The Performance of Potency
Trickster License, Masculine Display, and the Politics of Sexual Simplification in the Public Persona of Donald Trump
An interpretive essay. October 2026.
This essay argues that Donald Trump’s public persona can be read as a trickster who claims for himself a license he denies to everyone else. He crosses every boundary of decorum, assumes any costume of power, and treats ordinary constraints as not applying to him. Yet he insists, and now enforces through the machinery of government, that other people’s sex, gender, and sexuality remain fixed and simple. The argument can be stated simply: I may become anything; you must remain what you were assigned.
The essay’s deeper concern is less Trump’s sexuality than what happens when a public performance organized around domination and the display of masculine potency acquires the institutional power to impose its preferred classifications on others. Psychoanalysis offers hypotheses about how such a performance might be organized. Anthropology offers tools for reading its symbols and rituals. Political analysis asks what it does once it governs, and in particular what it does to a democracy whose people are among the most varied in the world, and whose founding promise is that all of them are owed equal dignity.
These approaches do different kinds of work, and they must be kept apart. The psychoanalytic and anthropological readings propose possible meanings for the performance: how it might be organized and what its symbols might express. The status analysis examines what the performance accomplishes once it is joined to governmental authority: whose standing is raised, whose is lowered, and by what means. The second does not require the first to be true. Resemblance between a psychological pattern and a set of policies does not show that the pattern caused the policies, and no such claim is made here. If every psychoanalytic hypothesis offered here proved mistaken, the political argument of the later sections would stand.
A discipline governs everything that follows. Three levels of claim are kept distinct:
• What the record shows. Posts, images, speeches, executive orders, and documented remarks, each tied in the notes to a dated source.
• What theory proposes. Interpretations drawn from Freud, Kernberg, Kohut, Sedgwick, Douglas, and Theweleit, and analyses framed in descriptive psychological terms. These are offered as hypotheses about how the observable pattern might be organized. They are not established facts about anyone’s inner life.
• What cannot be known from here. Trump’s sexual orientation, private fantasies, neurological condition, and clinical diagnosis. The essay makes no claims about any of these.
Two cautions are stated once here and not repeated at each turn. First, the persona is co-produced. Reporting in May 2026 indicated that much of the high-volume late-night Truth Social output is curated and posted by an aide, Natalie Harp, with Trump’s approval.1 What we read is a staged mythology, not a diary. But the images and stories a political court chooses to circulate, and its sovereign permits, reveal something about the public identity being cultivated. Second, the familiar move that equates hostility toward sexual minorities with concealed homosexuality is unfalsifiable, and it reproduces the stigma it claims to expose. This essay rejects it. Its claims concern the public organization of status, desire, identification, and display, which is observable, rather than a private sexual identity, which is not.
Volume and the night. A Financial Times analysis reported in May 2026 found that the account had posted more than 2,700 times that year, averaging about 19 posts a day, with nearly half carrying images or video.2 A Wall Street Journal analysis published the same month counted 44 bursts of a dozen or more posts between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. since January 2025. These included one evening with 55 posts between 10:14 p.m. and 1:12 a.m., and a night in December 2025 with nearly 160 posts before midnight.3 The bursts consist largely of reposts. Recurrent themes include the 2020 election, calls to arrest Barack Obama, and self-glorifying imagery.
The AI self-images. On October 18, 2025, the day of the nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself, crowned, flying a jet labeled “KING TRUMP” and dumping what appears to be excrement on protesters.4 Images posted in 2026 include:
• Trump as Jesus healing the sick (April)2
• launching missiles at the Earth from space (May 17)2
• walking beside a handcuffed alien (May 17)5
• in a single burst on August 1: kissing a golden statue of Christ; his face fused with George Washington’s; his head looming over Greenland; and an image of himself with his son Barron, presented as a younger version of himself, alongside a post claiming he ages “in reverse”6
• seated across from a young self in military dress uniform, captioned “Same Guy” (early August)7
• commanding giant war robots (Labor Day weekend)8
The official White House account posted a video of him as the comic-book hero Green Lantern on September 6–7.9
Women and “the look.” Trump repeatedly remarked publicly on the appearance of his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who left the post in August 2026. He praised her “lips” as moving “like a machine gun” in an August 2025 interview, aboard Air Force One on October 13, 2025, and at a December 9, 2025 rally in Pennsylvania.10 Journalists and surgeons have described a “Mar-a-Lago face” among women in his orbit: a conspicuously worked-on, youthful, immobile look that many observers read as a signal of belonging.11
Transgender policy. Within his first two weeks in office, Trump signed:
• Executive Order 14168 (January 20, 2025), which states: “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female”
• Executive Order 14183 (January 27, 2025), which declares that a gender identity diverging from a person’s sex “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service”
• Executive Order 14187 (January 28, 2025), restricting gender-related medical care for minors
Further orders followed on schools and sports.12 He had promised to end “transgender lunacy” on “day one.”13
Hegseth. At Quantico on September 30, 2025, the newly retitled “Secretary of War” spoke to several hundred generals and admirals. He announced a “warrior ethos,” directed that combat roles return to the “highest male standard,” claimed without evidence that standards had been “manipulated to hit racial quotas,” and denounced “fat generals and admirals” and “dudes in dresses.”14 He has since posted frequent workout videos with service members. Fitness experts consulted by The Atlantic criticized the form.15
The strongmen. Trump has praised Vladimir Putin’s strength since at least his first campaign. In 2016, he said that if Putin said great things about him, he would say great things about Putin.16 At their August 15, 2025 summit in Alaska, commentators noted the courtship-like staging of his wait for Putin on the red carpet.17
Men’s bodies, in jest. At a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, on October 12, 2026, Trump told the crowd, according to the transcript, “I started examining his body, because I didn’t know he was a great athlete,” and “I looked at his ass.” He added that Senator Jon Husted’s hands were “like, claws.”18 Five days later in Highland Heights, Kentucky, he said, “I examined his ass. I never did that with a man before.” He went on to list Husted’s shoulders, feet, hands, and jawline, and said that patting Husted’s shoulder was “like a piece of steel.”19 At a rally in Milwaukee on November 1, 2024, after repeated microphone failures and a remark about wanting to “knock the hell out of” people backstage, he mimed a sex act on the microphone stand.20 For years he has closed rallies dancing to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”21
Health. On December 1, 2025, the White House released a memo from Trump’s physician, Sean Barbabella, describing a “preventative” MRI of his heart and abdomen as “perfectly normal.”22 On April 30, 2026, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed entered into the Congressional Record a statement signed by 36 physicians and mental-health professionals, asserting that Trump’s mental state had deteriorated and that he is unfit for office. The statement says plainly that none of the signatories examined him.23 The question is contested, and this essay does not resolve it.
The trickster figures of world mythology (Hermes, Loki, Coyote, Raven, the Winnebago Wakdjunkaga recorded by Paul Radin) differ greatly across traditions.24 What they share is appetite, shamelessness, and boundary crossing. They lie without guilt, steal, boast, change shape, and turn rules into jokes. Trump’s political style has these features in abundance: the delight in transgression, the unembarrassed falsehood, the conversion of humiliation into comedy. The AI feed adds an endless wardrobe. In a single weekend he can be king, messiah, statesman, and space-age lawman.
