While the bulk of my empirical work has focused on authoritarian imaginaries in Syria and Yemen, here I want to take what I have learned in the Middle East analytically and use it to reverse relations and provincialize the United States. No more in the US than elsewhere does it pay to ignore ideological investments and libidinal satisfactions when trying to understand what binds authoritarian-minded followers to their leaders. And in the example of the US, it is impossible not to suppose that many, even most of Trump’s adherents suffer some level of dissonance in having to pretend he is anything but a continuous performance of the vulgar, rude, and grotesquely immoral actions that are his stock in trade. How are we to explain the license these supporters afford Trump to exercise power arbitrarily and act, as he once famously boasted of himself, with seemingly limitless impunity? In the story I want to tell, granting such license to Trump enables supporters to cathect onto the violence and aggression that suffuses his freedom. So, in addition to the dissonance, fundamental ambivalences are also in play, as, for example, between adherents’ desire to upend the system and the longing for some mythic order. By toggling their ambivalence, MAGA loyalists are able to tolerate the dissonance in exchange for the pleasure of the cathexis. This is what Fredric Jameson, in his account of ideology, describes as a “kind of psychic compromise or horse-trading, which strategically arouses fantasy content within careful symbolic containment structures which defuse it, gratifying intolerable, unrealizable, properly imperishable desires only to the degree to which they can again be laid to rest.” Ideology manages collective anxieties and sociopolitical incompatibilities by allowing dissonances to be contained and displaced, as Jameson notes so astutely, but also to be disavowed.
How does this work both in general theoretical terms and in the peculiar specificities of Trump’s America? As containment: ideology operates by making what are essentially social and historical anxieties seem natural and inevitable, gratifying desires, as Jameson says, largely to the extent that they are kept in check. Containment is also at work when people cathect onto objects that cannot ultimately satisfy. It generates modes of hyper-identification that enable the fantasy of having a share in celebrity glamour (or whatever), without being required to believe we could ever begin to imitate the exemplar. Jameson felicitously termed such instances a “fantasy bribe,” and in the context of thriving right populism in the current US political universe, the bribe functions rhetorically by arousing white-supremacist feelings of solidarity while paving over or otherwise managing white working-class discontent—and what must be (at least among a subset of evangelicals) a measure of moral revulsion. Jameson and others, including Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, have theorized containment in terms of Sigmund Freud’s account of condensation in his dream-work analysis. As Butler tells us, underpinning ideology are unconscious modes of condensation, where “condensation names how disparate psychic and social elements are arbitrarily connected with one another and reduced to a single reality.” These modes function like the shark in Jameson’s (and Žižek’s) analyses of the movie Jaws (1975)where the sublimely over-sized animal stands in for—condenses—a host of inchoate fears.
Also similar to Freudian dream work and allied with the dynamic of condensation, ideology operates through displacement: it relocates uncomfortable fears onto new objects, allaying anxieties by displacing the unbearable onto a fantasy Other. For those subject to the appeal of Donald Trump, displacement helps explain how he derives political advantage from direct attacks on Muslims or Blacks or immigrants or LGBTQ+ people, to name some obvious examples. In our own times, this displacement onto the Other—onto the monstrous figure of the immigrant or the SNAP recipient (as revitalized welfare queen)—can rightly be regarded as resulting from neoliberal policies and the effects of de-industrialization. But there are other communities demonized politically such as trans people and Muslims where political economy conditions fall short in explaining the attraction. Moreover, white working-class discontent cannot explain either Trump supporters’ openness to violence or their appetite for the continuous spectacle of gratuitous cruelty.
Ideology also operates as disavowal. The psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni used the term to describe how people rationalize their lives by acknowledging and dismissing simultaneously. The phrase, “I know very well and yet nevertheless” exemplifies this mode of ideological coping, a distancing from accountability that has implications for politics. In the case of Trump supporters in the US, disavowal typically works like this: I know very well that he shouldn’t be making fun of disabled people, but he is funny. Or: I know very well that he lies, but politicians never tell the truth. Or: I know very well that he said those lewd things about women, but it is just locker room talk—and boys will be boys. Disavowal goes beyond denial in that it poses the problem it works to dismiss, so realities that cannot be denied can still be ignored. Disavowal expresses the contradiction it simultaneously repudiates. And it suggests a degree of pleasure to be derived from the secret implicit logic of the self-sanctioned transgression.
