agree with each other performs worse than a four minute segment where two people argue. Because the algorithm rewards heat over light and the networks have decided to feed the algorithm.

They are not being naive. They are choosing revenue over reality. They are choosing clicks over the public’s ability to understand what is happening to them. And they are doing it every single day in front of millions of people who trust them to tell the truth.

What False Balance Actually Produces

Rapp’s research did not just document the problem. It documented the damage.

Audiences exposed to false balance reporting showed measurably reduced ability to identify scientific consensus. They were more likely to believe that contested questions were genuinely open when they were not. They were more likely to distrust expert conclusions after seeing those conclusions presented alongside fringe positions with equal credibility.

In other words: false balance does not just confuse people about specific issues. It degrades their ability to evaluate evidence at all. It trains them, over time and repeated exposure, to treat all positions as equally valid regardless of what the evidence shows.

This is how a population loses its grip on shared reality. Not through one dramatic moment. Through thousands of small moments where the camera said: both sides have a point. Both sides deserve equal time. Both sides are worth hearing.

Until the viewer stops asking which side has the evidence. Until the question itself stops feeling relevant.

Until a man with no evidence and a man with thirty years of research look, on television, exactly the same.

What Needs to Change

There is no balance between facts and lies.

There is only one side with evidence and one side without it.

Giving equal platform to both does not make a network fair. It makes them complicit in the erosion of the one thing a democracy cannot function without.

The truth.

Platforming far right figures alongside credible experts does not inform the public. It normalizes the idea that expertise and denial are equivalent positions. It tells every viewer watching that reality is negotiable. That science is one opinion among many. That the man with thirty years of peer reviewed research and the man with a podcast funded by an industry lobby both deserve your consideration.

They do not.

Stop booking them. Stop giving them segments. Stop calling it balance when one side has the evidence and the other has a financial relationship with the people who profit from doubt.

You are not being fair.

You are not protecting free speech.

You are running a propaganda operation with better lighting.

And calling it news.

Watch on YouTube

Sources

Imundo, M. N., and Rapp, D. N. (2022). When fairness is flawed: Effects of false balance reporting and weight-of-evidence statements on beliefs and perceptions of climate change. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 11, 258-271.

Cook, J., Nuccitelli, D., Green, S. A., Richardson, M., Winkler, B., Painting, R., Way, R., Jacobs, P., and Skuce, A. (2013). Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 8(2).

Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., and Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106-131.

Paul, C., and Matthews, M. (2016). The Russian firehose of falsehood propaganda model. RAND Corporation. PE-198-OSD.

Nyhan, B., and Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303-330.

A polling organization asked a simple question recently and the results broke the internet.

Could you beat Donald Trump in a fight?

It sounds like a joke. It is not. YouGov surveyed 2,609 Americans and what came back was one of the most revealing data sets about the psychology of the MAGA movement that has ever been published.

75% of Democrats said yes, they could beat Trump in a fight.

Only 33% of Republicans said yes.

That means 67% of Republican men believe they would lose a physical altercation with an 80 year old man who eats McDonald’s for dinner every night and gets winded walking to a podium.

But the data gets worse.

YouGov asked a follow up question. Could an eight year old boy beat Donald Trump in a fight?

54% of Democrats said yes.

That is a higher percentage than the number of Republicans who said they themselves could beat him.

Read that again. Republican men are less confident in their own ability to beat Trump than Democrats are in a third grader’s ability to beat Trump.

This is not a poll about fighting. This is a poll about psychology. And it reveals something that researchers have been documenting for decades.

The Science of Fake Strength

Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba spent his career studying why people submit completely to authoritarian leaders. His research produced one of the most important findings in modern political psychology.

Authoritarian followers do not submit to actual strength.

They submit to the performance of strength.

Altemeyer called this authoritarian submission. It is the psychological process by which a person surrenders their own judgment to whoever performs dominance the loudest, regardless of whether that dominance is real.

This distinction matters more than almost anything else you can understand about the MAGA movement.