Sexual transformation is not a defining property of every trickster, but some of the most revealing traditions make it central. Radin’s Wakdjunkaga keeps his enormous penis in a box and sends it across the water. In another episode he disguises himself as a woman, marries a chief’s son, and bears children.24 In the Prose Edda, Loki takes the form of a mare and gives birth to Odin’s horse Sleipnir.25 Hermes fathers Hermaphroditus.26 In these traditions the trickster’s sexuality is comic, bodily, protean, and unbothered by the line between male and female. Lewis Hyde’s reading of the figure is that the trickster reveals the joints in a culture’s categories, showing where they are made and where they can be moved.27
Against this background the contrast with Trump is sharp. His public performance exhibits the trickster’s appetite and shamelessness. But his costumes are, in the images examined here, costumes of potency, sovereignty, or divinity. He becomes pope, king, or fighter pilot, but not anything that would put his own masculinity in play. And his government legislates against others where these traditions treat the boundary as most plastic.
Transgender lives are not mythic transformations. For some transgender people, transition involves a significant change in social identity and public recognition. For many, it is better understood as the recognition of an identity already present. The question that matters is who is permitted to define or revise a person’s public standing. Here the asymmetry appears. The leader claims authority to redefine himself at will, before millions, as pope or king. He denies others the authority to have their own self-understanding recognized. The campaign can be read as an attempt to monopolize the power of redefinition.
The trickster and the transgender person are not equivalent, and they are not being likened here. In myth, the trickster seizes identities and prerogatives without anyone’s permission. In political life, a transgender person typically seeks the ordinary recognition that others receive without asking. What links them is authority over recognition: who may assume a public standing, who may confer or deny one, and on what grounds. That question runs through everything that follows.
In descriptive psychological terms, the point sharpens. A person’s status is their place in a community within a world. A person’s status helps determine which practices they are eligible to participate in, what positions they may occupy, and what possibilities for action are available to them.28 Status is not the same as legal permission. Law is one dimension of standing among several. A person can remain fully eligible, in the eyes of family, friends, colleagues, and community, for practices that a government tries to prohibit, and a government’s degrading definition need not be accepted by those who know the person. The costumes of pope, king, and messiah claim more than masculinity. They claim an enlarged world of eligible behavior, prerogatives unavailable to ordinary persons. The trickster’s oldest privilege is exemption: the rules that bind others do not bind him. What distinguishes this case is the pairing of maximal exemption for the self with minimal eligibility for others. The persona claims a status that exempts it from the ordinary constraints of personhood, while the government it leads works to narrow the statuses available to others. In particular, he would narrow the status of being recognized as the person one takes oneself to be.
Much of the persona can be read as phallic display: the continual public demonstration of potency, size, dominance, and invulnerability. Psychoanalytic theory proposes that such display, when compulsive, can defend against the performer’s own doubt rather than the audience’s. In clinical circumstances, the compulsive repetition of such displays may suggest that they serve a defensive function.
The record shows the repetition. It does not establish its source. High-volume posting is also consistent with deliberate communication strategy, the reinforcing appetite of an audience, settled habit, staff curation, and the incentives of social-media platforms. The psychoanalytic hypothesis does not need to exclude these; motives are layered, and a strategy can be chosen because it also serves a defensive need. But it remains one reading among several. The hypothesis gains plausibility less from the volume of posting than from the recurring content. The imagery returns again and again to the same small set of themes: enormity, penetration, invulnerability, divinity, and the soiling of enemies.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud observed that technology extends the limited human body. The ship and the airplane extend our legs, the telescope our eyes, the telephone our voice. With these “auxiliary organs” attached, he wrote, we become a kind of “prosthetic god,” truly magnificent. But the organs have not grown onto us, and they still give us trouble.29 The magnificence is borrowed. It has to be put on, and it can be taken off. The AI feed is a gallery of such prostheses, attached by image to an aging body: jets, orbital weapons, a power ring, robot armies, a head looming over Greenland. Each lends the body a power it does not have, and each must be posted again tomorrow. Paired with these grandiose images is a strand that a psychoanalytic reader would call anal-sadistic. The clearest example is a crowned king releasing excrement on protesters from the air. The pairing suggests a formula: one’s own grandeur secured by others’ abasement.
A status analysis can go further than a purely clinical one. Harold Garfinkel described “degradation ceremonies”: public acts through which a person’s identity is denounced and reconstituted as lower.30 In “Degradation, Accreditation, and Rites of Passage” (1979), I drew on Garfinkel’s paradigm to examine degradation as a change in status. The degraded person loses eligibility in a community, and the range of their action and responsibility narrows. The paradigm has three roles: denouncer, witness, and perpetrator. The denouncer and the witnesses must already be members in good standing, acting as the community’s representatives. The denouncer describes the perpetrator’s act as a violation of the community’s values. The denouncer then claims, with effect, that the violation expresses who the perpetrator really is: someone who is not, and perhaps never was, a member in good standing. The decisive question is whether the principals and the community accept the degradation. If they do not, it is ineffective.31
Two consequences follow for the present argument. First, the denouncer does not acquire standing by denouncing; standing is the precondition for denouncing at all. A denunciation can nonetheless enhance the denouncer’s standing, especially when it succeeds, because a successful degradation of another creates the appearance of the denouncer’s own good standing. Second, everything depends on the witnesses. Read this way, the night storms and the excrement video work as running degradation ceremonies before an audience of millions. Trump takes the denouncer’s role, speaking as the community’s representative, and his followers take the witnesses’ role. Their acceptance is what makes a denunciation effective. When the ceremonies succeed, they display the denouncer’s standing and make it appear secure. The theory of degradation ceremonies does not itself require that a successful degradation be repeated. A ceremony that succeeds has done its work. The need for repetition comes from somewhere else: from a political persona that maintains its standing through public performance rather than through institutional office alone. Such a persona depends on witnesses whose acceptance must be kept, and a standing displayed this way tends to be displayed again and again. That is an observation about the persona’s mode of maintenance, and it requires no claim about inner doubt.
Kernberg’s account of pathological narcissism describes others valued chiefly as extensions or mirrors of a grandiose self, not as separate subjects. Erotic interest follows cycles of idealization and devaluation.32 Whatever its application to the person, the account fits the public pattern closely.
“Mar-a-Lago face” can be read less as an expression of erotic taste than as a uniform. It is homogeneous, expensive, youth-simulating, and visibly worked for. Commentators have read it as announcing that its wearer has altered her own body to match the preferences of the circle’s center.11 The faces are held against aging in a court whose sovereign is aging.
The “machine gun” remark fuses two registers the persona keeps fusing. A young woman’s mouth is admired and, in the same breath, converted into a weapon fired on his behalf. In the remark, the value of what she says gives way to the image of how effectively she strikes his enemies.
