The Lucas Bean Show

Anthony Fauci spent 54 years saving lives. He advised six presidents. He helped lead the fight against the AIDS crisis. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And MAGA wants him prosecuted. Humiliated. Destroyed.

There is a psychological reason for that.

In 1960, psychologist Peter Wason at University College London ran a series of experiments on how people process information that contradicts what they already believe.

He gave participants a sequence of numbers and asked them to figure out the rule. Most people formed a hypothesis and then only tested examples that confirmed it. They never tried to break their own theory. They never looked for evidence that they were wrong.

Wason called this confirmation bias.

It is not a fringe finding. It is one of the most replicated results in the history of psychology. People do not evaluate evidence. They filter it. They accept what confirms what they already believe and ignore everything else. And when the pressure is high enough, when identity is on the line, the filter becomes a wall.

Let’s talk about what Fauci actually was.

He was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He was a doctor and a scientist who gave advice to political leaders during a public health crisis.

That is the full extent of his power.

Fauci could not fire you. He could not close your business. He could not mandate your vaccine. He had no legal authority over a single American citizen. Everything he said was a recommendation. Nobody was required to listen to him.

The politicians made the decisions. The governors issued the lockdowns. The executives signed the mandates. The president of the United States had the power to set national policy and he did exactly that.

That president was Donald Trump.

Trump contradicted Fauci regularly and publicly. He called him an alarmist. He undermined him at press conferences. He pushed unproven drugs. He held packed campaign rallies during a pandemic.

And then, on April 23, 2020, at an official White House briefing, the president of the United States suggested that injecting disinfectant into the human body might cure COVID-19. His exact words: “Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”

The manufacturer of Lysol had to issue a public statement warning people not to inject their products.

That man had the power. That man was making the decisions. He used it to downplay a virus that killed over a million Americans.

But here is where confirmation bias does its worst work.

MAGA rejected every peer reviewed study on vaccines and masks. Study after study was dismissed as fake, as globalist propaganda, as a conspiracy to control them.

Then Fauci admitted in congressional testimony that the six foot social distancing rule was not based on a specific study. It had evolved from general guidance rather than a controlled trial.

And suddenly the MAGA cult became scientists.

The same people who spent three years refusing to read a single peer reviewed paper were quoting process standards and demanding methodological rigor. Not because they cared about scientific integrity. Because the admission confirmed what they already believed. That was the only kind of evidence they were ever willing to accept.

That is confirmation bias operating at full strength. It is not about truth. It is about ammunition.

Now consider what Trump actually did with the vaccine.

He launched Operation Warp Speed. He took full credit for the fastest vaccine development in history. He called it a miracle. He got vaccinated himself before leaving office. In secret. Without telling his base.

His base still believes the vaccine is dangerous.

Yale researchers examined 538,159 deaths in Florida and Ohio from March 2020 to December 2021. They found that after vaccines became widely available in 2021, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43 percent higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. The gap widened further in the fall of 2021 as vaccine resistance hardened.

Forty-three percent.

They rejected the vaccine Trump built. They blamed Fauci for the deaths. And they kept watching the right wing propaganda channels that made them doubt the vaccine. And it got them killed.

Fauci became their scapegoat because the alternative was too painful to accept.

Accepting the truth would mean admitting they were manipulated. It would mean their politicians failed them. It would mean their media lied to them. It would mean people they loved died for nothing.

Confirmation bias will not let them go there. So they go after the doctor instead.

They are not seeking justice. They are seeking relief from a truth they cannot face.

And that is exactly what Peter Wason predicted in 1960. When belief and reality collide, people do not update the belief. They attack the source of the reality.

Sources

Wason, P.C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 129-140.

Wallace, J., Goldsmith-Pinkham, P., and Schwartz, J.L. (2022). Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Yale School of Public Health / Yale School of Management. Published in JAMA Internal Medicine, 2023.

Trump bleach injection remarks: White House coronavirus briefing, April 23, 2020. Reported by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN. Reckitt Benckiser (Lysol manufacturer) public statement, April 24, 2020.

Trump supporters don’t just tolerate the cruelty. They show up for it.

This is not a political observation. It is not a talking point. It is a documented psychological finding that explains everything about the last ten years of American politics that conventional wisdom refuses to name out loud.

The disabled reporter getting mocked on a national stage. The families being separated at the border. The protesters he fantasizes about having roughed up. The political enemies he promises will go to prison. The trans kids he has made into a target for an entire movement.

The crowd is not cheering despite the cruelty. They are cheering because of it.

And the research is unambiguous about why.

In 2013, psychologists Erin Buckels and Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia identified a trait they called everyday sadism. The enjoyment of causing pain or humiliation to others. Not in a criminal way. In the ordinary daily way that shows up as trolling, bullying, and feeling genuine pleasure when the right people suffer.

Everyday sadism is not rare. It exists on a spectrum. And it turns out it is extremely well distributed across the American population. What varies is not its presence but its permission. Most people who carry it never act on it because the social cost is too high. You cannot walk into work and openly celebrate a child being taken from their mother at a border crossing. You cannot tell your neighbors you enjoyed watching a disabled man get mocked by the most powerful person in the country.

Until you can.

Until someone gives you a context where that enjoyment is not just permitted but celebrated. Where the crowd around you is cheering the same thing you are cheering. Where the leader on the stage is performing the cruelty you came to see and calling it strength.

That is what Trump built. Not a political coalition. A permission structure.

Buckels and Paulhus found that everyday sadism is the single strongest predictor of internet trolling across all four Dark Tetrad traits. Not just arguing online. Actively seeking out the suffering of people they see as enemies and enjoying it. Putting in actual effort for the chance to watch someone hurt.

