"A glimpse into the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture"

 

Trump’s obsession with violence is more than a grotesque fixation on power and cruelty. It is a commentary on politics as pathology, a grim theater in which authoritarianism reveals its inner logic. Under Trump, politics is no longer about governance or vision. It is about the intoxication of destruction, the fetishization of cruelty, and the staging of violence as both spectacle and ritual.

On the individual level, it is the grotesque display of a delusional mind that can only feel alive through the embrace of terror that finds its emotional register only in the language of threat and annihilation. His boast that he “loves the smell of deportations in the morning,” a sadistic parody of Robert Duvall’s iconic line in Apocalypse Now— “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”—is not merely an offhand provocation.

It is a glimpse into the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture, where cruelty is transfigured into pleasure, violence becomes the grammar of belonging, and politics itself degenerates into a performance of derangement. 

In Trump’s hands, deportation is no longer a bureaucratic measure but an ecstatic ritual of exclusion, a celebration of malignant aggression that lays bare what the fascist subject looks like when cruelty is its only source of joy.

The terror of fascism produced a number of commentaries on the fascist personality and subject. Some Commentaries by Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno and, of course, Freud are relevant here. Reich long ago insisted that fascism grows out of an “irrational character structure” in which repressed drives are transfigured into obedience, hatred, and a perverse pleasure in cruelty.

Adorno deepened this insight, noting that the fascist demagogue eroticizes violence, offering his followers the delusional notion that cruelty is a source of collective pleasure. Freud had already warned in Civilization and Its Discontents that aggression is woven into the very fabric of human drives, a force that seeks expression in humiliation, exploitation, and annihilation when left unchecked by culture and conscience.

Trump in this photo and commentary makes clear how his embrace of violence ties cruelty to pleasure. Erich Fromm later sharpened this analysis with his concept of “malignant aggression.” Erich Fromm suggests that such aggression was not defensive but ecstatic, a passion for annihilation experienced as intoxicating. 

Trump’s post embodies precisely this malignant aggression, turning state violence into a spectacle of pornographic pleasure and belonging, a ritualized performance in which militarized cruelty itself becomes the ground of agency.

What emerges here is not the sober language of governance but the delirious performance of spectacularized sadism where violence becomes the end itself and the exclusive mode of state rule. Trump’s boast is more than a grotesque slip of the tongue. It is the utterance of a deranged mind for whom cruelty is the only register of feeling and terror the only idiom of power.

This is politics transfigured into pathology, a criminogenic mode of rule that normalizes lawlessness, and a necropolitical order that elevates the management of death and suffering into the very principle of sovereignty. Here, governance is reduced to the staging of annihilation, and the state is recast as an apparatus of terror whose legitimacy lies in its capacity to inflict pain, humiliation, and disposability. 

As Anthony DiMatteo puts it "From the Heart of Darkness (the Congo holocaust) to Apocalypse Now (the Vietnam war) to American fascism - all in the name of supremacy and subjugation."

-Henry Giroux