The anthropology of exchange adds a dimension. In Lévi-Strauss’s account of kinship, and in Gayle Rubin’s critique of it, women circulate between men as tokens of alliance and status.33,34 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick extended the point: in systems of male homosocial bonding, women often serve as the medium through which men’s relations to one another are formed and displayed.35 The women around Trump are part of how he is seen by other men: allies, rivals, foreign strongmen, his base. In this structure, the performance of heterosexual potency is addressed substantially to a male audience. That, rather than any speculation about private desire, is the first place where male-male investment becomes visible in the system.
The same structure helps explain a pattern in who is kept and who is let go. In October 2026, The New York Times reported that the prominent figures leaving Trump’s orbit had been “overwhelmingly” women.36 Kristi Noem was removed from Homeland Security in March 2026, and Pam Bondi was fired as attorney general in April. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned amid scandal that spring, and Tulsi Gabbard stepped down as director of national intelligence. All four were replaced by men. In October, Kimberly Guilfoyle was pushed out as ambassador to Greece. Elise Stefanik, earlier promised the United Nations ambassadorship, saw it go instead to Mike Waltz. Meanwhile, male appointees who faced intense scrutiny, including Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, remained in place. When Waltz was demoted over the leaked group chat, he received what the Times called a “soft landing” at the United Nations.
Each departure has its own particulars. They include scandal, policy disputes, and, in Gabbard’s case, a stated family reason. Women continue to hold major posts, among them Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and the White House says it judges people “on merit and qualifications.” Still, the asymmetry needs explaining, and the frame developed here suggests one explanation. The record establishes a pattern of differential treatment; it does not establish its cause, and what follows is an interpretation. If women in the court are valued disproportionately as mirrors and display, their standing depends on continuing to reflect well, and it can be withdrawn when the reflection dims. That would fit the idealization-devaluation cycle Kernberg describes. In a homosocial order, relationships among powerful men may receive a different kind of protection, because their currency is loyalty: a man who stays loyal can survive scandal, since what he offers is allegiance rather than an image. Within the homosocial structure proposed here, women may function disproportionately as instruments of display and accreditation, while relationships among powerful men are protected. This is a tendency, not a description of every woman in the administration. Women also hold real authority there and take part in its loyalty relationships. To treat them simply as instruments would reproduce the reduction being examined. In descriptive psychological terms, the hypothesis is that women’s standing in this court is more often a conditional accreditation, renewed through appearance and reflection, while men’s more often rests on a relationship, which is harder to revoke than an image.
Sedgwick’s term “homosocial desire” names a continuum running from male friendship, mentorship, rivalry, and identification to explicit erotic attachment. Her central historical claim was that modern Western cultures sharply broke this continuum, policing the boundary between bonding and desire with particular anxiety.35 The concept is useful here precisely because it does not collapse admiration, rivalry, or identification into eros. It asks where along the continuum a given bond sits, and how hard the culture works to keep it on the acceptable side.
The strongman. Trump’s posture toward Putin has geopolitical, transactional, and financial explanations, and they may carry much of the weight. What the psychoanalytic reader adds concerns the surplus of affect: the hunger for praise, the deference, the contrast with contempt for democratic allies. Kohut and Wolf described “ideal-hungry” personalities, who seek an idealized figure whose strength they can borrow by association.37 Although pathological narcissism in Kernberg’s account is often organized around the denial of dependency, admiration for an exceptionally powerful figure may serve the grandiose self when identification with that figure enhances one’s own sense of importance. Freud argued that the ties binding groups to leaders are aim-inhibited libidinal ties: love in their source, desexualized in their expression.38 On that view, an authoritarian bond is a love relation that cannot call itself one, and it depends on keeping that fact out of view.
Contempt for male enemies. A leader can admire some powerful men and distrust others for wholly political reasons, and that pattern needs no psychoanalytic explanation. What is more distinctive is the vocabulary of contempt: male opponents are so often described in terms of softness, weakness, and failed masculinity. Freud’s Schreber analysis, which proposed that disavowed attachment to a man can return as persecution, is too specific a clinical hypothesis to carry weight here.39 The more modest observation is that feminizing male rivals locates the threatening softness in others and keeps the self on the hard side of the line.
The armored body. Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, a study of the German Freikorps of 1918–1923, described a soldierly masculinity organized around a hard, sealed, disciplined body defined against everything experienced as soft, fluid, and mixed.40 George Mosse traced how the ideal of the hardened, beautiful male body became central to fascist aesthetics.41 These are historically specific analyses, and contemporary American military culture is not the Freikorps. Read as analogy, not equivalence, they illuminate Hegseth’s Quantico speech. Its disgust attaches to fat, to women in combat roles, and to transgender service members. Its remedy is hardness, uniformity, and the “highest male standard.” Its ideal is purification.
The workout videos extend the pattern. A cabinet secretary repeatedly displays his body in exertion before audiences of young servicemen who cheer him on. Gyms, barracks, and locker rooms are spaces where male bodily display and admiration are intense, and where a martial or athletic framing marks that admiration as safely non-erotic. Whether erotic investment is present in any particular case cannot be read from the footage. What the analysis can claim is structural. A culture that intensely celebrates hard male bodies, while punishing visible ambiguity in sex and gender, is a culture that works hard to police the line Sedgwick described. One hypothesis, offered about cultural organization rather than anyone’s private desires, concerns the stability of that line. On this reading, the intensity of the policing suggests that the culture experiences its distinction between acceptable and unacceptable expressions of male attachment as unstable. Admiration, bodily display, and devotion among men run so high that the boundary separating them from eros must be continually marked. The claim is about the instability of a cultural distinction, not about erotic attraction in any individual.
The previous section concerns structures. But the persona does not only police male-male desire; it also plays with it, openly and repeatedly, in the one register where such play is licensed: the joke, the clowning gesture, the dance.
No single episode below is decisive. Each admits ordinary explanations: crude humor, locker-room ribbing, masculine admiration, a bid to entertain, an attempt to humble the man being praised. The interpretive claim rests on the pattern. Across years, a figure who presents himself as maximally masculine repeatedly chooses male bodies and male-male sexual acts as material for comedy before crowds. These episodes increasingly cluster in the most recent period.
Husted. In Youngstown, Trump said he had started “examining” Husted’s body and “looked at his ass.” In Kentucky five days later, he returned to the theme with a disclaimer: “I never did that with a man before.” He then itemized Husted’s shoulders, feet, hands, and jawline.18,19 Two features matter. The first is repetition: a bit chosen for re-performance. The second is the disclaimer.
The disclaimer can be read two ways, and the difference matters. In “Negation” (1925), Freud observed that repressed content can enter speech in negated form. A patient’s “it is not my mother” lets the mother into the session; negation is a way of acknowledging what is repressed while its emotional force stays disowned.42 “I never did that with a man before” has that grammar. But Freud’s observation comes from a clinical setting, where a patient’s associations and relationship to the analyst give a denial its meaning. A politician’s aside to a laughing arena is a different situation. There the disclaimer is almost certainly part of the joke. It invites the audience to recognize the sexual implication, and the laugh depends on everyone catching it.
