Heart of Darkness. Trump is Dark Tetrad.
And for a Dark Tetrad ... SADISM IS THE POINT!!
Since we first published this article 14 months ago, more than 1,400 of you have joined us at PolitiSage. Now Trump is president again, and understanding his psychology is more important than ever. Read and weep, but also read it so you understand where he can go. Also, in the links below, you find analyses of his rapidly advancing dementia, which threatens all rational thought processes for a man whose sanity is unraveling at the speed of neurons.
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 41
They rage across history like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—these tyrants who crush peoples repressed for millennia by the standard-bearers of singular authority, with its reeking pride and ravenous greed and venal lust for power. Since the dawn of the 20th century, these living, breathing malignancies have let slip the dogs of war—the tawdry who goosestep in phalanxes, who slither and lie in wait on the jungle floor—these madmen who torture the betrayed in the blackened basements of Lubyanka and the squalid cells of Evin. They appear at the radical edges of human culture, on the frayed fringes of the ideological fabric at both liberal and conservative selvages. And from the deep—from the heart of darkness itself—they spawn hell.
At first glimpse, their hatreds seem like those of Ahab, whose “hot heart” bore the weight of the world’s seething malice—and, in the end, they are. In the beginning, however, their aggressions are the progeny of overweening hubris and self-elevation—the offspring of the self-crafted fantasies that they are done wrong because the world will not prostrate itself at their feet or because they claw a mere scratch of a loss into a gaping wound. When this personal darkness engages the collective archetypal shadow, it can set flame to continents. In psychological terms, a Dark Triad predator evolves into a Dark Tetrad monster.
As detailed by D. L. Paulhus and K. M. Williams in “The Dark Triad of Personality,” there are three attributes present in truly malevolent people: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy:
NARCISSISM is self-worship that ordains the superiority of oneself along the lines of race, class, masculine gender, ethnicity, national origin, ideology, or religion that are already extant in the person and therefore available to use in the evaluation of others with no potential loss of self-respect for the aggressor. Others will, of course, always be found lacking. For the aggressor, convinced of the “truth” of this “reality,” the reflection of his or her own image becomes mesmeric, for it is the image of a superior being. Those possessed of such arbitrarily elevated qualities are then entitled to privilege themselves while disenfranchising and abusing others.
MACHIAVELLIANISM—a psychological and perhaps neuropsychological disorder named for the political cruelty of Niccolò Machiavelli—is a characterized by manipulativeness, callousness, cunning, egoism, cold-blooded ambition, ruthlessness, and a thorough indifference to morality. Most Machiavellians (High Machs) also exhibit alexithymia: they cannot tell what others are feeling or even what they themselves are feeling. They will do anything to anybody to get what they want. However, Machiavellians are not focused on hurting others—they just couldn’t care less if other people get hurt or not.
PSYCHOPATHY is a neuropsychiatric disorder that has “strong genetic influences and which precipitates deleterious effects on widespread functioning networks, particularly within paralimbic regions of the brain.”[1] Psychopathy is characterized by deficient empathy, poor emotional response, and behavioral control, which result in “persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.” Psychopaths constitute roughly 4% of the American population—one in every 25 people. It is worth noting that psychopaths (not to be confused with the far softer, but still dangerous, sociopaths) are far more likely to be promoted on American organizations than their healthier fellows.
Despite how terrifying the Dark Triad personality is, we have not yet arrived at the harrowing specter of a Hitler or Stalin or Mao. One trait is missing.
SADISM: The Dark Triad becomes the Dark Tetrad with the addition of the vilest of all human evils—sadism.
The verbatim dictionary definitions of the word sadism, from Merriam-Webster, are:
1: the derivation of sexual gratification from the infliction of physical pain or humiliation on another person. 2a: delight in cruelty. 2b: extreme cruelty.
And herein find an observation rendered by Erin E. Buckels and her colleagues, a clinical demonstration of how much Dark Tetrads love to torture people:
Acts of apparent cruelty were captured using two laboratory procedures, and we showed that such behavior could be predicted.… Sadism [added to] Dark Triad measures predicted unprovoked aggression. … Sadists were willing to work for the opportunity to hurt an innocent person. In both studies, sadism emerged as an independent predictor of behavior reflecting an appetite for cruelty.
It is this sadism that ultimately defines the Dark Tetrad personality. It is the cruelty, the viciousness, the love of inflicting pain that means the Dark Tetrad knows no limit to what they will do to any person—man, woman, or child—or country—or planet. Fortunately, sadists account for only 1% of the population, but their impact is outsized and devastates humanity and the mind of the species.
