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America’s Toddler-in-Chief: When Personal Grievance Becomes National Policy
If progressives hope to counter Trump effectively, we must remember: We are not simply debating policy, we are confronting a man whose every political act is an attempt to soothe his private wounds.
Oct 04, 2025
If someone treats us badly or hurts our feelings, we feel resentful. Such a response is a normal and hard-wired reaction to experiences of rejection, neglect, and criticism. Such resentment might be a passing feeling or it might endure over time. Despite being advised to practice “forgiveness,” it’s possible or even probable that most of us, on some level, remember and keep alive our grievances, usually harboring them in private.
But do you know what normal people don't do? We don't draw up an “enemies list,” and make it our mission in life to exact retribution of some kind. If we do, we're weird and a bit crazy.
Welcome to the psychological world of President Donald Trump. He kicks Jimmy Kimmel off the air because Kimmel makes fun of him. He brings charges against James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and the “Biden crime family” because they were critical of him and judged him. When California Gov. Gavin Newsom mocks him, his response is to proudly come up with the nickname, “Gavin Newscum.” He threatens General Mark Milley with “execution” and makes jokes about the violent attack on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband. In response to Bruce Springsteen’s critiques from the stage in Manchester, UK, he attacked the Boss in a highly personal, peculiar, and bizarre way, posting this on Truth Social: “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out 'prune' of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT!” Trump’s actions and reactions to challenges or criticism of any kind come from an extremely personal, private, and insecure place, reminiscent of kids slinging insults in a schoolyard.
In other words, Trump turns everything political into something personal. His personal psychology is on display in his public actions all the time—it’s hiding in plain sight. And any guardrails or censor that should normally maintain a screen or at least some separation between his personal psychology and his public role have completely disintegrated, if it they were ever there to begin with. A leader unable to keep these two domains separate is invariably weakened and ineffective, and we’re all paying the price for this breakdown.
Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action.
A senior consultant in Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation used to teach progressive leaders that there is—and should be—a difference between public and private values, that in private life, relationships are ends in themselves while for public actors, relationships are, and should be, more instrumental and transactional. Self-sacrifice is normal in personal relationships, while self-interest guides public action. For political leaders, personal gratification should take a backseat to public service. Of course, there is often a blurring of these boundaries, but, in general, when these domains get too confused, the consequences are usually disastrous. We see in Donald Trump an extreme example of what happens when someone in public is unable to separate the pressures of his or her private psychology and public actions.
In Donald Trump’s world, the political is always personal. Barriers between the two worlds, the sort of censors and self-restraint that effective leaders are obligated to exercise in public life, have completely collapsed. You don’t need to be Freud to see how much his policies are suffused with his personal and private needs, defenses, and insecurities. He attacks Canada because its leaders had a “nasty” response to his suggestion that it become our 51st state. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is “disrespectful,” and so Trump withholds aid. His ignorance about policy reflects the fact that he recklessly acts on private impulses and not thoughtful reflection. He lies compulsively and continually, and always in the service of bombastic claims of perfection and self-exoneration. He frees criminals and criminalizes dissent, not out of high-minded principles but out of base impulses involving his personal narcissistic needs and vulnerabilities—not public interests.
Obviously, public figures and leaders are human beings with personal psychologies that invariably influence their public political actions. Effective leaders, however, learn to subordinate or at least sublimate personal psychological conflicts in the interest of being politically strategic, negotiating compromises, and focusing in a laser-like way on those desirable political outcomes that serve a broader good. No one is saying that politicians leave their egos at the door, but, rather, that the best ones seek to restrain these egos in order to achieve their political goals.
Trump is the opposite. He acts (out) entirely on the basis of personal animus and internal conflicts and then, only retroactively, spins a tale that paints his words and actions as principled or visionary. He will act on a small-minded personal impulse like humiliating Zelenskyy (who was “disrespectful”) in the Oval Office, but then argue that what was clearly an idiosyncratic personal response was really part of his efforts to single-handedly solve the Ukraine-Russian war and insure world peace. He feels slighted by other world leaders and then reactively trash talks them in public, all the while implying that his derogatory language and claims are really part of his efforts to make America great again and to promote a high-minded “America First” agenda without a hint of awareness that the real psychic motivation behind his actions involves making him, on a purely personal level, “great” and “first.”