That second reading complicates any claim that the erotic meaning is being defended against in a simple way. The humor works through shared awareness of what is being suggested, not through concealment. This fits the trickster better than the clinic does. The trickster does not hide transgression; he displays it, names it, and invites the crowd into it, while the frame of play keeps the consequences suspended. Freud’s point still applies in one respect: a meaning can be acknowledged and disowned together. In the arena, the disowning is done collectively, by laughter.
The admired object is also telling. Husted is praised as a hard male body (claws, steel, shoulders, jaw), the armored body of the previous section, now looked at by the sovereign himself.
The microphone. In Milwaukee the sequence ran: a failure of the instrument of his voice before a crowd; a fantasy of violence toward the men responsible; then a sexual gesture performed on the failed instrument.20 The gesture admits several readings: vulgar humor, mockery of the equipment and the staff responsible for it, or a simple violation of presidential decorum. A further reading needs stating carefully. In one common idiom of male insult, performing oral sex on a man marks the humiliated position. A gesture meant to degrade those responsible therefore places the performer, for an instant, in that position himself. The dominant figure mimes the act of submission he means to impose on others. The interest of the moment lies in that contradiction between masculine dominance and enacted sexual submission, which the comic frame lets pass without comment. Freud’s account of joke-work notes that obscene and hostile jokes often travel together, and that tendentious jokes need a third person: the listener whose laughter shares in the forbidden aim and absolves it.43 The rally crowd is that third person, on a mass scale.
“Y.M.C.A.” The Village People’s songs, including “Macho Man,” have long been associated with gay disco culture. Their costumes (cop, cowboy, construction worker, soldier, leatherman) began as a camp exaggeration of macho types. The band’s lead singer, Victor Willis, has disputed the “gay anthem” label and approved the song’s use at rallies.21 Still, the anthropological curiosity stands. A movement committed to unironic masculinity closes its gatherings dancing to a song that grew out of a camp parody of unironic masculinity. The simplest explanation is that the song is catchy and the crowd loves it. A psychoanalytic reading adds that the ritual permits pleasurable participation in male-male play under cover of fun.
The trickster frame returns here with a refinement. The trickster’s sexual fluidity is not wholly refused; it is permitted in the clown’s register, through jokes, mime, and dance. What is not permitted is that others live it in earnest. Earnest living would remove the joke frame that keeps the clown’s own play safe.
Two questions need to be kept apart. The first is why transgender issues became politically salient at all. The answer lies largely in politics: political mobilization, religious commitments, organized advocacy on both sides, electoral strategy, and wider cultural conflict. The second is why these issues acquire the particular symbolic meaning they have within the public performance analyzed here. Psychoanalytic and anthropological tools can say something about the second question, not the first.
Mary Douglas argued that every classificatory system produces anomalies, and that cultures commonly treat anomalies as polluting and dangerous.44 Her analysis concerns the relation between anomalies and the demands of a particular classificatory scheme. Applied here, the claim is not that transgender people’s existence settles contested questions about biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. Those are distinct matters, and they need not be resolved here. The claim is narrower. Transgender people challenge a specific political demand that these matters be fixed, simple, and identical. A scheme built on that demand will experience them as anomalies, and its defenders will tend toward rituals of purification.
The executive orders read in this light as classificatory acts. They define the categories, expel from institutions those who do not fit (the military), withdraw recognition (official documents), and restrict the means of transition (medical care).12Kernberg’s description of splitting is relevant as hypothesis. Primitive defensive organizations keep the world in clean, opposed compartments, because integrating ambivalence threatens the coherence of the self.32 On this reading, a person who visibly moves between categories affronts splitting itself.
Two limits matter. First, restrictions on youth medical transition and on transgender participation in women’s sports command substantial public support, including from many who share none of the psychology discussed here.13 This essay does not claim that opposition to particular policies reflects psychological defensiveness. Its question is narrower. Why do these particular leaders invest the issue with such evident personal intensity, raising it often and unprompted, beyond what its political value alone would predict? Second, two kinds of claim must be kept apart. The symbolic claim is that, within this public performance, the policing of others’ sexual and gender classifications expresses and displays a fixed masculine identity; that claim rests on the observable fit between the policies, the rhetoric, and the imagery. The psychological claim, that such policing helps secure the leader’s own masculine identity, is a causal hypothesis about an inner function, and nothing in the public record can confirm it. This essay asserts the first and offers the second only as a psychoanalytic possibility.
Erich Fromm coined “malignant narcissism” in The Heart of Man (1964) for a narcissism so extreme that it shades into destructive pathology.45 Otto Kernberg gave the term clinical form. It joins a narcissistic personality organization (a pathological grandiose self, devaluation of others, chronic envy, exploitativeness) with antisocial behavior, ego-syntonic aggression or sadism, and a paranoid orientation.46 Kernberg distinguished it from antisocial personality proper by its retained capacity for some loyalties and for idealizing others. That retained capacity helps explain how such figures can lead movements and can themselves idealize a stronger figure.
The category is used here descriptively, as a template the public pattern closely resembles. The resemblance includes the grandiosity of the imagery, open delight in degrading opponents, a persecutory organization of grievance, instrumental loyalty, and idealization of the strongman abroad. It is not used as a diagnosis, which would require what no public record supplies. Its value is heuristic. It predicts which features of the pattern hang together, and it directs attention to what may happen when the supports of a grandiose self come under strain.
Whether Trump is experiencing cognitive decline is disputed. The White House reports normal results, though the released MRI addressed his heart and abdomen, not cognition. Thirty-six clinicians have publicly asserted decline from observation, without examination.22,23 Nothing in this essay depends on resolving that dispute. The subject here is a different and observable fact: Trump is 80 years old, and the public identity he has built for half a century is invested in youth, strength, sexual vitality, and invulnerability. Aging threatens such an identity whatever happens neurologically.
A distinction matters here. The vulnerability in question is not, or not necessarily, that of an aging person. It is that of a public identity built on claims of invulnerability. No inference about inner distress is needed to see that such a persona must negotiate a widening gap between what it claims and what an audience can see. The analysis that follows concerns how a persona manages that gap, not how a man feels about growing old.
Kernberg wrote about what middle and later life can mean for narcissistic personalities.47 For most people, aging is cushioned by inner resources: internalized good relationships, continuity with others and with work that will outlive them, and the capacity to take pleasure in the youth and achievements of others, including their children. Kernberg’s account is that the narcissistic personality has fewer such resources. Its sense of worth depends on external supplies (admiration, beauty, power, conquest, the envy of others), and aging erodes them. He described characteristic outcomes. Envy of the young intensifies. Contempt for aging bodies (often especially women’s) increases. Depressive collapse becomes possible. Or, in those with strong grandiose defenses, grandiosity and devaluation escalate in an effort to deny the loss.
From this, one can sketch several responses that a public identity organized around invulnerability might make under the pressure of aging. Each is a possibility suggested by theory. Each has observable correlates in the recent record. None is established as caused by inner distress.
1. Escalation of prosthetic display. The image increasingly supplies forms of potency that the aging body cannot literally possess: jets, orbital weapons, robot armies. The AI imagery has grown in volume and scale; the FT counted 57 AI posts in the first three weeks of May 2026 alone, against 8 in April.2 Much of that increase very likely reflects the means of production. Image-generation tools have become faster, cheaper, and more capable, and a staff that once had to commission or find such images can now make them in seconds. A change in the means of production should not be mistaken for a change in psychological organization. What the tools do not explain is the selection: which fantasies, out of everything now cheaply available, are chosen, approved, and posted.