The assumption most people make is that Trump supporters follow Trump because they believe he is genuinely powerful. Strong. Capable. A force to be reckoned with. If that were true, the poll numbers above would be impossible. You do not believe you would lose a fight to someone you genuinely think is stronger than you.

What Altemeyer’s research reveals is that the followers are not responding to actual strength at all. They are responding to a performance. And performances do not require the performer to actually possess the quality being performed. They only require the audience to believe it.

Trump is not physically strong. He cannot walk up a flight of stairs without assistance. He does not exercise. He has spent decades eating fast food and sitting behind desks. By any objective physical measure he is a sedentary elderly man in poor health.

But he performs dominance. He brags constantly. He attempts to intimidate everyone around him. He calls other people weak, stupid, and losers while he struggles to complete a sentence. He demands submission from every person in his orbit and destroys anyone who refuses to provide it.

And for a specific type of person, that performance is indistinguishable from the real thing.

Why Weak People Need a Fake Strong Man

This is the part that the poll data makes impossible to ignore.

The people who are most convinced by Trump’s performance of strength are the same people who just told a pollster they could not beat him in a fight. These are not people who respect genuine physical or intellectual strength. These are people who are drawn to the loudest, most aggressive, most domineering presence in the room because that presence makes them feel protected.

Altemeyer’s research is consistent on this point. Authoritarian submission is not about admiration. It is about fear. People who score high on authoritarian submission measures are not looking for someone to look up to. They are looking for someone to hide behind. The performance of dominance signals safety to them. It signals that the threat is on their side.

This is why the poll numbers make perfect psychological sense. Of course 67% of Republican men think Trump would beat them in a fight. Admitting he is physically weak would destroy the entire psychological structure they have built around him. If he is not dominant, he cannot protect them. If he cannot protect them, they are exposed. And exposure is the thing they fear most.

Democrats do not have that psychological investment. They can look at an overweight 80 year old man who lives on fast food and answer the question honestly. There is no identity at stake. There is no protection to lose.

What the Poll Actually Measured

This survey was not really about fighting. It was an accidental measurement of how deeply Republican men have surrendered their own judgment to a performance.

The irony is suffocating. The movement built entirely around the aesthetics of toughness, guns and flags and threats and dominance, is populated by people who just admitted in a national poll that they could not beat an elderly man in deteriorating health in a physical altercation.

They are not tough. They never were. They are scared people who found a scared man who is very good at pretending not to be scared, and they built a political movement around the pretense.

Altemeyer’s research did not predict Trump specifically. But it predicted everything about him. It predicted that a certain type of follower would respond to performed dominance regardless of whether anything real was underneath it. It predicted that facts, evidence, and reality would have no effect on that response because the response was never rational in the first place. It was emotional. It was fear based. It was the desperate need of frightened people to believe that the loudest voice in the room is also the strongest one.

The poll just proved that deep down, they do not even believe it themselves.

Scared, broken people chose a fat, out of shape fraud as their alpha.

And then admitted they couldn’t beat him in a fight.

That is the MAGA Cult.

Sources

Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-Wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press.

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.

Altemeyer, B. (2006). The Authoritarians. Available at bobaltemeyer.com.

YouGov. (2026). How many Americans think they could beat Donald Trump in a fight? Retrieved from yougov.com/en-us/articles/54707-how-many-americans-think-they-could-beat-donald-trump-in-a-fight.

Feldman, S. (2003). Enforcing social conformity: A theory of authoritarianism. Political Psychology, 24(1), 41-74.

Stenner, K. (2005). The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge University Press.

Why the Right Celebrates When People Suffer

There is a scientific reason for that. And once you understand it, you will never be able to unsee it.

Where the Word Comes From

The Germans put this word together in the 1740s.

Schaden. Freude. Harm. Joy.

Schadenfreude. The pleasure you feel when someone else suffers.

When the English first encountered the word in 1852, a philosopher named Richard Chenevix Trench was horrified by it. He called it a mournful record of the strange wickednesses which the genius of man has invented. He thought naming it was shameful. He thought no civilized society could truly relate to it.

He was spectacularly wrong.