The nature of the psychological engine that drives Trump to so constantly leak his personal issues onto his public political postures, the real reasons he simply cannot keep the seamier sides of his psychology from flooding his actions as president, all stem from his core psychological makeup. Again, let’s be clear: Trump’s psychology is hiding in plain sight. This isn’t some long-distance psychiatric conjecture or diagnosis. Trump is driven to avoid or refute any situation, any moment, in which he might potentially feel or be seen as one-down, inadequate, inferior, or otherwise a failure. He lives in dire fear of such feelings and instinctively, automatically, and desperately has to go out of his way to communicate the opposite. We see it every day. We see it in Trump’s constant clownish boasting and self-aggrandizing arrogance. When the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal suggested business sentiment had soured in response to his tariffs, Trump lashed back, calling it "globalist," "antiquated," and "very bad for the USA"—before promising, absurdly, that "we will WIN on everything!!!”
Everyone is so used to Trump’s compulsive sense of grievance and defensive arrogance that it no longer seems to be as much the impairment that it actually is. No one blinks an eye when he makes remarks, barely concealed within his word salad, about “having the best words,” being “the best President for black people since Abraham Lincoln,” or knowing more about taxes, the military, climate change—well, pretty much everything—than the world’s experts.
My point here is that Trump has no choice, no freedom at all, to edit or censor remarks like these because the psychic threats they seek to mitigate—feelings of shame, inferiority, or failure—are so threatening to him that they leave him no room at all to be cautious, modest, or to seek common ground. While all politicians, like all people, bring their personal psychologies into their public work lives, Trump’s interior life is a clown car of neurotic conflicts that have seized control of his executive functions and shape his every public statement and action.
This is exactly why Trump can’t tolerate Newsom’s mocking tweets. They hit him exactly where it hurts the most, namely, his ego, his narcissism, and his profound insecurities connected to feeling small, to being seen in any way as a loser. And this is the precise tone that those of us in the progressive opposition should take when we challenge the Trump regime in public.
There is nothing funny, nothing at all, about the systemic harm that Trump is inflicting on all of us. And our struggle to repair and reverse such harm involves gaining and wielding political power and not psychiatric explanation. But if progressives hope to counter Trump effectively, we must remember: We are not simply debating policy. We are confronting a man whose every political act is an attempt to soothe his private wounds. Exposing that truth is not a sideshow. It is part of the strategy.
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This Is Not a Drill: Bravery as Strategy in the Face of American Tragedy
In recent memory, the prospect of a president preventing congressional elections from taking effect has been unimaginable. But today, it is not at all hard to imagine that this could happen.
Oct 02, 2025
Succumbing to fear often leads to mistakes, including inaction, or too little action, too late.
Look to the year ahead. Those counting on the 2026 elections to provide a course correction should think again.
In the United States, in any normal midterm election, the party that holds the White House loses control of Congress. This was true in 1994 with Clinton, 2002 and 2006 with Bush, 2010 and 2014 with Obama, 2018 with Trump, and 2022 with Biden. It is a truism which—given how deeply unpopular the Trump administration is right now—should remain true in 2026. But it may not.
In 2020, Trump was faced with a classic “Dictator’s Dilemma.” He feared that if he relinquished power, he would be brought to account for his actions. On January 6th, 2021, he attempted a violent coup that was only thwarted due to the refusal of the U.S. military and his own Vice President to subvert the will of the voters.
Now Trump is back and he is faced with a similar prospect. As his advisor Peter Navarro said on public radio last week, the mindset of the Trump administration is that it must destroy its political opponents prior to the 2026 elections, and that it cannot allow the Democrats to take control of Congress next year.
In recent memory, the prospect of a president preventing congressional elections from taking effect has been unimaginable. But today, it is not at all hard to imagine that this could happen.
For instance, unlike the Electoral College, there are no constitutional provisions that speak directly to how a new House of Representatives is seated. Instead, the rules governing the swearing-in of new House members are determined by the outgoing House. If competing House delegations arrive from states like Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, California, and Virginia, will Speaker Johnson and the narrow outgoing Republican majority seat the representatives-elect certified by state election authorities? Or will they follow Trump’s dictates, as they have just done this week in refusing to seat Representative-elect Grijalva of Arizona?