2. Reversal of time and fusion with a young double. Examples include “Same Guy,” the young self in uniform, the claim of aging “in reverse,” and the son presented as a younger version of himself.6,7 These images are made and chosen within a court, so they cannot be read as a direct statement of one man’s wish. They are better understood as fantasies that the persona and its surrounding political culture find worth circulating and approving. Taken that way, they are symbolically rich. They present an aging leader contemplating his younger, uniformed self, and they show where the persona’s most admiring gaze at a male body is directed: toward its own younger form.
3. Delegation of display to others. A court can carry a display the sovereign’s own body no longer carries well: the warrior secretary, the cheering soldiers, the frozen-young faces. The record does not show that Hegseth’s performances serve this function for Trump, and Hegseth has his own reasons for them. The structural point is that an institution organized around a leader’s image tends to supply such proxies, whatever any individual’s motives.
4. Self-immortalization. The imagery moves toward the eternal and divine: pope, Christ, Washington, monumental arches, currency bearing his face. In anthropological terms, it suggests a transition from trickster to ancestor-god.
5. Intensified degradation. Contempt for decline can be projected onto others’ bodies, so that opponents are shown as animals, as filth, as feeble.
6. Intensified policing of others. If a fixed masculine center is what makes the costume play safe, pressure on that center may show itself as harder enforcement of boundaries in others.
Several dilemmas follow. For the persona, defenses against the appearance of decline can themselves become its evidence. A trickster’s audacity read at forty can read as the grotesque at eighty. For the court, a sovereign who punishes reflections of weakness selects for courtiers who amplify rather than contain. A curated feed that learns what pleases may accelerate the very disinhibition it might otherwise buffer. For the polity, a leader whose standing rests on demonstrated potency faces pressure toward ever larger demonstrations, and state power offers very large ones.
Before turning from the persona to its political consequences, the strongest alternative accounts of the material so far deserve a hearing. They carry real force.
Political calculation. Several of the policies discussed are popular with large parts of the electorate. A politician might emphasize them for strategic reasons alone, and the psychological reading may overinterpret ordinary coalition-building.
Locker-room humor and showmanship. Remarks about another man’s physique, crude gestures at a broken microphone, and a crowd-pleasing disco song can all be read as conventional male banter and rally entertainment. The psychoanalytic reading claims only that what is chosen for a joke, and repeated, is meaningful. It cannot exclude the conventional reading.
Curation. If staff select much of the content, the imagery may reflect judgments about what the base enjoys, rather than spontaneous fantasy. The persona is then partly a product.
Generational norms. Comments on women’s looks and boasts of toughness were routine in the business and entertainment culture in which Trump formed his public style. The pattern may be less idiosyncratic than this essay implies.
Readiness and realism. Defenders of Hegseth’s standards argue that combat readiness depends on uniform physical requirements. Trump’s posture toward Putin may be better explained by deal-making, skepticism of alliances, or a realist view of great-power relations than by idealization.
The hazard of psychologizing opponents. Psychoanalytic interpretation of political adversaries has a long record of being used to delegitimize rather than understand, and it is hard to falsify. Readers should hold these interpretations as hypotheses about structure and meaning, to be judged by how well they organize the record, not as established facts.
The essay’s most consequential claim does not concern psychology, and it does not depend on any of the hypotheses above. We cannot establish a ruler’s private fantasies or defenses from public observation. We can examine public conduct: the statuses a ruler claims, the permissions assumed, the practices a government tries to prohibit, and what follows for other people. That analysis would remain consequential even if every psychoanalytic interpretation in this essay proved mistaken.
A private person can manage anxieties about masculinity through clothing, jokes, fantasy, admiration, or sexual display, and the costs fall mostly on that person and those close to them. A president can do something categorically different: use the machinery of government to fix which identities receive recognition, which conduct is permissible, and which persons are degraded or excluded.
In descriptive psychological terms, communities assign status: a person’s place, which shapes what that person can do and be within the community, including their eligibility to take part in its practices.28 Legal status is one dimension of that place, and not the only one; but it is the dimension a government controls. States are among the most powerful assigners of status. They issue documents, define legal categories, admit and expel from institutions, and fund or forbid forms of care. The executive orders of January 2025 are status assignments at national scale.12 A personal performance of degradation becomes, through them, an institutional practice of degradation.
A distinction is essential here. Every functioning state classifies people. Citizenship, age, residency, disability, professional licensure, and eligibility for benefits all require categories, and classification as such is not a threat to democratic dignity. The democratic problem arises when classification arbitrarily denies standing, imposes humiliation, or excludes people without adequate justification, and when it is announced in a register of contempt. Some of the policies discussed here involve real competing considerations, and reasonable people weigh them differently. The question is how classifications are justified, enforced, and used to distribute standing. Classifying is not, in itself, purification. But where classification is used to lower and expel, Garfinkel’s ceremony, which once required a courtroom or a parade ground, can be conducted by definition in the Federal Register.
The same transformation appears in the military. Hegseth’s Quantico directive converted an aesthetic of the armored male body into a personnel standard. He openly acknowledged that it might reduce the number of women in combat roles.14Whether one judges such standards on their readiness merits or not, the path from performance to policy is visible. A public identity built on displaying hardness became a rule for whose bodies count as fit to serve.
Max Weber observed that charismatic authority is unstable and must be “routinized” into ordinary structures if it is to last.48 The routinization traced here has a particular content. The trickster’s license (exemption for the self, as display) is being routinized into classification (fixity for others, as law). That is why the persona’s psychology, however speculative, is not merely a private matter. Its preferred categories have acquired the means of enforcement.
These dynamics would matter anywhere. They matter more in the United States, because the country is plural by constitution and composition. It is not a homogeneous people on which variety has been imposed. The 2020 Census found that the non-Hispanic white share of the population had fallen to 57.8 percent, and that the number of Americans identifying with more than one race had grown from about 9 million to 33.8 million in a decade. Hispanic Americans numbered 62.1 million, nearly one in five.49 Roughly one resident in seven was born abroad.50 Within this population, millions of families cross lines of race, religion, national origin, and sexuality inside a single household. American complexity is not a minority condition at the margins. It runs through the center, and through the family trees of many of the leader’s own supporters.
American history did not begin by honoring that complexity. The founding order accommodated slavery. The Constitution counted three-fifths of the enslaved population (“three fifths of all other Persons”) in apportioning representation and direct taxes, so that slaveholding states gained political power from the very people they held as property, who could neither vote nor consent. The first naturalization law, in 1790, limited naturalization to “free white” persons. Women were excluded from the national franchise until 1920, and Chinese immigrants were barred by law from 1882. The egalitarian tradition is not the founding order itself. It is an argument developed within and against that order, very often by the people it excluded.51
That argument has deep roots. In 1869, Frederick Douglass, who had been born into slavery, described the country as a “composite nation.” Against the anti-Chinese agitation of his day, he argued that its strength lay in drawing together peoples of every origin under equal law.52 Randolph Bourne’s “Trans-National America” (1916) argued that the American project was a federation of cultures rather than a melting into one prescribed type.53 The Reconstruction Amendments wrote part of that argument into the Constitution. These are aspirations, often betrayed. But they are the claims American democracy has made on its own behalf, and the standards by which it asks to be judged.