That finding explains everything the media keeps getting wrong about Trump rallies.

Political analysts spend enormous energy trying to understand why Trump supporters keep showing up. Why they donate. Why they spend hours online attacking strangers. Why they drive hours to stand in a field and scream. The answer the analysts keep reaching for is economic anxiety. Or cultural displacement. Or distrust of institutions.

The research says something simpler and far more uncomfortable.

They are paying for access to cruelty. And they keep showing up because he keeps delivering.

The research also found something that explains the intensity. Everyday sadism is the one Dark Tetrad trait that predicts willingness to work for the opportunity to hurt someone. Not just when it is easy. To put in actual effort. To sacrifice time and money and energy for the chance.

That is not a voter base. That is an audience. And Trump has always known the difference.

Every rally is a performance. Every enemy named from the podium is a gift to the crowd. Every promise of retribution is an appetizer. Every mock. Every insult. Every fantasy of violence directed at the right targets lands exactly the way it is designed to land. Not as a policy position. As a delivery.

And this reframes everything about the last decade of Republican governance.

The immigration policy that separates families is not a side effect of border security. The trans policy that humiliates children is not a side effect of protecting them. The attack on voting rights is not a side effect of election integrity. The suffering is not incidental to the policy. The suffering is the policy. The cruelty is not a bug. It is the product. It is what was ordered. It is what gets delivered. It is what brings people back.

This is why facts do not work on this movement. You cannot argue someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into. And you cannot appeal to empathy in people who are not experiencing the empathy deficit you think they have. They know families are being separated. They know trans kids are being targeted. They know protesters are being threatened.

That is not the problem. That is the point.

Trump has always known it. He has never pretended otherwise. From the first moment he rode down that escalator and called Mexicans rapists he was not making a policy argument. He was making a promise. He was telling a specific segment of the American population that he knew what they wanted. That he would give it to them. That under his leadership the cruelty they had always felt but never been permitted to perform would finally have a home.

He has kept that promise every single time he opens his mouth.

He knows exactly what they came for.

And he has never once failed to deliver it.

Sources

Buckels, E. E., Jones, D. N., and Paulhus, D. L. (2013). Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2201 to 2209.

Paulhus, D. L., and Williams, K. M. (2002). The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556 to 563.

Buckels, E. E., Trapnell, P. D., and Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Trolls Just Want to Have Fun. Personality and Individual Differences, 67, 97 to 102.

The United States government just published its official counterterrorism strategy.

Read that sentence again.

Not a tweet. Not a rally speech. Not a Truth Social post at 3am. The official 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy. Published by the White House in May 2026. A formal national security document that defines who this government considers its enemies.

It lists three major terror threats facing America.

Narcoterrorists and transnational gangs.

Legacy Islamist terrorists.

Violent left wing extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists.

Anti-fascists. In an official White House national security document. Alongside ISIS. Alongside narcoterrorists. Alongside al-Qaeda.

Now let me tell you who anti-fascists are.

Every soldier who stormed the beaches at Normandy was anti-fascist. Every man who parachuted behind enemy lines into occupied France to fight the Nazi regime was anti-fascist. Every American who died on a European battlefield between 1941 and 1945 was anti-fascist. Four hundred thousand of them. Dead. Fighting fascism. Because America looked at what fascism was doing to the world and decided it had to be stopped at any cost.

America did not just oppose fascism. America built its entire post-war identity on having defeated it. The Greatest Generation. The good war. The defining moral achievement of the twentieth century. We built monuments to it. We made movies about it. We taught it in every school in the country as the clearest example in modern history of good versus evil.

Trump just labeled every single one of those men a domestic terrorist.

That is not hyperbole. That is the logical conclusion of what was published. If opposing fascism makes you a terror threat then every Allied soldier who fought in World War II was a terror threat. Every resistance fighter who hid Jewish families in their attic. Every person who sabotaged Nazi supply lines. Every man who picked up a weapon and pointed it at the Third Reich.

Terrorists. All of them. By the definitions now encoded in an official document signed by the President of the United States.

And the document does not stop at classification.

It authorizes using the full counterterrorism apparatus of the United States government to map domestic groups and identify their members. The same surveillance tools built to track ISIS. The same financial disruption tools built to strangle terror networks. Now pointed at Americans whose crime is opposing the people in power.

This from the same administration that pardoned over 1600 January 6th insurrectionists. That called January 6th a beautiful day. That vacated the seditious conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders. That has never once used the word terrorist to describe the people who beat police officers with flagpoles, smeared feces on the walls of the Capitol, and tried to overturn a free and fair election.

Those people got pardons.

The people opposing fascism got put on the terrorism list alongside ISIS.

Let that land.

Here is what makes this moment so important to understand clearly. Antifa is not an organization. The FBI said so. The Congressional Research Service said so. There is no membership. No leadership. No headquarters. No structure. No dues. No meetings. Antifa means anti-fascist. You cannot join it. You cannot leave it. You cannot be a card carrying member of an ideology.

Which means the government gets to decide who qualifies.

That is not an accident. The vagueness is the weapon. When the definition is broad enough to mean anything it can be applied to anyone. A content creator who makes videos criticizing the administration. A teacher who assigns books about World War II. A donor who gives money to a civil liberties organization. A protester who shows up with a sign.

None of them have to be violent. None of them have to belong to anything. They just have to be visible and opposed.