For 150 years the word stayed locked in academic circles, surfacing occasionally in philosophy texts and psychology papers but never breaking into mainstream culture. Then in 1991 The Simpsons put it on television. Homer is gloating at his neighbor’s failure. His daughter Lisa stops him and names what he is doing. Homer’s response: “Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.”

After that episode aired the word exploded. Because everyone recognized it immediately. Because it named something that had always been there but never had a clean label.

Then the scientists got involved. And what they found should concern all of us.

The Brain Science

In 2009, a team of Japanese researchers led by Hidehiko Takahashi at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences put volunteers in brain scanners and told them a story.

The story was simple. There was someone more successful than you. Better job. More money. Better life. Everything you wanted and did not have.

Then the story changed. That same person, the one with the better life, just lost everything.

The researchers were watching the brain the entire time. What lit up when the successful person fell was the ventral striatum. The brain’s reward center. The same structure that fires when you eat something delicious, when you win money, when you accomplish something you worked hard toward.

Watching someone else suffer hit the same neural architecture as winning.

And the people who felt it most intensely were consistent across every test. They were the volunteers with the lowest self-esteem. The ones who felt like their own lives were going nowhere. The ones for whom watching someone else fail was the only version of winning available to them.

People who feel like losers need someone else to lose more than they do. That is not a moral judgment. That is a documented biological response.

The Entire Platform

This is the entire platform of the modern American right.

Not lower prices. Not better healthcare. Not safer communities. Not stronger families.

Suffering. Specifically the suffering of people they have been told are their enemies.

A family gets deported. The crowd cheers.

A protester gets hurt. They should have complied.

A journalist gets humiliated on live television. The crowd goes wild.

A trans kid loses access to medical care. They call it a win.

None of these outcomes make conservative lives materially better. Deportations do not lower grocery bills. Punishing journalists does not fix the roads. Stripping healthcare from vulnerable people does not improve anyone’s wages.

The policy outcomes are completely irrelevant. That is not what is being sought.

What is being sought is the feeling. The ventral striatum firing. The reward. The only version of winning available to people who have spent their entire lives feeling like they were losing.

This is what happens when a political movement is built on the psychology of people who feel like their own lives went wrong and need someone else to pay for it. They cannot organize around making things better because making things better requires a positive vision of what good looks like. People who run on schadenfreude do not have that. They only have the enemy. The enemy is the entire point.

Take the enemy away and there is nothing left.

This is why the targets keep changing. Immigrants. Academics. Journalists. Trans people. Scientists. Doctors. Teachers. The list expands constantly because the need never gets satisfied. Schadenfreude is not a hunger that can be fed to completion. Every win creates the appetite for the next win. Every group that suffers creates the need for another group to suffer. The reward center demands more. And the leaders who figured this out are very good at providing more.

The Opposite Exists

Here is what makes the schadenfreude framework so clarifying. It has a direct opposite. And the existence of that opposite reveals everything about the difference between the two sides of this cultural divide.

In 1978, social scientist Lee Preston published research introducing the concept of freudenfreude. Where schadenfreude is harm-joy, freudenfreude is joy-joy. The pleasure you feel when someone else succeeds. The warmth that fires when a friend gets the promotion, when a stranger’s kid graduates, when someone you have never met achieves something they worked hard for.

Catherine Chambliss, a psychology professor at Ursinus College, spent years studying freudenfreude and built a training program around it. Her research found that people who practice sharing in others’ joy show improved mood, stronger social bonds, and greater emotional resilience. She called freudenfreude the social glue that holds relationships together.

The contrast is not subtle.

One emotional orientation builds. The other destroys. One expands the circle of who deserves good things. The other shrinks it until the only acceptable outcome is that your enemies suffer. One produces community. The other produces movements.

The people cheering deportations are not broken in some unique or inexplicable way. They are experiencing a well-documented biological reward response that has been deliberately activated and directed at specific targets by people who understood exactly what they were doing.