A politics of purity collides with this society in a particular way. Mary Douglas’s point applies here too. A rigid classificatory scheme makes anomalies of whatever it cannot fit, and a plural society contains countless things a rigid scheme cannot fit. Purification in such a society is never finished. Each round reveals new anomalies.
The public record shows the same classificatory impulse, often expressed in a register of contempt, at work across several domains:
• Sex and gender: the January 2025 executive orders on sex, the military, medical care, and sports.12
• Citizenship: Executive Order 14160 (January 20, 2025) declared that children born on American soil would not be citizens if their mother was unlawfully or only temporarily present and their father was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident. On June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court affirmed an injunction against the order on the constitutional merits. The five-justice majority, in an opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, held that under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause such children “are citizens at birth.” Justice Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment on statutory rather than constitutional grounds, and Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented.54
• Race: orders dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government.55 Hegseth’s Quantico claim, offered without evidence, that standards had been lowered “to hit racial quotas.”14
• Imagery: in February 2026, an AI video posted to Trump’s account depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. It was deleted after a backlash, including from some allies.2,1
George Mosse’s history of modern masculinity helps explain why these domains travel together. Mosse showed that the ideal of the hardened, disciplined male body was historically defined against a “countertype.” The countertype was a figure of failed manhood: soft, nervous, effeminate, unrooted. Nationalist movements projected it in turn onto homosexuals, Jews, Black people, the Roma, and the foreign-born.41 The countertype is what the armored body needs in order to know itself. In a plural nation, a politics that idealizes the armored male body will keep finding countertypes among its own fellow citizens. It will find them first among those whose sexuality or gender is visibly complex, and then among those whose ancestry, color, faith, or place of birth is.
One fact complicates any simple story. Trump’s 2024 coalition was more racially and ethnically diverse than his earlier ones. According to Pew Research Center’s study of validated voters, he won 48 percent of Hispanic voters (up from 36 percent in 2020), 15 percent of Black voters (up from 8 percent), and 40 percent of Asian American voters (up from 30 percent).56 The plural nation is not a bloc, and many members of the groups discussed here support the policies examined here, for reasons of their own. Their reasons deserve to be stated in their strongest form. On this view, ending race-conscious programs restores equal treatment of individuals. Sex-based categories protect women’s privacy, safety, and athletic fairness. Enforcing immigration law is an ordinary exercise of sovereignty that every democracy undertakes. Each of these arguments has to be met on its merits, policy by policy. The argument, then, concerns neither which voters belong to which side nor any single policy. It concerns how classifications are imposed, the degradation that may accompany them, and what institutions do to persons. The democratic principle at stake holds regardless of who commands the majority.
The Declaration of Independence asserts that all men are created equal, a promise whose reach Americans have spent two and a half centuries widening. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees every person the equal protection of the laws and makes citizenship a birthright rather than a grant. Jeremy Waldron has described modern democratic dignity as a “leveling up.” The rank and standing once reserved for nobility is extended to every person, so that each is owed the respect once owed to a lord.57 In descriptive psychological terms, democratic citizenship establishes a fundamental status: eligibility to participate as an equal in the practices of self-government. Democracy does not give everyone identical eligibility for every practice. Children cannot vote, noncitizens lack full political standing, and many roles require qualifications. As section 12 noted, every state must classify. The democratic principle is that equal human dignity constrains the legitimate ways in which a government may differentiate people’s statuses and eligibilities. Differences must be justified, applied without contempt, and never used to mark some persons as lesser in kind.
Seen this way, governing by degradation is not a matter of style or manners. It reverses the democratic status assignment. Avishai Margalit defines a decent society as one whose institutions do not humiliate the people subject to them. He distinguishes this from a merely civilized society, in which individuals refrain from humiliating one another.58 Personal insult wounds. Institutional humiliation, carried out through law, documents, and official imagery, tells whole classes of persons that their standing is lower and revocable. Martha Nussbaum has traced how a “politics of disgust” works. It projects onto subordinated groups the qualities a dominant group fears in itself: animality, fluidity, decay, the body’s vulnerability. It then uses that disgust to justify exclusion.59 The imagery examined here fits her account closely. Opponents are rendered as animals, as filth, as soft, as “fat,” while the leader is rendered as a god. A psychoanalytic reading would add one more possibility, which the record cannot confirm: that the ruler’s own aging body is among the vulnerabilities such imagery displaces onto others. What can be observed is the contrast itself, between a leader rendered as ageless and opponents rendered as feeble.
Hannah Arendt observed that the most fundamental deprivation is the loss of a place in a political community: the “right to have rights,” on which every other right depends.60 The birthright citizenship order aimed at precisely that place. The Supreme Court’s rejection of it on constitutional grounds shows two things. It shows how far the classificatory impulse was prepared to reach, and that the constitutional order retains the capacity to stop it.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that democracies depend on two unwritten norms. Mutual toleration means treating rivals as legitimate. Forbearance means declining to use every power one formally holds.61 The performance analyzed here erodes both. Opponents become enemies, traitors, filth, and countertypes. And the logic of potency, power that must be shown, pushes against forbearance, because power withheld is power undemonstrated.
Here psychoanalysis and political theory meet. Psychoanalysis distinguishes a mode of mind that splits the world into all-good and all-bad from a more mature mode that can hold ambivalence. In the second, the same person is seen as both loved and frustrating, and others are recognized as whole and separate.62,32 Democracy asks citizens for something like that second capacity at the scale of a society. They must live alongside people whose lives, bodies, faiths, families, and loves they do not share and may not understand. They must accord them equal standing anyway, and must accept that the persons they disagree with are fellow members, not contaminants. In this sense democracy is institutionalized tolerance of complexity. A politics organized around splitting, purification, and the display of domination is anti-democratic in its structure, not only in particular policies. It also changes citizens’ position. They become an audience in a mirror-court, applauding or jeering, rather than participants deliberating among equals.
These considerations yield a set of concrete dilemmas for American democracy.
1. Revocable recognition. Once the executive treats basic recognition (citizenship, legal identity, eligibility to serve) as something it may redefine, grant, or withdraw by order, without the justification and deliberation that law ordinarily requires, no one’s standing is fully secure. That includes those whom the current definitions favor. Every unjustified classification established against one group is a precedent available against the next.
2. Humiliation modeled from the top. When a head of state models degradation, the example travels downward into schools, workplaces, online life, and the street. Degradation ceremonies become ordinary, and the people most exposed are those with the least power to answer them.
3. The multiplication of enemies. A purity politics in a plural nation cannot be completed. Each purification creates new anomalies and new countertypes, so the circle of those who belong keeps drawing tighter.