Arguably, nowhere is ideology more in action than in Trump’s Truth Social postings and the incitement to acclaim, sycophancy, pleasure, and repugnance they generate. There are, granted, a myriad of posts to choose from, but the video showcased here is both emblematic and befuddling in ways that merit further scrutiny. On the surface, given its posting on Trump’s own Truth Social, the video is an odd-seeming parody of his manifest delusions of grandeur. And, indeed, it was originally posted by a detractor in jest. Like many a Truth Social post, however, it was appropriated by team Trump and repurposed into a powerful simultaneous display and occasion of ideological disavowal with revenge at the center. With Trump figured as a rock star dressed in an Uncle Sam-like American flag outfit while playing piano, guitar, and drums to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the video places him in a full stadium of adoring fans, and, at one point, accompanied in the background by dancing cheerleaders, he clutches his guitar in an exhibition of familiar phallic mimesis.
The video in no way pretends Trump himself is really playing the instruments. On the contrary, a close-up of his AI-generated fingers on the keys emphasizes the disingenuousness of the piece—this isn’t a deep fake but a superficial one. All the more effectively, then, does it operate within the logic of its presumed addressees, who know what it is to be ignored or rejected—but who see here that they can not only fantasize a world with the adoring crowds and the multi-talented performance but also inhabit it. For the brief period of the video everything is within reach. What Trump as the everyman of compensatory vengeance can’t actually do, he makes up for by acting as if he can. This is not so much another instance of Trumpian public dissimulation but a reject’s guide to indulging fantasies of abundant talent and cheering crowds. It is the grotesque boy getting all the pretty girls. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true; it doesn’t matter that it’s not believed; it doesn’t even matter that it’s couched in irreverence. But it does matter that we are all, to varying degrees, enlisted in it. Trump offers to all comers the chance to have the last laugh along with him—and whatever anyone else might have to say about it is immaterial. His emotional freedom is an identification magnet for anyone who has ever been rejected or underestimated—or criticized by woke know-it-alls: “I know very well that this isn’t true, but nevertheless it speaks to me.”
Trump arouses and manages his followers’ desire for revenge in a process psychoanalysts might describe as adjacent to jouissance. The vengeful rage he taps into betrays an enjoyment inextricably linked to the death drive, and in this sense the politics it motivates can be reasonably termed fascist. The Trump phenomenon is classically fascist because it depends on followers’ identification with a strong, charismatic leader endowed with quasi supernatural powers (like surviving an assassination). The leader stands at the head of a system devoted to rigidly hierarchical forms of sociality. Fascism maintains, as does MAGA, an essentialist ontology of peoplehood, conjuring a mythic past of lost glory projected onto an aspirational future that cannot and need not be delivered. It celebrates a form of hypermasculinity whose power is tethered not only to fantasies of domesticity but to a homosociality rooted in the pleasures to be taken from the violent Othering of the vulnerable. It creates the permissive conditions for an organized chaos guided by aggression. And unlike some accounts of fascism, in which adherents are necessarily true believers, fascist ideology, in my understanding, accommodates a range of intensities and orientations toward belief, attachment, and desire. Fascism may aspire to the total surrender of adherents, but it can live and even thrive without it.
When social scientists wonder what’s wrong with working-class Americans that makes them willing to violate their material interests to vote Republican, they are assuming that our interests as individuals are coherently related to one another, when in truth they often are not. Scholars frequently also assume that affective investments and cognitive interests can be neatly disentangled. Instead, people in many ways are ambivalent. We want the state and we don’t want it at the same time. Or we want aspects of the state but not others. We can take pleasure in sentimental fictions, while also being repulsed by their power to manipulate. We can worry about wasting water and also want green parks. Trump’s brazenness can be a source of fascination—even prompt a certain repugnant admiration—as well as being a trigger for despair, comedy, and/or political action and even all these three and more simultaneously.