But a more detailed notion may be more helpful, and it comes from psychologist Theodore Mollon, who cites four kinds of sadism. Each of these types reflects the temperament of the sadist:
Spineless sadism: These individuals display avoidant features to their behavior. They are insecure and lack courage, but they use these shortcomings to fuel their false bravado, among others. They tend to seek out powerless victims on whom to inflict pain.
Tyrannical sadism: These individuals display negativistic features and are energized through the menacing and brutalization of others. They crave and abuse power over others and use words as weapons to get others to submit to them. They are destructive, inhumane, and unmerciful.
Enforcing sadism: These individuals exhibit dependent features of sadism and find ways to “rightfully” inflict pain on others. They couch their torment in efforts to maintain order in this world through professions such as law enforcement and management. They take roles that give them the power to have control over others as well as seek out and punish those who don’t follow the rules, whether the rules refer to the laws or organizational practices.
Explosive sadism: These individuals are reactive and explosive in their displays of sadistic behavior. They can “blow” in a heartbeat and will direct their fury and rage at those around them. It’s as if they have been keeping feelings of humiliation stored up over time, and then when the final straw arrives, they explode. Explosive sadists have been noted to feel contrition after their outbursts. [2]
With Trump, we don’t know if his sadism expresses as a psychosexual problem or not. Despite the primary dictionary definition, not all people express sadism in a sexual way, even if they feel it.
Also, Trump’s personality does NOT seem to echo the Explosive Sadism” described in No. 4 above. Example: when he lost the first E. Jean Carroll defamation case and was fined $5 million dollars, he did NOT apologize. No, he promptly did it again—and got fined again.
So, it’s worth 5,000,000 smackeroos to this guy to be able to shoot of his mouth and viciously attack someone.
That leaves Nos. 1, 2 and 3—Spineless Sadism, Tyrannical Sadism and Enforcing Sadism—and those definitions seem extremely characteristic of his passions in that he seems “energized through the menacing and brutalization of others” and that he “craves and abuses power over others and use[s] words as weapons to get others to submit.” He is, as the definition puts it, “destructive, inhumane, and unmerciful.” And, he lusts after the presidency because it will give him “the power to have control over others as well as seek out and punish those who don’t follow the rules”—his rules, always his rules. Where the Spineless Sadism (No.1) comings in is in his incessant whining, I’m-done-wrong victimhood when he is broadsiding anybody and everybody who doesn’t give him his way. In short, he rants and has throws incessant temper tantrums.
Trump as the Dark Tetrad Chucky Mannequin for MAGA’s stoked hatred.
We have become almost inured to his hate faces. And his taunts. And his targeting. And we mustn’t go to sleep.
For standing behind him is an army that is mule-packing arsenals of weapons and is mentally twisted by a dark theopolitical philosophy shot through with the fascism—the fascism that, in the last century, put Jews, Roma, and gays to death by the millions—and, in its Spanish incarnation, made war on the “Spanish New Woman” in ways that rivaled the worst abuses indulged in by the Gestapo.
At first we thought, “Well, he’s ridiculous, and he’ll never get ahead.”
Then we thought, “Well, we don’t like this: he’s rousing the racism and white supremacy barely held under control by political correctness these long decades.”
Then we watched, with rising anxiety, as these people came out of the woodwork screaming abuse and openly inviting comparisons to the rise of Hitler in Germany.
Just a little more than a year ago, Donald Trump, under 91 criminal indictments and getting his backside kicked in court by E. Jean Carroll—and Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania—instructed the voluntarily enslaved to fawn in a manner not seen since the “Heil Hitler” salute of Third Reich infamy. NY State Senator Anna M. Kaplan (D-North Hills) issued the following statement:
Last night at a rally held by the former President, and today at a political rally held by a candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania, supporters were urged to hold up their right hands in a unified salute that should shock the conscience of every American for its remarkable similarity to the “Heil Hitler” salute used by the Nazis.
That was an open call—with permission overtly granted and encouraged—for MAGA devotees to embrace Nazism and the racism, violence, genocide, war, destructiveness, hatred, and oppression it espouses. This should teach us a lot about how incredibly deeply many, many whites want to hold onto privilege—and how incredibly dangerous they are.
And not to be forgotten in this are the most prominent elements of fascism involved with MAGA, as they were with Nazism and fascism in the World War II Era:
Fascism is, as scholar Kevin Passmore points out, “quintessentially male”—male supremacist—going so far as to embody what Sebastiaan Faber calls “the cult of the male body.” Fascism makes war upon, and enslaves, women, relegating them to the status of breeding animals.