Of course, this is only one possibility—one that Americans may never be so lucky as to face. On the night of Thursday, September 25th, Trump issued his second anti-anti-fascist order. Unlike his first order, which was heavy on rhetoric and light on action, this second order directed all federal law enforcement to “investigate . . . disrupt and dismantle” any individuals and organizations engaged in “anti-fascism . . . anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
We all knew this was coming. This is not a drill.
The following day, the architect of Trump’s ICE policies, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, described the Democratic Party as, “not a political party; it is a domestic extremist organization." Meanwhile, Trump summoned America’s top military officers to Quantico to tell them to prepare for war, even as he escalated his threats against major U.S. cities and other American countries.
In the past, some argued that the way Trump tried to rule was “personalist,” a way of saying that he makes government all about himself. Others argued that he represented a broader authoritarian movement that mixes big-state capitalism with racial nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Today, it should be clear that both arguments were correct. We all knew this was coming. This is not a drill.
The psychological toll is real. After the deaths of so many good people, from the Jewish congregants murdered by a white supremacist at the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, to the massacre by a rightwing religious fundamentalist of 49 people at the Pulse night club in Orlando, to the young woman rammed with a car by a neo-Nazi in Charlottesville, to the dozens of Americans killed by paramilitaries and police in 2020 while protesting against the police murder of George Floyd, to the many people who have died in ICE detention centers, to the two Minnesota legislators and their spouses shot by a rightwing extremist in the Twin Cities, to the teenagers murdered by a white supremacist at Evergreen High School on September 10th and the father killed by an ICE agent after dropping his children off at school in Chicago, Americans have been forced to reckon with what was once unthinkable. It is not only the death of our republic that we grieve.
In times like these we must remember that repressive violence often fails. This can be particularly true when government repression is in a middle range.
Relatively low levels of repression can sometimes keep a lid on social protest, discouraging citizens from moving from words to deeds. High levels of repression can often drive protest movements underground, making it difficult for activists to communicate with each other, much less with the broader public.
Because Trump and his policies are so unpopular, low levels of repression are no longer effective. Instead, his administration is escalating its use of violence. And while he has expressed admiration for brutal dictators like Kim Jong Un of North Korea, for the moment Trump does not have the ability to successfully suppress the democratic opposition. As a result, American communities are experiencing repression that oscillates in the middle range from low to high and back to low again.
Social movement studies show that if repression is in this middle range that is when it most often backfires. In this middle range, repression can produce popular outrage even as it fails to quell public protest. This is why we must be brave right now: Not because courage is admirable, but because it is opportune, smart, and necessary.
We must be brave right now: Not because courage is admirable, but because it is opportune, smart, and necessary.
What then must we do? First, Americans must publicly show our bravery. We call street protests “demonstrations” because of what they show: They are demonstrations of strength. They reveal depth of feeling, they proclaim numbers, they show who has overcome fear and is prepared to act. Small and mid-sized protests are happening daily in hundreds of American communities right now. But for the moment, they are not demonstrating the level of national opposition that actually exists to what Trump is doing.
Instead, most are waiting for the next planned major national day of action on October 18th. In the past, I have been an organizer of nationally coordinated protests like these. I understand the rhythms of coalition work and the need to assemble resources and organize mobilization. But we should not get stuck in only one pattern of organizing. It has been four months since the last major national day of action. In the absence of mass public demonstrations, Democratic elected officials are left as the primary opposition voices to Trump. That is not good for them—and certainly not for for us.
American labor unions have the power to lead a democratic opposition. Those who are union members or in union families have an important role to play. Some unions have provided significant leadership already. But anyone who was in the streets of Detroit in 1997, Seattle in 1999, Los Angeles in 2006, Madison in 2011, Chicago in 2012, or of Oklahoma City and Charleston, West Virginia in 2018, knows that our unions have the ability to bring many more people into street demonstrations. Labor unions also often have strong ties with community, faith, student, veteran, farmer, and environmental organizations. Together, they have the ability to move more people into the streets, more often, and on shorter notice.
Second, law enforcement officers and members of the U.S. military also have power. Despite Trump’s demands for personal loyalty to him and him alone, many officers and enlisted personnel take their allegiances and their oaths to the constitution and the Republic very seriously.
Historically, both in the United States and in many other countries, military and police forces have sometimes refused orders requiring them to violate their oaths. At times, they have taken the side of the people against authoritarian governments. Being lectured by a chickenhawk about making war on the American people could not have sat well.