Robert Jay Lifton at Harvard Medical School spent decades studying authoritarian consolidations of power. He studied Nazi Germany. Stalinist Russia. Maoist China. Every single one. And across all of them he identified the same sequence. It never changes. You do not just build loyalty among your followers. You criminalize your opposition. You redefine dissent as a national security threat. You build the legal architecture to surveil, investigate, and silence anyone who stands against you. And you do it gradually enough that by the time most people realize what is happening the exits are already closing.

That document is the architecture.

This is not counterterrorism. Counterterrorism targets people planning violence. This targets people holding an ideology. The ideology of opposing fascism. The ideology that won World War II. The ideology that is older than the United States itself.

That is fascism protecting itself from being called fascism.

Edmund Burke’s most famous quote was probably never actually said by him. But whoever said it was right. The world needs bystanders for evil to win.

They pardoned the insurrectionists.

They criminalized being anti-fascist.

History is not being subtle right now about what comes next.

Don’t be a bystander.

Sources

United States Counterterrorism Strategy. The White House. whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-USCT-Strategy-1.pdf

Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. W. W. Norton and Company.

Brennan Center for Justice. (2025). Trump’s Orders Targeting Anti-Fascism Aim to Criminalize Opposition. brennancenter.org.

Congressional Research Service and former FBI Director Chris Wray statements on antifa as a decentralized movement without formal membership or leadership structure. Cited in Wikipedia. Antifa United States. Retrieved May 2026.

International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. (2025). It Can’t Happen Here? Designating Antifa as a Terrorist Organisation in Europe. icct.nl.

Why the Right Cannot Tell the Difference Between Facts and Lies

There is a reason conservatives believe in things that are not true. It is not just stubbornness. It is not just Fox News. There is a psychological structure underneath it that explains everything. And once you see it you cannot unsee it.

In 2024, three researchers at the University of Limerick published a study in the British Journal of Social Psychology. Adrian Lüders, Dino Carpentras, and Michael Quayle mapped out the actual beliefs of Republicans and Democrats across 40 political topics using a technique called Response Item Network analysis. Their goal was simple. They wanted to see if there was a real measurable difference in how each side thinks.

What they found was striking.

Republicans showed significantly more variety in their political opinions than Democrats. On the surface that sounds like a good thing. More variety. More independent thinking. More diversity of thought.

Conservatives have been making exactly that argument for years.

But the researchers called this attitude network density.

And when you look at what was actually inside that Republican belief network the picture changes completely.

That variety was not made up of well reasoned independent ideas built on evidence.

It was made up of things with zero scientific basis. Climate denial. Flat Earth theory. Vaccine conspiracies. Stolen election lies. Bigfoot. The Loch Ness monster.

When you have no standard for what counts as a valid belief, when proof is not required to let an idea into your head, of course you end up with more variety.

Anyone can collect an unlimited number of things if they never throw anything out.

Democrats showed fewer, tighter opinions. And the reason is not groupthink. The reason is that facts converge.

When you follow real science and real peer reviewed evidence you stop believing in things that cannot be proven.

The scientific method does not give you a hundred different answers. It gives you one.

And you can test it, replicate it, and verify it over and over again until there is no reasonable doubt left.

This is the core difference between the two belief systems. One has standards for what gets in. The other does not.

Can this studies headline be any more misleading??

And this difference does not just affect how people think. It affects whether people live or die.

In 2022, researchers Jacob Wallace, Jason Schwartz, and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham at Yale University tracked excess death rates for Republican and Democratic voters in Ohio and Florida throughout the COVID pandemic. What they found was devastating. After vaccines became widely available in 2021, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters. Before vaccines were available the gap was almost nonexistent. The moment a life saving tool based on real science became available, the belief system gap turned into a body count gap.

Conservatives did not get vaccinated because their belief system told them not to trust the science. And they died for it at a 43% higher rate than Democrats. This is what happens when a belief system has no standards for what is allowed in. It does not just make you look stupid. It kills you.

This is exactly why logic does not work on conservatives. When you try to debate someone whose belief system has no requirements for evidence you are not having an argument about ideas. You are debating a person who decided that proof does not matter. You show them data. They call it fake. You show them peer reviewed science. They call it a conspiracy. You show them video. They say it was staged.

Nothing gets through because nothing is required to get in.

The most stunning example of this happened in real time. When Artemis II launched, a significant portion of the right denied it was real while it was happening live on television. Not after. Not later when they had time to construct a theory. In real time. While the world watched. They were rejecting empirical reality as it unfolded in front of their eyes.

That is not skepticism. That is a broken relationship with truth.

Every climate denier. Every stolen election lie. Every vaccine conspiracy. Every Flat Earther. They all share the same root cause. A belief system with no filter. No standards. No requirement for evidence. A system that lets absolutely anything in as long as it feels right or confirms what they already want to believe.

Here is the part they will hate.

Republicans do have more diversity of thought. In the same way that a dumpster has more diversity of content than a refrigerator. One of them has standards for what gets in. The other one just collects garbage.

So yes. Republicans do have more diversity of thought.

In the same way that a dumpster has more diversity of content than a refrigerator.

One of them has standards for what gets in.

The other one just collects garbage.

Sources

Lüders, A., Carpentras, D., and Quayle, M. (2024). Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network modelling to research attitude identity relationships in polarized political contexts. British Journal of Social Psychology, 63(1), 37-51. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12665

Wallace, J., Schwartz, J.L., and Goldsmith-Pinkham, P. (2022). Excess death rates for Republican and Democratic registered voters in Florida and Ohio during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAMA Internal Medicine. https://tobin.yale.edu/research/excess-death-rates-republicans-and-democrats-during-covid-19-pandemic

You want to debate me? You can’t spell the subjects you’re wrong about. You don’t even know the names of the scientists you’re dismissing. You’ve never read the studies you’re rejecting.