Understanding that does not require excusing it. A person whose brain reward center fires at the sight of a child being separated from their parents at a border is still making a choice about what to do with that feeling. The biology explains the mechanism. It does not remove the responsibility.

What to Do With This

Facts will not fix schadenfreude. That is the hardest conclusion the research points toward.

You cannot show someone a policy outcome and expect it to override a dopamine reward. You cannot argue someone out of a feeling that is firing in the same part of the brain as hunger and sex. The argument was never the point. The suffering was the point. And as long as the suffering continues, the reward continues, and the loyalty continues.

What you can do is stop being confused by it. Stop expecting the behavior that would come from someone motivated by policy outcomes or civic values. Stop treating bad faith as though it were good faith that just needs better information.

You are watching people who hate their own lives trying to make yours worse.

Name it clearly.

And do not let it work.

Watch on YouTube

Sources

Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., and Okubo, Y. (2009). When your gain is my pain and your pain is my gain: Neural correlates of envy and schadenfreude. Science, 323(5916), 937-939.

Preston, L. E. (1978). Freudenfreude and schadenfreude. Journal of Behavioral Economics, 7(1), 1-12.

Chambliss, C. (2018). Freudenfreude enhancement training. World Journal of Psychiatry and Mental Health Research, 2(1).

Leach, C. W., Spears, R., Branscombe, N. R., and Doosje, B. (2003). Malicious pleasure: Schadenfreude at the suffering of another group. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(5), 932-943.

Smith, R. H., Turner, T. J., Garonzik, R., Leach, C. W., Urch-Druskat, V., and Weston, C. M. (1996). Envy and schadenfreude. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(2), 158-168.

Trench, R. C. (1852). On the Study of Words. John W. Parker and Son.

This one took me a while to fully understand.

For years I kept trying to explain Trump supporters the same way everyone else does. They are misinformed. They are in a bubble. They have been manipulated by bad media. If they just had access to the right information they would come around.

Then I found the research. And it changed everything I thought I knew about what is actually happening.

Because the problem is not that they do not have access to the truth.

The problem is that the truth was never the point.

The Research

In 2022, political scientist David Moon at the University of Bath published peer-reviewed research examining the relationship between Trump’s political style and professional wrestling psychology. The paper appeared in Political Studies Review and it introduced a concept that reframes everything about how MAGA operates.

Moon called it Kayfabe.

If you grew up watching professional wrestling you already understand the concept intuitively. In wrestling, everyone in the building knows the fights are choreographed. The outcomes are predetermined. The rivalries are written by producers. The blood is sometimes fake. The feuds are storylines.

And the arena is full anyway.

Because the fans are not there for reality. They are there for the performance. The villain who cheats and brags and gets away with it. The hero who suffers and perseveres. The drama of watching someone you hate get what they deserve, or someone you love get robbed. The emotional experience of it all. The spectacle.

Nobody in that arena is confused about what they are watching. They just do not care that it is fake because the emotional payoff is real.

Moon’s research found that Trump supporters engage with politics through exactly the same psychological framework.

What This Actually Means

This is the part that is hard to sit with.

It means Trump supporters are not victims of misinformation in the way most people assume. They are not confused. They are not waiting to be shown the right facts. They made a choice, consciously or not, to engage with politics the way a wrestling fan engages with a pay-per-view event. They chose the performance over the reality. And that choice is remarkably stable because it was never based on information in the first place.

Look at the record.

He promised no new wars. The United States is involved in active military engagements.

He promised cheaper gas. Gas prices rose.

He promised lower bills. Every bill went up.

He promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. The wall was never finished. Mexico paid nothing.

His supporters know this. These are not obscure facts buried in policy documents. They are lived experiences. They are numbers on receipts and gas station signs and utility statements. The information is right in front of them every single day.

They do not care.

Because they were never voting for results. They were voting for the show. They wanted the villain. The spectacle. The enemy. The performance of dominance and victimhood running simultaneously in the same body, which is the specific psychological trick that professional wrestling perfected decades before Trump ran for office.