The Nazi form of fascism was, as MAGA is, also quintessentially white supremacist—Aryan to the bottom of its soul.
It was virulently anti-Semitic, projecting its archetypal dark shadow onto Jews. Projection is dangerous because it allows us to take absolutely everything about ourselves that we despise, offload it onto somebody else, and then punish them for what we are doing. Anti-Semitism, like racism, is extremely psychologically convenient for people who are deliberately staying unconscious about what they need to change because it is serves their purposes to do so. The Nazis tortured, sterilized, and murdered as many as six million Jews.
Nazism also viciously attacked people of color. The Nazis preached the inferiority of blacks and all people of color and made war on them and on the Roma. Before World War II began in earnest, the Reich limited the work rights of blacks in Germany, then numbering 24,000. As the Weiner Holocaust Library points out:
“One of the most extreme pre-war actions taken against Black Germans by the Nazi authorities was the mass sterilisation of the Rhineland Children in 1937. The Rhineland Children were 600-800 children who had been born to white German women and Black French soldiers (who had occupied the Rhineland following Germany’s defeat in the First World War). In total, approximately 385 children were secretly sterilised, shortly before most of them reached adulthood.”
The Nazi form of fascism also makes war on those who do not represent strictly heterosexual gender orientations and expressions—and it makes war on the disabled as allegedly being genetically inferior (they are not!)—and, as in all body cults, fascism feels just fine about exterminating both. The Nazi war against gays, supposedly legally protected in German society, started with the erosion of their rights and ended with brutal physical and psychological tortures to force gay men to divulge the names of their sexual partners and ended with forced castrations and their murders in concentration camp gas chambers.
Trump’s Embodiment of Dark Tetrad Fascist Traits
Trump is the almost accidental totem and mannequin for American White Supremacist Fascism. He is not, strictly speaking, really intelligent. He just has one talent: an ability to identify and exploit the of weaknesses in a system, so his true talent is anarchy. It’s Leonard Leo who is doing the thinking.
Trump is, as we have seen in his relationship with White-Supremacist Evangelical Christofascism, willing to be told what to do so long as he gets his daily two shots of limelight combined with his five shots of raving at, humiliating, and denigrating his fellow “man”—who is often a woman.
He is accidental—or cunningly manipulative to an embarrassing degree—because he doesn’t believe any of what he’s espousing. He’s as godless a man as walks this earth. What he does express is the vicious, destructive attitude of fascism towards anything it doesn’t see in the mirror.
How many of these Dark Tetrad fascist traits has Trump exemplified? Let me count the ways:
Abuse of Women
Twenty-six women have brought legal complaints against Trump for sexual harrassment, assault, or rape. Cases pending. E. Jean Carroll won her case against Trump, who was convicted of sexual assault.
Legalized abuse of women includes the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elevating of lawyers to the Supreme Court who are challenging women’s rights to no-fault divorce and everyone’s rights to contraception (even if they’re married). We now have a Christofascist Speaker of the House, hand-picked by Trump, who says it’s every woman’s duty to have at least one child. Apparently, white women especially are not breeding fast enough for this group.
Ridicule of the Disabled
Trump mocked disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, whose hand and arm movement on his right side is impaired due to arthrogryposis. Video from 2015 seems to indicate that Trump was indeed cruelly imitating the man.
Ridicule of Fallen Soldiers
Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, saying, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. Trump dodged the draft multiple times on “medical grounds” that he had “bone spurs,” which led to his oft-cited nickname, Private Bone Spurs.
Chronic Pathological Lying
Trump told more than 30,000 verified lies during his four years in the presidency.
Racism
Trump is on film at a rally referencing an incident from the Civil Rights Movement in which blacks protestors in a Southern diner were viciously beaten during a sit-in. For Trump, it was a fond memory that engendered great nostalgia for the ability of whites in the South to just beat up any Black people anytime they stood up for themselves.
There’s more:
From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump didn’t stop with racist acts after his 2016 election.
Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — racist terms that tap into the kind of xenophobia that he latched onto during his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump insinuated that Sen. Kamala Harris, who’s Black, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to run for vice president — a repeat of the birther conspiracy theory that he perpetuated about former President Barack Obama.
There’s more, here in a list taken largely from Dara Lind’s tally for Vox and an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:
1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to previous discrimination.
1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”
1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.
1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a Black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred Black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.
1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”
2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”
2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a Black contestant, for being over-educated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”
2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”
This Month: Trump threatens to ban all further immigration of Muslims, from anywhere, into the United States.
Trump has accused Mexican immigrants of being criminals and rapists.