And I know. Spelling is hard for you.

No. I will not debate you. I will not talk to you. I will not argue with you about what the facts are. The facts were settled before you showed up. By scientists. By doctors. By people who gave decades of their lives to actually understanding something. That conversation is over. You missed it. You were not qualified to be in it.

You did not discover the truth in a Facebook group. Your crazy uncle’s YouTube channel did not crack what every research institution on earth somehow missed. You are not smart. You have never been smart about this. And everyone in your life who actually respects science already knows it.

If you want to play independent researcher you should probably learn what research actually is first. Because googling until you find a result that agrees with you is not research. That is confirmation bias with a wifi connection.

In 1999, psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning at Cornell University published a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” They called it the Dunning-Kruger effect. People who know the least about a subject consistently believe they know the most. Participants who scored in the bottom 12th percentile on logic and reasoning believed they were performing in the 62nd percentile. Not because they were lying. Because the skills required to recognize your own incompetence are the exact same skills you are missing.

Some people are too stupid to know they are stupid.

That is not a burn. That is a peer reviewed scientific finding. And it is you. Documented. Published. Cited hundreds of times in academic literature. You are a case study.

Being anti-science is not edgy. It is not brave. It is not independent thinking. It is embarrassing. It was embarrassing when people thought the sun orbited the earth. It was embarrassing when doctors thought washing hands was unnecessary. Every single time in human history that someone decided feelings were more reliable than evidence they were wrong and they looked like idiots to every generation that came after them.

That is you right now. In real time. Looking like an idiot.

The schoolyard bully who pushed people around because they had nothing else going for them went out with the 1980s. Demanding debates you have no business being in is that exact same energy. Trying to feel powerful by intimidating people who are smarter than you. It did not work then. It does not work now. And everyone watching can see exactly what it is.

And here is the thing nobody says out loud. The moment I agree to debate you I have told the world that your misinformation deserves to share a stage with facts. That propaganda belongs in the same conversation as truth. That what you read in a Facebook group is on the same level as what scientists spent decades proving in a laboratory.

It is not. It never will be.

Debating you does not make me open minded. It makes me complicit in the lie. It tells every person watching that there are two sides to facts. There are not two sides to facts. There is the truth and there is the garbage you were fed by people who needed you stupid and angry. Those are not the same thing. They will never be the same thing. And I will not stand across from you and pretend otherwise.

You are not a debate partner. You are a vector for misinformation. And I will not legitimize you.

Here is what happens every single time we corner you with facts. When the evidence is airtight. When you have no way out of being wrong. You shout fake news. You say we have Trump Derangement Syndrome. You say the moon landing was faked. You change the subject. You get louder.

You do not update. You do not concede. You just move the goalpost and keep screaming.

That is not someone searching for truth. That is someone who decided the answer before they asked the question and will burn the whole conversation down before admitting they were wrong.

To debate any expert you have to agree to one thing first. That facts are the standard. Not feelings. Not what resonates with you. Not what your gut says. Facts. Verifiable. Reproducible. The rest of society has already agreed to this. You have not. Which means there is no debate. There is just you, wrong, demanding an audience for it.

Someone convinced you that being a mediocre person who outsources their thinking and calls it courage is something to be proud of. It is not. You got played. You got made into a product. You got handed conclusions and told they were your own. And the most brutal part is that the Dunning-Kruger effect makes it almost impossible to see it from where you are standing.

You are not a researcher. You are not a rebel. You are not the person who figured out what everyone else missed.

You are a loser who got played.

And I will not be debating you about it.

Sources

Kruger, J., and Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121 to 1134.

Motta, M., Callaghan, T., and Sylvester, S. (2018). Knowing Less but Presuming More: Dunning-Kruger Effects and the Endorsement of Anti-Vaccine Policy Attitudes. Social Science and Medicine, 211, 274 to 281.

Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning-Kruger Effect: On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 247 to 296.

WHY TRUMP SUPPORTERS LOSE THEIR MIND WHEN YOU CRITICIZE HIM

You ever notice how the second you criticize Trump his supporters don’t just disagree with you. They act like you personally attacked them. Their voice changes. They get defensive. They get angry. Like you just insulted their mother.

There is a psychological reason for that. And it explains everything.

THE RESEARCH

In 2009 psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala at Goldsmiths University of London published a landmark study on what she called collective narcissism.

What she found was wild.

Collective narcissism is the belief that your group is exceptional and uniquely superior. And that the rest of the world constantly fails to recognize it.

Here is the key difference between regular narcissism and collective narcissism. Regular narcissism is about you. Collective narcissism is about your group. When your identity is fused with the group, any criticism of the group feels like a direct attack on you personally. Your brain cannot tell the difference.

Golec de Zavala found that collective narcissists share three consistent traits across every culture and political system she studied.

They are hypersensitive to any criticism of their group. They are convinced their group is under constant attack from outsiders. And they respond to perceived threats with disproportionate aggression.

Sound familiar.

HOW TRUMP WEAPONIZED IT

Trump did not create collective narcissism in his followers. He weaponized it.

Make America Great Again is not a policy platform. It is a collective narcissism trigger. It tells millions of people that their group was once great. That outsiders took that greatness away. And that only one man can restore the status they deserve.

Every rally. Every speech. Every post. Feeds the same psychological hunger. We are exceptional. We are under attack. They are the enemy.

This is not accidental. Every authoritarian movement in modern history has used the same mechanism. Golec de Zavala documented it across dozens of countries and political systems. The trigger is always the same. The group was great. The group was robbed. The group needs a savior.