The Heel

In wrestling there is a character called the heel. The heel is the villain. But the heel is not simply evil. The most effective heels in wrestling history share a specific psychological profile. They are simultaneously unstoppable and aggrieved. Dominant and victimized. Powerful and persecuted.

They brag about how great they are. Then they complain about how unfairly they are being treated. They cheat to win. Then they claim they only cheated because the system was rigged against them. They humiliate their opponents. Then they cry victim when anyone fights back.

The audience holds both of those contradictory ideas at the same time and feels no conflict. Because wrestling trained them to do exactly that. The contradiction is not a bug. It is the entire emotional engine of the character.

Trump perfected this completely.

He is simultaneously the most powerful man in the world and the most persecuted man in American history. The billionaire president who is also the ultimate outsider. The man who won the most powerful office on earth and spent every day in it claiming the system was rigged against him.

His supporters hold both of those ideas without any friction because they learned how to do it from decades of watching professional wrestling. The psychological infrastructure was already there. Trump just walked into it.

The House They Burned Down

Here is where the kayfabe framework becomes genuinely disturbing.

A wrestling fan who gets swept up in the performance goes home after the show. The arena is not their house. The storylines do not affect their children’s schools or their parents’ retirement or the price of food at their grocery store.

Trump supporters do not have that separation.

They burned their own house down. Then they sat in the rubble and watched it on television. Cheering.

Their jobs are here. Their kids go to school here. Their parents collect Social Security here. Their health insurance, their mortgage rates, their grocery bills, their gas prices: all of it is here. All of it got worse. And they applauded the man who made it worse because the show was too good to turn off.

This is what Moon’s research is ultimately describing. A population that has so thoroughly adopted the entertainment framework for politics that they can watch their own material conditions deteriorate in real time and experience it as content rather than as damage. The emotional satisfaction of the performance overrides the cognitive recognition of the harm.

That is not stupidity. It is something more specific and more troubling than stupidity. It is a complete substitution of emotional entertainment for rational self-interest, executed so thoroughly that the person doing it cannot see the difference anymore.

What It Means for the Rest of Us

Facts will not fix this. That is the hardest conclusion Moon’s research points toward, and it is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.

You cannot fact-check someone out of kayfabe. When a wrestling fan watches their favorite storyline play out they are not making a factual claim about the world. They are having an emotional experience. Telling them the fight is staged does not ruin the experience because they already know it is staged. That is not new information. It changes nothing.

The same dynamic applies here. Showing a MAGA supporter that Trump’s promises were broken is not delivering news. They watched it happen. The argument that their lives got worse under his policies is not a revelation. They lived it. The emotional architecture of the performance absorbs all of that and converts it into more content. More persecution. More proof that the enemies are powerful and must be fought.

What breaks kayfabe is not facts. What breaks kayfabe is when the performance stops being satisfying. When the storyline gets boring. When the emotional payoff stops arriving. When enough real world damage accumulates that the performance can no longer paper over it.

Some of that is already happening. Quietly. In private. Without announcement.

But for the people still in the arena, still cheering, still holding the contradictions without friction: our country is not professional wrestling.

And the people willing to burn it down for entertainment cannot be trusted with power ever again.

Because next time there may not be anything left to save.

Sources

Moon, D. (2022). Kayfabe, smartdom and marking out: Can pro-wrestling help us understand Donald Trump? Political Studies Review, 20(1), 3-13.

Edelman, M. (1988). Constructing the Political Spectacle. University of Chicago Press.

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Viking Penguin.

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion. Harcourt Brace.

It happened on a farm in Wisconsin, in the rain, on a Sunday morning.

Kristen Welker had traveled all the way from New York to sit down with the President of the United States for a Meet the Press interview. She asked him about election fraud in California. She asked him about the January 6th rioters. She asked him about an 1.8 billion dollar anti-weaponization fund his own administration had quietly abandoned.

She asked him, at one point, a very simple question.

Do you have evidence?

What happened next was not a policy disagreement. It was not a heated debate between two people with different views. What happened next was a 78 year old man, the most powerful person on earth, come completely undone in front of a global audience because a woman would not pretend his answers made sense.