Today we face the unthinkable. But the resilience and resistance of American cities show that another world is possible.
This is another reason that public demonstrations are important; they show those entrusted with public safety where the people stand. It is also one reason why disciplined nonviolence is critical; the contrast between legitimate protest and illegitimate repression must be clear. And it suggests that the US needs its moral authorities—its religious, community, and cultural leaders—to lead an ongoing campaign against all political violence.
This brings me to a third insight about this time in American history. At the moment, our cities are where the current crisis is being determined and where the possibility of a better world is being built. American democracy is deepest in our communities. They are where neighbors look after neighbors, schools support children and families, and government agencies are closest to the people they serve. Our cities, towns, and villages are where much needed reforms to provide good housing, healthy food, meaningful work, sustainable economies, sanctuary from violence, representative elections, and more democracy in every part of our daily lives are taking shape. For these reasons, our cities are the places both most targeted by Trump and they are where he has met his most determined resistance.
Petra Kelly once told us that, “If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.” Today we face the unthinkable. But the resilience and resistance of American cities show that another world is possible. We simply must be brave enough to demonstrate our resolve, to recognize that there is no going back to the imaginary safety of the pre-Trump era, and to build a new system as he tears the old one down around us. The national institutions of the old republic cannot provide salvation. Our cities, our community institutions, our unions, and our courage in demonstrating the spiritual power of the democratic creed are the potent mix that can overcome our common tragedy.
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Dissent for a Democratic Revival
If hope is to survive these dark and dangerous times, the scattered majority cannot afford to lose its democratic voice.
Sep 24, 2025
The premise of After Empire: Myth, Rhetoric, and Democratic Revival (which I coauthored with Oscar Giner last year) is that the backlash to the decline of US empire bodes ill for democracy. Indeed, the roots of democracy are being torn up in the name of “Making America Great Again.” Authoritarian rule is ascendant. While not dead yet, collective self-rule in America—whether it is called liberal democracy, electoral democracy, representative democracy, or constitutional democracy—is rapidly disintegrating. The alternative of reviving the nation’s flagging democracy, I want to suggest, must include the practice of deliberative dissent.
One can hope that democracy will bounce back, starting with the 2026 election, eventually to recover its previous status and perhaps even deepen its cultural roots. It is too early not to hope. Already, though, those who would defend democracy are operating on undemocratic terrain. Citizens speak up at the risk of their freedom and livelihood. Intimidation suppresses deliberation. Dissent is rendered unpatriotic. Voting, along with the attack on freedom of speech, is being engineered to prevent free and fair elections. And there is little evidence so far that the party out of power will rally the country’s scattered, fragmented, bullied, and increasingly demoralized majority to turn the tide of authoritarian rule.
If hope is to survive these dark and dangerous times, the scattered majority cannot afford to lose its democratic voice. The spirit of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, of the right to assemble peacefully, to protest, and to hold government accountable is a commitment to deliberation and nonviolent dissent as the lifeblood of democratic citizenship. Confronted with government intimidation and coercion, citizens who would, in the language of the First Amendment, “petition the Government for a redress of grievances” must weigh the consequences of silence relative to the costs of voicing criticism, and they must pragmatically consider whom to address, what to say, and how to say it. When and where to speak are less essential questions in a digital world where nearly anything said can be retrieved, decontextualized, and disciplined.
One can hope that democracy will bounce back...
Democratic dissent is rapidly becoming a fugitive practice. Fugitive democracy, in the late Sheldon Wolin’s terms, is “the best hope for a democratic revival” in exigent circumstances. It is necessarily an episodic intervention “in the service of commonality.” To become a small-d democrat, he maintains, is “to learn how to act collectively” as “democratic citizenries,” which requires going public, thereby helping “to constitute a ‘public’ and an ‘open’ politics.” (Democracy Incorporated, pp. 287, 289-90).
Deliberative democratic dissent (deliberative dissent for short) refers here to a hybrid political discourse that enacts democracy by objecting strongly to a perceived injustice in order to promote public deliberation and hold governing power accountable. It serves as a prompt to consider the reasons for and against a challenged measure, rule, policy, law, practice, or proposal, that is, to open debate and decision-making to public scrutiny, privileging nonviolence and persuasion in support of collective self-rule. The deliberative hybrid of dissent is realized most fully in discursive forms of speaking and writing, such as a speech delivered at a political rally or in a deliberative body, or an editorial or commentary published in a newspaper, magazine, or blog.