4. The critic’s dilemma. Opponents are tempted to answer degradation with degradation. That includes mocking the leader’s sexuality, his body, or his age, which reproduces the stigma of the very politics they oppose. A democratic critique has to defend the dignity of the person it criticizes, including this one. That is why no claim is made here about his orientation or diagnosis: the principle at stake is not partisan.
5. The supporter’s dilemma. Members of groups within the governing coalition receive what might be called conditional accreditation: welcome as allies, while the same machinery of degrading classification remains available for use against people who share their ancestry, faith, or sexuality. Status granted by a sovereign can be withdrawn by one.
6. The institutions’ dilemma. Courts, the military, the civil service, and the states are caught between deference to an elected executive and duty to a constitution that guarantees equal protection. Trump v. Barbara shows that institutions can hold. Whether they continue to do so depends on the people who staff them, and on citizens who expect them to.
The health of a democracy like this one can be measured by a single test: whether its institutions extend equal dignity to the people whose complexity its most powerful figures will not tolerate. By that measure, the danger described here is not that a leader has an unusual psychology. Leaders often do. The danger is that one leader’s need for simplicity has been offered to a complex nation as its governing principle.
The title names the central distinction: between possessing power and needing continually to demonstrate it. A performance of potency must be renewed. Its costumes, ceremonies of degradation, mirroring women, idealized strongmen, armored proxies, and the jokes through which forbidden attentions slip into view are all ways of renewing it.
What makes this performance politically significant is its asymmetry. The persona claims an extraordinary freedom to cross boundaries, assume identities, and suspend ordinary constraints, even to play with what it forbids. The government it leads, meanwhile, asserts authority to restrict the identities and eligibilities of others. The contrast is between a sovereign’s expanding prerogatives and the narrowing standing of those subject to his rule. I may become anything; you must remain what you were assigned. In mythology the trickster’s transgressions loosen a culture’s categories and remind it that they were made. Here the trickster’s freedom has been joined to the power of the state, and it is being used to tighten the categories for everyone else.
Trump’s private sexual orientation is not the subject here, and no claim has been made about it. Sexuality in the public sense (masculine display, sexual humor, the policing of others’ gender) has been one of its subjects, because it is one of the persona’s chief instruments. The deeper subject is what happens when a public identity organized around the display of domination acquires the authority to classify other people, and when the demand for simplicity expressed in that public identity becomes a principle governing other people’s lives.
In a country as composite as the United States, that is a question about the democracy itself. American democracy has never been a promise that its people would be simple. Its promise is that they need not be simple in order to count: that a person of any ancestry, faith, family, body, or love holds the same standing as any other, and that no ruler may assign them less. The trickster in mythology reminds a culture that its categories were made by human beings and can be remade with care. A democracy worthy of its people takes up the same freedom and grants it to everyone. What it cannot survive, for long, is a sovereign who reserves that freedom for himself.
1. Newser, “Trump Aide Drives His Late-Night Truth Social Barrage,” May 15, 2026, summarizing Wall Street Journal reporting. https://www.newser.com/story/389178/trump-aide-drives-his-late-night-truth-social-barrage.html
2. Dan Clark and Anna Nicolaou, “How AI turbocharged Donald Trump’s ‘slopaganda’ machine,” Financial Times, May 20, 2026; figures as reported by Mediaite, May 21, 2026 https://mediaite.com/politics/trump-has-averaged-a-whopping-19-truth-social-posts-a-day-in-2026-report, and Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/inside-donald-trumps-ai-slopaganda-machine/.
3. “The Late-Night Truth Social Storms That Offer a Window Into the President’s Mind,” Wall Street Journal, May 2026. https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-truth-social-late-night-posts-167cb47a
4. Axios, “Trump posts fake video in ‘KING TRUMP’ jet as GOP dismisses No Kings marches,” October 19, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/10/19/trump-no-kings-post-jet-protesters
5. Lead Stories, “Fact Check: Donald Trump DID Post A Fake Photo Of Himself Walking With An Alien,” May 2026. https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2026/05/fact-check-donald-trump-did-post-fake-photo-walking-alien+shared-truth-social.html
6. Mediaite, “Trump Kisses Jesus and Arrests Aliens in Loony Truth Social Posting Spree,” August 1, 2026. https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/trump-kisses-jesus-and-arrests-aliens-in-loony-truth-social-posting-spree/
7. Newsweek, on Trump’s weekend AI image posts, August 2026. https://www.newsweek.com/aliens-arc-du-trump-and-elvis-trumps-latest-social-media-spree-12275922
8. Salon, “‘Give Them Nightmares’: Trump unleashes AI robot army,” September 7, 2026. https://salon.com/2026/09/07/give-them-nightmares-trump-unleashes-ai-robot-army
9. TV Insider, “Donald Trump’s AI Image Spree Turns Him Into Green Lantern,” September 2026. https://www.tvinsider.com/1285837/donald-trumps-ai-image-spree-turns-him-into-green-lantern-targets-robert-de-niro/
10. August 2025 Newsmax interview and October 13, 2025 Air Force One remarks: The Independent via AOL, “Trump again makes a weird statement about Karoline Leavitt’s lips.” https://www.aol.com/news/trump-again-makes-weird-statement-135039070.html. December 9, 2025 rally in Mount Pocono: Raw Story. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-2674384942/
11. Inae Oh, “The Brutal Aesthetics of MAGA,” Mother Jones 50, no. 3 (May/June 2025) https://www.motherjones.com/?p=1120488; “Surgeons Reveal Spike in ‘Mar-a-Lago Face’ Requests From Trump Insiders,” The Daily Beast, November 2025, summarizing Axios reporting https://www.thedailybeast.com/surgeons-reveal-spike-in-mar-a-lago-face-requests-from-trump-insiders/.
12. Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” 90 Fed. Reg. 8615 (Jan. 30, 2025), signed Jan. 20, 2025 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-30/html/2025-02090.htm; Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” 90 Fed. Reg. 8757 (Feb. 3, 2025), signed Jan. 27, 2025 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-02-03/html/2025-02178.htm; Executive Order 14187, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” (Jan. 28, 2025); Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” (Feb. 5, 2025).
13. Remarks at Turning Point USA AmericaFest, Phoenix, December 22, 2024, reported by ACI Prensa/EWTN. https://www.aciprensa.com/amp/noticias/109421/trump-promete-medidas-ejecutivas-desde-el-primer-dia-para-acabar-con-locura-transgenero. On public support for some restrictions, see UnHerd, January 1, 2026. https://unherd.com/newsroom/will-2026-spell-the-end-of-gender-ideology/
14. Remarks of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to general and flag officers, Marine Corps Base Quantico, September 30, 2025. Official transcript: U.S. Department of War https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318689/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-addresses-general-and-flag-officers-at-quantico-v/. Reported in Military Times, “Hegseth blasts ‘fat troops’ in rare gathering with military brass,” September 30, 2025 https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/09/30/hegseth-blasts-fat-troops-in-rare-gathering-with-military-brass/, and by TNND/WSET the same day https://wset.com/news/nation-world/secretary-hegseth-calls-on-military-to-adopt-warrior-ethos-or-step-aside-quantico-va-physical-fitness-woke-democrat-national-guard.
