Obsessed with dominating Iran through unmitigated violence, Trump channels age-old American pathologies
To derail and defeat Trump, we need a broader public awareness of how the president's sociopathy synergizes with long-standing, malevolent conceptions of the United States
Novelist and Iraq War veteran Phil Klay has published one of the more clarifying pieces I’ve read about the violence-worshipping approach the Trump administration is applying to its illegal war on Iran. Klay identifies a tendency that may now click into sharper view for anyone paying moderate attention to MAGA’s war in the Middle East: “the administration’s delight in displays of violence and domination.” We can see this in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s clear glorying in the killing of Iranian armed forces, his talk about punching down and silent death for sailors whose ship was torpedoed far from the combat zone. Trump engages in it, too, claiming that the Navy finds it more “fun” to destroy ships than to capture them, and speaking in coldly sociopathic terms about killing Iranian leaders that the administration had identified as possible constituents of a new Iranian government. Klay rightly calls out as well the administration’s promulgation of videos that make the war look like a game, interlacing cartoonish violence with real-world footage of U.S. strikes: war as entertainment, war as fun, war as something we should all get off on doing.
Klay ties this embrace of violence for violence’s sake with a Trump administration fallacy that conflates the infliction of violence with an actual war strategy: the idea that if you simply cause enough pain and suffering, you can dominate an enemy and impose terms of surrender. Here, Klay hits a fundamental point for understanding why Trump’s ill-planned and unjustified attack on Iran is so quickly going awry: “The enemy always gets a vote, and even after a victorious campaign, the effect of war on a population may have complex, unwanted and sometimes catastrophic consequences.” In the context of Iran, one basic application of this insight is that the wanton killing of Iranian civilians and destruction of civil infrastructure might actually increase public support for the theocratic regime that has so recently gunned down thousands of Iranian protestors.
Not coincidentally — because it is so bedrock to Trump and his conduct of this war — Jamelle Bouie recently hit a similar theme, asking why the Trump administration has seemed unable to anticipate obvious counter-moves by the Iranians. Bouie ties this inability to Trump’s fundamentally narcissistic character, observing that, “Over his decades on the public stage, we have seen little to no evidence that he believes in the existence of other minds.” This is a shocking but I believe accurate assessment; it speaks to the president’s severe psychological limitations, and ultimately to his inability to govern the country in a way that doesn’t court national disaster via personal, political catastrophe.
Yet Trump’s sociopathic celebration of violence (as Klay describes) and his failure to fundamentally grasp the full meaning of the existence of other minds and interests (as Bouie describes) should not be viewed simply as the president’s unique pathologies — even though, as the chief executive, the misrule and mayhem these shortcomings enable are vast. If we are to be honest about the larger question of why Trump was elected president not once but twice, and more specifically about why there is still substantial public support for his illegal, shambolic war, we need to recognize that Trump in fact shares these dire tendencies with substantial swathes of the American public — at least insofar as Americans conceive of those who have had the bad fortune to be born outside of our country’s borders.
This binary mindset — a faith in the efficacy of American violence alongside a disregard for the innocents and societies caught in the crosshairs of U.S. firepower — was on glaring display at the start of the war on terror and the United States’ modern entanglements in the Middle East. It underlay the initial widespread U.S. support for the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Afghanistan; was the bedrock on which the administration proceeded to lie the country into the necessity of conquering Iraq; and underlay the amorphous, deluded “war on terror” that conceived of American arms as the tool for cleansing the world of an implacable enemy.
Now, in Trump regime appeals to purported Iranian evil and irrationality, in the notion that violence is the only language this backwards people understands, in the conflation of the theocratic regime and ordinary Iranians (despite superficial appeals to the citizenry to rise up), the violence and blindness that characterized the war on terror are on full display. And they are laid barer than ever, shorn of accompanying claims that the United States is also engaged in spreading democracy and human rights, another lie told to justify the Afghanistan and Iraq debacles.
But this vision funnels back centuries, all the way back to colonists and then American citizens perpetually at war with North America’s native inhabitants — the lesser races deemed only to understood the language of the sword and the gun. It is a thread of violence and dehumanization that feels like a part of the American DNA. And you can see the mentality it has repeatedly enabled when it erupts into the present, for instance as the president speaks of his desire to “take” Iran’s oil, just as he believes he had a right to “take” the oil of Venezuela: because his superior ability to engage in violence means that he can, and because those from whom he takes it are beneath consideration.
An enormous source of Trump’s political power lies in how his personal pathologies align so well with America’s pathologies; combined with his con man’s skill at reading a room and taking feral America’s racing pulse, he has embodied his supporters’ darkest desires and grievances, enabling a baseline loyalty from enough voters to twice put him into the White House. But just because Trump is channeling primordial aspects of the national character doesn’t mean that he’s somehow expressing some unavoidable truth and destiny for our country, or its place in the world. In what I would readily acknowledge as a mixed blessing, the downside for Trump, and this darker vision of America, is that the president’s own undisguised personal sociopathy helps expose our national penchant for violence and domination as the moral sicknesses that they are.
While he may be the only American politician of our time who possesses the shamelessness, charisma, and showmanship to rally an electorally-critical number of Americans with such dark appeals, Trump is also a singularly grotesque advertisement for these values and his own claim to power. Perhaps most importantly, Trump has shown the folly of believing that a man who lives to dominate won’t eventually get around to trying to dominate everyone, including his own supporters; of believing that a man who revels in violence wouldn’t eventually get around to using the power of the U.S. military to plunder the world, and in the process violate his central pledge to the MAGA base not to embroil the U.S. in more forever wars; and of believing that such a violent and domineering character wouldn’t eventually seek to directly hurt even his own voters, as he is doing now with his cuts to health care and apparent determination to make inflation or even stagflation into permanent parts of our national life.
In so vigorously exposing some of the ugliest strains of the collective American character as self-defeating and morally indefensible, in taking our nation through this dark passage of a war built on such obvious betrayal and destined for defeat, Trump has provided the country with an opportunity to name, denounce, and unravel a vision of America that implicates all of us in murder, depravity, and collective impoverishment.