As a fugitive act against authoritarian rule, the challenge and the risk of engaging in deliberative democratic dissent necessitates careful consideration of how it is enacted, that is, how to cultivate a public prudently. Mitigating risk—short of eliminating it, for there is always a degree of risk when speaking publicly—is constructive. Speaking not only of democratic principles but in those principled ways contributes to the formation of a public confronting the emergence of an authoritarian juggernaut. Moreover, it advances democratic principles and practices in a manner harder to assail as radical, hateful, unpatriotic, conspiratorial, vengeful, violent, criminal, and otherwise alien.
Speaking of and in democratic terms is a gesture of affirmation, one of the two gestures essential to deliberative dissent. The other essential gesture is one of opposition. A gesture of affirmation locates the argument and its intended audience at a point of shared perception, opinion, attitude, or value. It identifies the speaker with the listener and claims shared convictions. The gesture of opposition locates a point of negation, disagreement, and disapproval resistant to a political or governmental posture, proposal, practice, or policy. The two gestures complement one another to constitute a statement of what one is for and against, consistent with democratic principles.
By way of brief example, both gestures were evident and intertwined when Illinois Governor JB Pritzker spoke out on August 25 against Trump’s developing plan to occupy Chicago with military troops, supposedly to fight crime. The governor’s gesture of opposition and disapproval took various forms. Among them, he insisted “there is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention,” and he then proceeded to elaborate on this point of disagreement with the Trump administration.
Pritzker reinforced the significance of his objection by interweaving a gesture of affirmation grounded in democratic principles that would be violated by a military intervention. The planned action, Pritzker insisted, is an illegal, unconstitutional, un-American invasion of the city for partisan gain. “This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see,” Pritzker warned, “where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored.” The public is asked to stand up for democracy over authoritarianism.
Enacting the double gesture of deliberative dissent is a principled and politically pragmatic way of reconstituting a democratic public. It sets in motion myriad ways of revivifying the nation’s democratic heritage and reframes present struggles in terms of democratic aspirations. It is a corrective to the downward spiral of a discourse of recrimination. It is dissent in a constructive voice, avoiding pitfalls while building a dynamic community that respects diversity, safeguards freedom, upholds equality, privileges the rule of law, seeks justice, conducts free and fair elections, and pursues the common good.
Enacting the double gesture of deliberative dissent is a principled and politically pragmatic way of reconstituting a democratic public.
William Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism (2017) draws on the principles of pluralism and egalitarianism to resist Trump’s endangerment of democracy. A politics of egalitarianism, he argues, is “the best available antidote to aspirational fascism.” Egalitarianism is relational, an engagement that traverses pluralism’s diversity—a diversity that includes working and middle classes, environmentalists, ethnic and racial minorities, and gender and sexual orientation communities among others—by articulating “agonistic respect across intersecting [and interdependent] constituencies” with a “focus on the question of equality.” Developing an egalitarian agenda is necessary “to recapture a [larger segment of a working-class] constituency that has been pulling away from pluralism,” he maintains. Doing so offers the best chance of drawing together disaffected citizenries, for “you cannot secure democratic pluralism unless and until its active supporters also become profoundly committed to reducing significantly class inequalities of income, job security, educational opportunity, retirement prospects, wealth, and conditions of work” (pp. xlii, 86, 97, 99, 105-6). Thus, Connolly develops a detailed agenda that aims to pull together and broaden a coalition of progressives.
Whether or not Connolly’s particular vision of a coalitional agenda gains traction in the current political crisis, it illustrates a process of constructing a positive defense of democracy in democratic terms. One might even ask if, through a similar process, an agenda could be constructed to bring progressives together with moderates on democratic grounds to blunt authoritarianism. In one configuration or another, exercising the democratic voice of deliberative dissent raises the prospect of forming a working coalition of the currently fragmented majority split along multiple fault lines. No one subset of a democratic public can achieve its aims alone, nor can it achieve everything it seeks in coalition with other subsets. But the collective public might advance together in sufficient numbers and on democratic terms in these exigent circumstances under a banner of intersecting interests and in the service of a commonality of citizenries to resist the authoritarian advance. One can hope.
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