Trump just had the infrastructure, the platform, and the shamelessness to deploy it at a scale nobody had seen in American politics before.

THE MECHANISM IN PRACTICE

Here is what collective narcissism looks like in real time.

When you say Trump lied, his supporters don’t hear a fact. They hear you saying their group is stupid for believing him. When you say his policies hurt people, they don’t hear concern. They hear you saying their group is cruel. When you say he lost the election, they don’t hear a result. They hear you saying their group is losing.

Every criticism of Trump is processed as an existential attack on their identity. And the brain responds to existential attacks the same way it responds to physical danger. With aggression. With denial. With the urgent need to destroy the threat.

This is why facts don’t work. This is why evidence doesn’t work. This is why showing them video of something Trump said and did doesn’t work. You are not in an argument about facts. You are in a threat response loop. And threat response loops don’t respond to information. They respond to the removal of the threat.

Which is why they need you to shut up. Not because you’re wrong. Because you’re dangerous to the only thing that makes them feel significant.

THE PART THAT SHOULD TERRIFY YOU

Golec de Zavala found that collective narcissism is one of the strongest predictors of support for authoritarian leaders ever documented in political psychology research.

Not economic anxiety. Not education level. Not religion. Not geographic location.

Collective narcissism.

People who score high on collective narcissism are more likely to support leaders who promise to restore group greatness. More likely to tolerate the erosion of democratic norms if it protects the group. More likely to accept violence against outsiders. And more likely to stay loyal no matter what the leader does because leaving the leader means abandoning the group. And abandoning the group means losing the only source of significance they have.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. Golec de Zavala’s research showed collective narcissism exists across the political spectrum. But it is disproportionately activated by leaders who explicitly position themselves as saviors of a threatened group.

Trump has done nothing else for ten years.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE REST OF US

Understanding collective narcissism doesn’t mean having sympathy for people who use it as a justification for cruelty. It means understanding what you are actually dealing with.

You are not going to argue these people out of their position. You are not going to show them enough evidence. You are not going to find the magic fact that breaks through. Because the belief is not based on facts. It is based on identity. And identity doesn’t update the way beliefs do.

What actually works, according to Golec de Zavala’s research, is reducing the perceived threat to the group. When people feel less existentially threatened they become less aggressive and more open to information. But in an environment where a leader is deliberately and constantly amplifying threat perception, that is nearly impossible to achieve.

Which is exactly why Trump keeps doing it.

Every day. Every post. Every rally.

The threat has to stay alive. Because the moment the threat disappears the movement disappears with it.

And Trump knows that better than anyone.

So the next time a Trump supporter screams in your face because you criticized a politician, understand what you are actually looking at.

You did not offend them. You threatened the only thing that makes them feel significant.

Their membership in the group.

And that is the whole game.

SOURCES

Golec de Zavala, A., Cichocka, A., Eidelson, R., & Jayawickreme, N. (2009). Collective narcissism and its social consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 1074-1096.

Golec de Zavala, A. (2019). Collective narcissism and in-group satisfaction are associated with different emotional profiles and psychological wellbeing. Frontiers in Psychology.

Golec de Zavala, A., & Cichocka, A. (2012). Collective narcissism and anti-Semitism in Poland. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 15(2), 213-229.

HOW DONALD TRUMP’S FATHER BROKE HIM

Most people look at Donald Trump and see a political figure. A controversial president. A convicted felon. A man who inspires either devotion or disgust depending on who you ask.

What they don’t see is the child underneath all of it.

In 2020 Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and Donald Trump’s niece, published a book called Too Much and Never Enough. She called her uncle the world’s most dangerous man and traced exactly how he became that way. Donald sued her for 100 million dollars to stop the book from being published. A judge blocked it temporarily. An appeals court overruled the judge. The book sold nearly one million copies on its first day.

What Mary Trump documented is not a political story. It is a psychological one. And the research backs up everything she said.

Here are the five things that built Donald Trump.

1. THE MOTHER WHO DISAPPEARED

Donald Trump was two years old when his mother Mary Anne was hospitalized following a series of serious operations. She nearly died. And when she came back she was never really there again.

Mary Trump described her grandmother as ghostly and emotionally absent for most of Donald’s childhood. A woman who attended to her children when it was convenient for her and not when they needed her. Fred Trump, Donald’s father, had no interest in emotional caregiving. Mary Trump described him as a high-functioning sociopath who seemed to have no emotional needs at all.

So at two years old, at the exact moment the human brain is forming its first understanding of what other people are and whether they can be trusted, Donald Trump had nobody.

Psychologist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute in London spent decades studying what happens to children when the primary caregiver disappears during the first two years of life. His landmark 1951 research identified what he called maternal deprivation. The complete failure of the attachment bond at the exact moment the brain is learning whether other people’s pain matters.

Bowlby found that children who experience maternal deprivation before age two develop what he called affectionless psychopathy. The permanent inability to feel remorse. The permanent inability to feel empathy. The permanent inability to form genuine emotional bonds with other human beings.

This is not a metaphor. This is a neurological finding. The brain develops its capacity for empathy through early attachment. When that attachment fails the capacity simply does not develop the way it should.

Mary Trump argues her uncle has never watched another human being suffer and felt anything. Not the disabled reporter he mocked on national television. Not the families separated at the border. Not the people dying because they lost their healthcare.

Bowlby’s research published in 1951 explains exactly why. The person who was supposed to show Donald Trump that other people matter was not there. She was in a hospital. And when she came back she was somewhere else entirely.

That absence shaped everything that came after.