Trump’s Great Gatsby Halloween Party of 2025, on the eve of forty-two million Americans being denied their much needed food benefits, was a master class in MAGA’s ostentatious disregard for the suffering of ordinary people. To be clear, the steady barrage of cruelty may ultimately backfire by congealing routine incoherencies for many people into a more pronounced set of untenable contradictions. After all, as comedians pointed out, things didn’t end so well for Jay Gatsby. But so far, at least, Trump’s performative refusal to demonstrate care and his willingness to bully have been part of the fascist appeal. Precisely his refusal to pretend to the usual pious bromides of politics—which is mistaken at times for honesty—is key to his magnetism.
Holding the Gatsby party the night before SNAP benefits were set to lapse brings ideology’s workings into bold relief yet again. The party arouses the dream image of American opulence, while limiting it to those who not only can afford the indulgence, but are willing to relate sycophantically in public to a president whose narcissism demands absolute fealty. For those of us in the opposition, the party might displace anxieties temporarily onto the spectacle of a woman in a martini glass, where being revulsed by our own captivation is part of the scene’s luridness. Supporters who are not blind to the contradictions are kept in play in a state of disavowal, where they sense very well the underlying obscenity, while recognizing, even celebrating, the billionaires’ right to their singular enjoyment. Or perhaps the idea is that everyone would do the same thing if they could, or that, in the end, the people on SNAP are gaming the system, too. Or perhaps it’s one answer on one occasion and another the next time the contradictions become so curiously blatant.
To conclude: Trump’s emancipation from presidential gravitas, the rule of law, diplomatic decorum, the obligation to respect facts, literacy, or the norms of basic human behavior and compassion titillates supporters while engaging most of us, to supporters’ further titillation. By identifying with him, Trump’s MAGA constituents’ enable their own pleasure in his freedom to disregard elementary human decencies—or, as Jon Stewart put it, “to not give a fuck about not giving a fuck.” To be sure, Trump’s populism feeds on the fact that a great many average citizens are feeling profoundly disaffected from the polity. Yet, crucially, as Lauren Berlant and Aaron Schuster have argued independently, the pent-up outrage motors an intense identification with Trump’s emotional freedom. He is free to say and do whatever he wants—to voice racist thoughts, to bully those he identifies as weaklings, to flaunt his pornographic desires in public, to make fun of disabled people, to flagrantly abuse public coffers for private gain, to grift—and all but incessantly to lie.
As the video of Trump jamming to Journey lays bare, in the course of cultivating citizens’ attachments, ideology complicates matters of belief and unbelief, so that people can know things and not know them at the same time. People can know something and feel something quite contradictory, moreover—their affect outrunning their knowledge or their judgment. And anyone can experience the irony of and inane pleasure in “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a video that is flamboyantly unbelievable. Ideology might generate ardent loyalty in some cases such as among MAGA loyalists, but at least as effectively in political terms, it thrives on the ambivalence of less ardent, more conflicted supporters. For some self-proclaimed independents, as noted at the start, this means toggling between their desires for an unruly undoing of politics as usual and their compensatory attachment to a mythic order of former and soon-to-be future greatness. Ambivalence plays an enabling role for supporters who enjoy watching him destroy public institutions despite their fundamental attachment to order. Often this ambivalence is resolved practically by undermining working-class economic interests even while satisfying something powerful in white, masculinist constituencies (whether working class or not).
Those of us who are completely repelled by the cruelty and the corruption are still interpellated—hailed into reacting to and being continually surprised by a world whose grotesqueries, parody, irreverences, and lethal disregard for fundamental guardrails cannot but hack our attention—a potential making of solidarity in the breach, a reach for possibilities in that now teasing oscillation between fascination and exhaustion. Trump, in dominating the attentional economy, in other words, may be generating conditions for solidarity among those summoned to attention, those who can’t help but feel strong reactions to his provocations. The shared experience of these reactions (however diverse the reactions themselves) may lead to new political possibilities. Or not. One can at least hope. In the meantime, we are all his addressees.
Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from an article originally published in In the Moment, the blog of Critical Inquiry, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to critical thought in the arts and humanities.