So, is Trump a Fascist? I give you the inimitable Robert Reich.
Since the last decades of the 19thth century, those dead at the hands of Dark Tetrads number in the hundreds of millions. Their campaigns of extermination and genocide have been shot through with torture (physical and psychological), rape, amputations, mutilations, and executions made excruciating by design (note the Nazi boxcar/creosote exterminations on that one).
Counted among these monsters are Benito Mussolini, Pol Pot, Kim Il-sung, Nicolas Ceausescu, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Idi Amin, and Ismail Enver Pasha. There are others, worse still, and five of them warrant special dishonorable mention: King Leopold II of Belgium—Josef Stalin of the USSR—Mao Zedong of China, who may have killed more people than any human being, ever—Francisco Franco of Spain—and Adolf Hitler of Germany.
“Trump can’t achieve that here,” you say?
Sure, he can. He’s got the supermajority in the Supreme Court that the Evangelicals demanded. He’s got the House of Representatives. He’s got Aileen Cannon. He’s got 54,000 hand-picked minions across the country ready to do his bidding at every level of government the minute he’s elected. He’s got Leonard Leo and Project 2025 to think for him. Republicans are attacking the rights to vote of college students, Gen Z-ers, and Blacks through redistricting, limiting access to mail-in voting and limiting voting hours.
And we already know he’s willing to put up fake electors, commit fraud, claim fraud where it doesn’t exist, run an election-interference RICO violation and incite an insurrection in which he hopes the Proud Boys and QAnon will overthrow the government and hang Mike Pence.
Zach Beauchamp of Vox nailed it:
Historically, the erosion of American democracy has happened subtly. In a country where democracy is basically a civic religion, politicians generally don’t announce their intention to attack it when running for office. The past decade of voter suppression laws, state-level rules explicitly designed to limit access to the ballot box, have been sold as tools for combating voter fraud. Many proponents of Jim Crow-era voting regulations — a nakedly racist attempt to ensure white political dominance — described them as a restoration of Southern democracy after the alleged Northern tyranny of Reconstruction.
Donald Trump is currently testing the limits of that unwritten rule by all but openly campaigning on a platform of tearing democracy down.
Perhaps the clearest sign came in a speech on Veterans Day where he vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” Calling one’s opponents subhuman and vowing aggressive action against them is a hallmark of classical fascist rhetoric, so much so that the Washington Post’s headline — on a news article, not an opinion piece — described it as “echoing dictators Hitler [and] Mussolini.”
They’re not wrong: Anyone familiar with Nazi propaganda can tell you that it commonly dehumanized Jews by describing us as rats or diseases. Trump has used such language more than once: Just last month, he claimed immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” [a Nazi racial purity catch-phrase].
This incendiary language is backed by an incendiary policy agenda. Trump and his team have a series of proposals to crack down on dissent, including by remaking the Justice Department into a tool for jailing his enemies and sending troops to suppress protests. They aim to launch mass anti-immigrant raids and detain the people he rounds up in camps. They have extensive plans to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with ideologues and toadies, putting people ready and willing to undermine the rule of law in key positions to act on Trump’s dubious orders.
Given Trump’s track record, we should take these threats seriously. Let’s not forget that many thought it was unthinkable that Trump would attempt a kind of coup after the 2020 election. We now know that’s exactly what happened, up to and including inciting an actual riot on January 6.
There’s been a long-running debate among American political observers as to whether Trump can reasonably be described as a fascist. Between his increasingly fascist rhetoric and increasingly fascist second-term policy proposals, the debate should now be considered settled. A political leader who vows to destroy opponents he calls “vermin,” to weaponize the Justice Department against his critics, and to conduct political purges in the federal government is in fascist territory.
Trump is talking like a fascist, planning fascist policies, and staffing up with fascists. While a second Trump term is vanishingly unlikely to produce an openly fascist state — that’s not really how authoritarian takeovers of democracy work today — it’s quite plausible that they could do extensive, even fatal, damage to the American system by pulling the right policy levers. This is what happened in Hungary, and what is currently happening in India, Israel, and democracies around the world.
Beauchamp sums it up succinctly.
The fascist ideological positioning is a signal of intent: Trump is coming for American democracy. No one can say they weren’t warned.
No, they can’t.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4321752/
[2] Millon, T. (2011). Disorders of personality: Introducing a DSM/ICD spectrum from normal to abnormal (Vol. 208). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons
The writers of Project 2025 are not madmen. Trump is the willing vengeance seeker and figurehead of those flatterers and despots who have helped get him elected.
Excellent article!!