2. THE BROTHER HIS FATHER DESTROYED IN FRONT OF HIM EVERY DAY

Donald Trump’s father Fred had five children. Three sons and two daughters. Of the three sons, one was chosen to worship, one was chosen to destroy, and one was neglected into invisibility.

Freddy was the firstborn son. By every account from people who knew him, Freddy was kind. He was funny. He loved people. He loved flying and became a commercial airline pilot, one of the most demanding and skilled professions in the world.

Fred Trump called him weak every single day.

He mocked Freddy at the dinner table in front of the whole family. When Freddy apologized Fred mocked the apology too, repeating it back in a sneer. Fred wanted a killer. Freddy was a human being. And Fred destroyed him for it.

Mary Trump, Freddy’s own daughter, documented what her grandfather did to her father in clinical terms. She wrote that Fred dismantled Freddy by devaluing and degrading every aspect of his personality until all that was left was a man who hated himself and spent every day trying to earn the approval of a father who would never give it.

Freddy became an alcoholic. He lost his pilot’s license. He gave up the career he loved. He ended up doing maintenance work for the family real estate business, the lowest position available, while his younger brother Donald built skyscrapers in Manhattan. He died at 42. Broken. Invisible. Alone.

When Freddy was dying in that hospital, Donald went to the movies.

Mary Trump wrote it plainly in her book. As her father lay dying alone, Donald went to the movies.

Freddy was the only person in that family who ever made his daughter Mary feel loved. Fred Trump destroyed the kindest person in the family and made Donald watch every single day for years.

The lesson was delivered clearly and repeatedly. This is what happens to weak people. This is what sensitivity gets you. This is what happens when you feel things.

Donald received it completely.

3. THE MOMENT DONALD CHOSE TO BECOME HIS FATHER

Watching was not enough for Fred. He needed Donald to participate.

Mary Trump documented that Donald began mocking Freddy alongside his father. He learned to sneer at his brother’s sensitivity. He learned to call Freddy weak. He learned to degrade him in front of the family the same way Fred did. He chose his father’s side completely and permanently.

Anna Freud, one of the most important psychologists of the twentieth century and the founder of child psychology as a clinical discipline, identified the mechanism that produces this exact behavior in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.

She called it identification with the aggressor.

When a child cannot escape an abuser and cannot defeat them, the brain chooses a third option. Become the abuser. Adopt their cruelty. Perform their values. Make yourself indistinguishable from the thing that terrifies you. If you become the aggressor nobody can use the aggressor’s tactics against you.

Anna Freud found that this is not a conscious choice. The child’s brain makes it automatically as a survival strategy. It is the psychological equivalent of if you can’t beat them join them, except the stakes are the child’s entire emotional development.

The price of that survival is the permanent suppression of empathy, vulnerability, and genuine connection. You become safe. But you are no longer fully human.

Mary Trump described what this cost Donald in clinical terms. She wrote that Fred short-circuited Donald’s ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion. By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it.

She wrote that her uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth. What mattered in the Trump family was wielding power and making money. Empathy had no value or upside. It got you destroyed like Freddy.

So Donald learned not to feel it.

He didn’t lose his humanity. His father took it.

4. MALIGNANT NARCISSISM

In 1964 psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm identified what he called the most severe personality pathology in clinical history.

He called it malignant narcissism. The combination of four traits that together produce what Fromm described as the purest form of evil a human being can become. Narcissism. Paranoia. Antisocial personality disorder. And sadism.

Fromm said malignant narcissism represented the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity that psychology had ever documented. Not ordinary cruelty. Cruelty that feeds on itself. That needs to escalate. That is never satisfied. Fromm wrote about this pattern in the context of studying Adolf Hitler and other authoritarian leaders. He was describing what happens when a person’s psychology becomes organized entirely around domination and the destruction of others.

This is what it looks like in practice.

Trump has mocked a Gold Star family on national television and laughed. He told Megyn Kelly she had “blood coming out of her wherever” after she questioned him about his treatment of women. He tweeted that Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift.” He called a Gold Star widow who had just buried her husband, fumbled her husband’s name, and told her he knew what he signed up for. She said it made her cry even worse.

In my opinion those are not political acts. Those are the acts of someone who experiences other people’s pain as entertainment.

John Gartner, a psychologist who taught at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years, applied Fromm’s concept of malignant narcissism to Donald Trump specifically. He called it the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible in a leader. Gartner was so alarmed that he founded a organization called Duty to Warn, dedicated to alerting the public to the psychological dangers of Trump’s presidency.

In 2017 twenty-seven psychiatrists and mental health experts published a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, edited by Bandy X. Lee of Yale School of Medicine. They argued their professional duty to warn the public superseded the Goldwater Rule prohibiting diagnosis of public figures. They put it on the record collectively and publicly.

Mary Trump, who sat across the dinner table from Donald for decades and holds a PhD in clinical psychology, said he meets all nine DSM criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She said he will never change. She said the damage was done too early and too completely.

She wrote that Donald continues to exist as he was at three years old. Incapable of growing. Incapable of learning. Unable to regulate his emotions or take in new information.

And the country gave that three year old the most powerful office in the world.

5. WHY HE NEEDS THE CHAOS

Trump’s presidency has been defined by one thing above everything else. Chaos. Daily explosions. Constant firings. Threats in every direction. Reversals that make no sense. A government that lurches from crisis to crisis without ever stopping.

Mary Trump argues this is not incompetence. It is familiarity. Chaos is the only environment her uncle has ever felt safe in.