15. Mediaite, “Military Fitness Experts Bash Hegseth’s Workout Videos,” 2026, summarizing The Atlantic. https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/military-fitness-experts-bash-hegseths-workout-videos-one-says-none-of-his-push-ups-or-pull-ups-were-done-right/
16. Business Standard, “Vladimir Putin ‘far more’ of a leader than Barack Obama: Donald Trump,” September 2016. https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/putin-far-more-of-a-leader-than-obama-donald-trump-116090800387_1.html
17. InDepthNews, “Putin Is Trump’s Medicine,” 2025. https://indepthnews.net/putin-is-trumps-medicine/. This is opinion commentary, cited for the observation, not as evidence of motive.
18. Transcript, Donald Trump, midterm political rally, Youngstown, Ohio, October 12, 2026, Roll Call Factbase, 00:02:35–00:03:15. https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-midterm-political-rally-youngstown-ohio-october-12-2026/
19. Rally at Truist Arena, Highland Heights, Kentucky, October 17, 2026, as recorded in video clips posted the same day by Aaron Rupar and by Acyn (x.com/Acyn/status/2111525473612366075); reported in “‘I never did that with a man before’: Trump fawns over Ohio Republican’s body at Kentucky rally,” The Advocate, October 17, 2026 https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/donald-trump-jon-husted-bizarre, and International Business Times, October 18, 2026 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-jon-husted-inspection-rally-comments-1826221.
20. The Daily Beast, “Donald Trump weirdly simulates sex act on microphone stand,” November 2024, on the November 1, 2024 rally in Milwaukee. https://thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-weirdly-simulates-sex-act-on-microphone-stand
21. NBC News, “Village People gives Trump OK to play gay anthems ‘YMCA,’ ‘Macho Man’ at rallies,” 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/village-people-gives-trump-ok-play-gay-anthems-ymca-macho-n1142531; Straight Arrow News on Victor Willis’s rejection of the “gay anthem” label. https://san.com/?p=275571
22. Yahoo News, “‘Perfectly normal.’ White House releases details of Trump’s MRI scan,” December 1, 2025, on the memo by Dr. Sean Barbabella. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/perfectly-normal-white-house-releases-190830460.html
23. “Medical Concerns about President Donald J. Trump and His Fitness for Office,” statement of 36 physicians and mental health professionals, entered into the Congressional Record April 30, 2026, by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed; text posted by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear Warhttps://www.ippnw.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Medical-Concerns-about-Donald-Trump-5_5_26.docx.pdf. Reported in “Senior doctors warn Trump is mentally unfit,” doctors.net.uk, May 12, 2026 https://www.doctors.net.uk/news/senior-doctors-warn-trump-is-mentally-unfit-and-showing-signs-of-cognitive-decline.
24. Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), the Winnebago cycle, with commentaries by Karl Kerényi and C. G. Jung.
25. Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, “Gylfaginning,” the building of Asgard’s wall.
26. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV (Salmacis and Hermaphroditus).
27. Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
28. Peter G. Ossorio, Place (Ann Arbor: Descriptive Psychology Press, 1998), and The Behavior of Persons (Ann Arbor: Descriptive Psychology Press, 2006). See also Wynn Schwartz, Descriptive Psychology and the Person Concept (London: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2019).
29. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Standard Edition 21: 91–92 (ch. III).
30. Harold Garfinkel, “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies,” American Journal of Sociology 61, no. 5 (1956): 420–424.
31. Wynn Schwartz, “Degradation, Accreditation, and Rites of Passage,” Psychiatry 42, no. 2 (1979): 138–146, esp. 139 on the degradation paradigm and 143 on accreditation. The paper draws on Garfinkel as formulated in Peter G. Ossorio, What Actually Happens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978).
32. Otto F. Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Jason Aronson, 1975).
33. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949; Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
34. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
35. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), esp. the Introduction.
36. Erica L. Green, “The disappearing women of the Trump administration,” The New York Times, October 14, 2026 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/us/politics/trump-administration-kimberly-guilfoyle-women.html; republished in the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 2026 https://www.inquirer.com/politics/nation/trump-administration-cabinet-officials-women-20261015.html. On Noem, see “Trump removes Kristi Noem from Homeland Security post,” March 5, 2026 https://www.fox4news.com/news/trump-fires-kristi-noem-homeland-security-post.
37. Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf, “The Disorders of the Self and Their Treatment: An Outline,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 59 (1978): 413–425. See also Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971).
38. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition 18.
39. Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)” (1911), Standard Edition 12.
40. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History (1987), and vol. 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (1989) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; German original 1977–78).
41. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), on masculinity and its “countertype.”
42. Sigmund Freud, “Negation” (1925), Standard Edition 19: 235–239.
43. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Standard Edition 8, esp. the discussion of tendentious jokes and the role of the third person.
44. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
45. Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
46. Otto F. Kernberg, Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); see also Aggression in Personality Disorders and Perversions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
47. Otto F. Kernberg, Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied (New York: Jason Aronson, 1980), the chapters on normal and pathological narcissism in middle age; see also Kernberg (1975) on the effects of aging in narcissistic personalities.
48. Max Weber, Economy and Society (1922; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), on charismatic authority and its routinization.
49. U.S. Census Bureau, “2020 Census Statistics Highlight Local Population Changes and Nation’s Racial and Ethnic Diversity,” August 12, 2021 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210812005880/en/2020-Census-Statistics-Highlight-Local-Population-Changes-and-Nations-Racial-and-Ethnic-Diversity; non-Hispanic white share as reported by the Associated Press https://www.audacy.com/knxnews/news/national/census-data-shows-u-s-is-now-more-diverse-than-ever-before.
50. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2023 one-year estimates: 14.3 percent of U.S. residents foreign-born, as reported by the Associated Press, “Share of foreign-born in the US at highest rate in more than a century,” September 12, 2024. https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/national/2024/09/12/share-of-foreign-born-in-the-us-at-highest-rate-in-more-than-a-century-says-survey/
51. U.S. Constitution, art. I, sec. 2, cl. 3; Naturalization Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 103; Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 22 Stat. 58; U.S. Constitution, amend. XIX (1920).
52. Frederick Douglass, “Our Composite Nationality,” lecture delivered in Boston, December 7, 1869.
53. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916): 86–97.
54. Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365, 609 U.S. ___ (June 30, 2026), slip opinion https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf, reviewing Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” 90 Fed. Reg. 8449 (Jan. 29, 2025) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-01-29/html/2025-02007.htm. See also Amy Howe, “Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship,” SCOTUSblog, June 30, 2026 https://scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-trumps-order-ending-birthright-citizenship.
55. Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” (Jan. 20, 2025), and Executive Order 14173, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” (Jan. 21, 2025).
56. Pew Research Center, “Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition,” June 26, 2025 (validated voter study). https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trumps-2024-victory-a-more-racially-and-ethnically-diverse-voter-coalition/
57. Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
58. Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
59. Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), and From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
60. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), ch. 9, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.”
61. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018).
62. Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States” (1935) and “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms” (1946), in The Writings of Melanie Klein, vols. 1 and 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975).