He called her crooked. He called her stupid. He told her she was either crooked or stupid, take your pick. He accused NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN of being one-sided crooked networks in a single breath. He said “thank you darling,” threw his microphone on the ground, and walked out of the interview while Welker sat in her chair and watched him go.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

There is a psychological framework that explains exactly what you watched. And once you understand it, you will never be able to unsee it.

The Research

Roy Baumeister at Florida State University spent decades studying the relationship between self-image and aggression. His findings overturned a widely held assumption about confidence and power.

The popular belief was that aggression comes from low self-esteem. That people who feel bad about themselves lash out. Baumeister’s research told a more complicated and more disturbing story. The people most prone to explosive aggression are not people with low self-esteem. They are people with inflated, unstable self-esteem. People who think very highly of themselves but whose self-image has no foundation underneath it.

When that self-image is challenged, the nervous system reacts before the conscious mind can intervene. There is no reflection, no consideration, no processing of the incoming information. There is only the threat response. And the threat response has one goal: eliminate the source of the challenge.

Baumeister called this threatened egotism. And his research showed it is one of the most reliable predictors of human aggression across cultures, contexts, and situations.

The angrier the reaction, the more fragile the ego that produced it.

What Welker Actually Did

It is worth being precise about what triggered the collapse, because it was not an attack. Welker did not accuse Trump of anything. She did not editorialize. She did not raise her voice or interrupt or argue.

She asked for evidence.

When Trump said California’s elections were rigged, she asked him to support that claim. When he said “all I have to do is look,” she told him that looking is not evidence. When he continued making claims without support, she continued asking for support.

That is journalism. That is the job. And for a man whose self-image depends entirely on never being wrong, never being challenged, and never being held to a standard he cannot meet, it was functionally indistinguishable from a physical attack.

His brain did not register her questions as journalism. It registered them as a threat to his survival. And it responded accordingly.

This is the mechanism Baumeister documented. The person with the fragile inflated self-image does not have the psychological tools to say “you make a fair point” or “I may have overstated that.” Those responses require a stable internal foundation. They require the ability to be wrong without being destroyed by it. Trump does not have that foundation. He never has.

So when Welker would not let the claims pass unchallenged, his only available response was to attack her credibility, label her an enemy, dismiss her with a condescending endearment, and physically remove himself from the situation.

He ran. On live television. In front of the entire world.

What It Means

The instinct is to frame what happened as a bad day. A moment of frustration. An understandable reaction to hostile press.

That framing is wrong, and the research explains why.

What Welker did was not hostile. It was the minimum standard of accountability journalism. The fact that minimum standard accountability produced a full public collapse tells you everything about what happens behind closed doors, in classified briefings, in negotiations with foreign leaders, in any situation where someone with actual power pushes back on something Trump says and refuses to accept a non-answer.

Leaders who cannot be questioned cannot be corrected. Leaders who cannot be corrected make catastrophic decisions and then attack whoever points out the damage.

Baumeister’s research did not stay in the laboratory. The pattern he documented in study after study shows up in boardrooms, in courtrooms, in homes, and apparently, on farms in Wisconsin in the rain on Sunday mornings.

The tell is always the same. The intensity of the reaction is inversely proportional to the strength of the position. The louder the rage, the emptier the argument behind it.

Trump had no evidence. He knew it. Welker knew it. And rather than acknowledge that, he did what every fragile ego does when it runs out of road.

He attacked the person asking the question.

He called her darling.

And he ran.

A reporter asked the President of the United States to back up what he said.

He had no evidence.

He had no choice but to run.

Sources

Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., and Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark side of high self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103(1), 5-33.

Baumeister, R. F. (2001). Violent pride: Do people turn violent because of self-hate, or self-love? Scientific American, 284(4), 96-101.

Twenge, J. M., and Baumeister, R. F. (2005). Social exclusion increases aggression and self-defeating behavior while reducing intelligent thought and prosocial behavior. In D. Abrams, M. A. Hogg, and J. M. Marques (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Inclusion and Exclusion. Psychology Press.