Sigmund Freud identified this pattern over a century ago in his 1920 paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He called it repetition compulsion. The unconscious drive to recreate the conditions of your original trauma. Not because you want to suffer. Because familiar pain feels safer than unfamiliar calm. The brain returns to what it knows even when what it knows is destructive.

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades expanding Freud’s work with neurological research on trauma survivors. His landmark 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score documented what happens to people who grow up in chaotic households. They don’t just tolerate chaos as adults. They recreate it. Because calm feels wrong. Calm feels like the moment before something bad happens. Chaos feels like home.

Van der Kolk found that traumatized people are drawn to situations and relationships that replicate their original wound. Not because they consciously choose this. Because their nervous system has been calibrated to that level of stimulation and anything below it feels wrong.

Donald Trump grew up in a house where his father destroyed people. Where nothing was safe. Where love was withheld and cruelty was the only currency that mattered. That was his normal from the day he was born.

So when he got power he recreated it. The daily explosions. The firings. The threats. The reversals. The cruelty aimed in every direction at once.

Van der Kolk’s research suggests this is not strategy. This is not incompetence. Trump recreates chaos because chaos is the only thing that has ever felt like home. And now the entire country lives inside it.

WHAT THIS MEANS

This is what happens when you emotionally destroy someone at a young age.

A mother who vanished at the exact moment the brain learns whether other people matter. A father who tortured his oldest son in front of his younger one every single day. A younger son who watched that torture and chose to become the torturer. A clinical diagnosis that twenty-seven psychiatrists put on the record because they said the public deserved to know. And a man so traumatized by his own childhood that he needs the entire country to live inside it with him.

Mary Trump documented all of it. She watched it happen from the inside. She said her uncle will never change. Not because change is impossible for human beings. Because the damage was done before he had words for what was happening to him.

Freddy paid for it with his life. Donald paid for it with his humanity.

And the rest of us are paying for it now.

SOURCES

Trump, M.L. (2020). Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Simon and Schuster.

Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal Care and Mental Health. World Health Organization.

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

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Hogarth Press.

Fromm, E. (1964). The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. Harper and Row.

Gartner, J. (2017). Duty to Warn. Psychology Today.

Lee, B.X. (Ed.) (2017). The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Thomas Dunne Books.

Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. International Psycho-Analytical Press.

Here it is:

You have heard it so many times it barely registers anymore.

Election fraud. The deep state. Grooming children. Weaponizing the government. Burying the truth. Every week a new outrage. Every week a new enemy. Every week the same people screaming about the same crimes they are actively committing.

This is not a coincidence. There is a specific psychological mechanism behind it. And once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Sigmund Freud identified it over a century ago. He called it projection. His theory was straightforward: when people cannot tolerate their own guilt, their mind transfers it outward. They do not see the flaw in themselves. They see it in everyone around them. The shame gets redirected before it can be felt.

Freud’s framework was theoretical. But in 1997, psychologists Leonard Newman, Judith Duff, and Roy Baumeister put it in the lab and confirmed it. Their research showed that when people actively suppress thoughts about their own undesirable traits, those traits become more mentally accessible, not less. The harder you try to push the guilt down, the louder it gets. And the brain resolves that tension by attributing the trait to someone else. You do not bury the guilt. You relocate it.

That is the unconscious version. The version where the person genuinely does not know they are doing it.

But there is another version. And MAGA has been running it for a decade.

Some people project on purpose. They accuse you first so that when the truth comes out, it looks like retaliation. It is a preemptive strike dressed up as moral outrage. By the time the evidence surfaces, the accusation has already poisoned the well. Anyone pointing at the truth looks like they are playing politics.

Trump perfected this.

He screamed election fraud for four years. He is the man on the recorded phone call demanding Georgia officials find him 11,780 votes.

They screamed about the deep state weaponizing the government against political enemies. Trump is currently using the Justice Department to prosecute his personal enemies list.

They screamed about the Epstein files and demanded full transparency. Trump has been slow walking and burying those same files since day one.

They screamed about Iran. Trump bombed Iran without congressional approval and called anyone who questioned it a traitor.

Look at the pattern. Every single accusation maps directly onto something they were already doing or planning to do. This is not hypocrisy in the casual sense. This is projection deployed as strategy. Accuse the other side of the crime you are committing. Make the accusation loud enough and often enough that when the evidence surfaces, half the country is already confused about who the real criminal is.

It works because of how projection functions psychologically. Newman, Duff, and Baumeister’s research tells us the brain is already primed to see its own suppressed traits in others. When a movement is built around people who cannot tolerate accountability, projection becomes the default response to everything. They are not lying in the way a calculated deceiver lies. Many of them genuinely believe it. The guilt is real. The redirection is automatic. And the result is a base that will follow the accusation wherever it leads because the accusation feels true from the inside.

The louder the outrage, the guiltier they are.

And when you point it out, they do not admit it. They escalate. Fake news. Witch hunt. Deep state. Because admitting guilt would require accountability they do not have. So they project harder. They scream louder. They find a new enemy to absorb the shame that was never going to stay buried.

They have been telling you exactly what they are guilty of for years.

Every accusation is a confession.

You just have to know how to read it.

Sources

Newman, L. S., Duff, K. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). A new look at defensive projection: Thought suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(5), 980--1001.

Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 3, pp. 41--61). Hogarth Press.

Think about the best good cop bad cop routine ever pulled off in American politics.

One party found a way to never be responsible for anything. Ever. Children dying in classrooms? Not their problem. That is between you and God. Climate destroying the planet? God is in control. Twenty million people without healthcare? We will pray for them. God will sort it out.

They put God in the bad cop chair. And walked out of the room.

It is the most effective accountability dodge in the history of politics. You cannot subpoena God. You cannot vote him out. You cannot hold him responsible at the midterms. And the moment a politician hands your suffering over to God, they are done. They already responded. They prayed. What more do you want from them.

This is not faith. This is a strategy.

And here is the research that explains why it works so well on the people who believe it.

In 2008, psychologists Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky at the University of Texas at Austin published a landmark study in the journal Science. They found that when people feel a lack of control over their circumstances, their brains compensate by reaching for patterns, rituals, and symbolic gestures that restore the feeling of order. The less control people feel, the more they lean on magical thinking. Not because they are stupid. Because that is what human brains do under pressure.

Prayer is magical thinking. It is a ritual that creates the sensation of having acted without requiring action. And for people who feel powerless, that sensation is genuinely comforting.

Conservative politicians know this. They have built an entire platform around it.

The genius of the God as bad cop move is that it works on two levels at once. For the politician, it is a clean exit from accountability. For the voter, it is a genuine comfort. The voter feels heard. They feel like something spiritual has been set in motion. The research tells us that is enough. The brain registers the ritual as a response and moves on.

Which is exactly what the politician is counting on.

Prayer did not pass gun legislation. Prayer did not lower insulin prices. Prayer did not house a single homeless veteran. But it felt like something. And in the framework they have built, feeling like something is the entire point. Once God has been handed the problem, the human beings with actual power to pass laws and allocate resources are off the hook. Permanently. Because if God wanted it fixed, God would fix it. And if it is not fixed, that is God’s will. Not their failure.

There is something worth saying about the religion they claim to follow.

Jesus did not pray for the sick. He physically healed them. Jesus did not pray for the hungry. He fed them. The entire moral architecture of the New Testament is built on direct action. Seeing suffering and doing something about it with your hands, your resources, and your presence.

What American conservative politics did was take that religion and hollow it out. They kept the aesthetic. The crosses. The prayers. The language of faith. And they replaced the action with a feeling. Then they called it Christianity.

They are not praying for you. They are praying instead of helping you. And they put God in the room so you would not notice the difference.

The bad cop never has to show up. The good cop never has to do anything. And the problem never gets solved.

That is the whole play. And it has been working for decades.

Sources

Whitson, J. A., & Galinsky, A. D. (2008). Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. Science, 322(5898), 115--118.

Alcock, J. E. (2018). Belief: What it means to believe and why our convictions are so compelling. Prometheus Books.

You’ve seen it a thousand times.

Someone spends years saying the most vicious things imaginable. Calling people groomers. Threatening civil war. Celebrating cruelty. And the moment you push back, even once, they collapse into victimhood. Suddenly you’re the problem. Suddenly you’re uncivil. Suddenly you’re the one who needs to calm down.

This isn’t random. It isn’t hypocrisy in the casual sense. There is a specific psychological mechanism at work, and researchers have been studying it for decades.

Psychologists Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno at Northeastern University ran a series of experiments examining how people judge the exact same behavior depending on who commits it. Their findings were stark. People consistently rated identical actions as fair and acceptable when performed by someone in their own group and unfair and unacceptable when performed by someone outside it. Same behavior. Completely different moral judgment. They called this moral hypocrisy.

What makes this relevant to American politics right now is the scale at which it has been weaponized.

Donald Trump didn’t invent moral hypocrisy. But he industrialized it. He spent a decade modeling a specific behavior pattern: say whatever you want, no matter how cruel or dishonest, and then play victim the moment anyone responds in kind. Call a federal judge a Mexican. Mock a prisoner of war. Threaten prosecutors. Celebrate political violence. And when someone pushes back, even politely, perform outrage. Demand civility. Ask why the left is so angry.

His followers learned the pattern by watching it work.

This is how moral hypocrisy functions at the group level. The leader models the behavior. The followers adopt it. And because their moral judgment is filtered through ingroup loyalty, they genuinely do not see the double standard. They are not pretending. The research shows that people applying moral hypocrisy often believe they are being entirely consistent. The bias is invisible to the person holding it.

That invisibility is the point.

When your silence is manufactured by their behavior, they win without a fight. They celebrated a man being deported to a foreign prison without a trial. They defended a killing in the streets because he should have just complied. They cheered the dismantling of institutions they once claimed to revere. And every time a reasonable person stayed quiet to keep the peace, that silence was taken as permission to go further.

Here is what moral hypocrisy research also tells us: the double standard only survives when it goes unchallenged. Valdesolo and DeSteno found that when people were forced to consciously compare their judgment of ingroup behavior to outgroup behavior side by side, the bias weakened. Exposure disrupts it. Naming it disrupts it.

So name it.

When someone performs outrage at your pushback after years of their own cruelty, you are not obligated to apologize. You are not obligated to lower your voice. What you are watching is moral hypocrisy in real time, a person applying one standard to themselves and another to you, and genuinely believing that is fair.

It is not fair. And you do not have to pretend that it is.

The rules were never suspended for them. They just acted like they were. And enough good people went along with it long enough that it started to feel normal.

It is not normal. And the fact that they are melting down right now is not evidence that you went too far.

It is evidence that you finally pushed back.

Sources

Valdesolo, P., & DeSteno, D. (2007). Moral hypocrisy: Social groups and the flexibility of virtue. Psychological Science, 18(8), 689–690.

Robertson, C. E., Akles, M., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2024). Preregistered replication and extension of “Moral hypocrisy: Social groups and the flexibility of virtue.” Psychological Science, 35(7), 798.

Association for Psychological Science. (2024). Making sense of moral hypocrisy. APS Observer.