“Today, many people use psychology as a new form of mysticism: as a substitute for reason, cognition and objectivity, as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment, both in the role of judge and judged. Psychologizing is condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of, or contrary to, factual evidence.” – Ayn Rand, The Psychology of Psychologizing, 1971.
The professional cognoscenti class can’t seem to figure out Donald Trump’s “personality”, as if every world and domestic conflict is implausibly a consequence of Trump’s psychological dynamics, bombastic speech outbursts on “X” and his frequent use of the working-class word for horse dung. Even the highly educated commentariat at libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom”online forum have joined the fashionable trend of attributing their perception of Trump’s moral failings to his personality. What follows is an attempt at understanding Trump, not a defense of Trump. (Disclosure: I did not vote for Trump in 2024).
Trump’s Knowledge Class Psychologizing Critics
One of the most recent attempts to explain Trump comes from former British intelligence officer and diplomat, Alastair Crooke who asserts Trump is not a self-made man but has a magnetic “Jungian” personality. By “Jungian” (from psychologist Carl Jung) Crooke means motivated by mythical archetypes, but not in the same authoritarian mold of Hitler or bombastic Mussolini. But no one is self-made, least of all presidents. The most un-self-made US president was the mentally normal university president Woodrow Wilson who gained office by an election rigged by the Bank of London, proceeded to abolish constitutional government by the people, established the Federal Reserve and forced isolationist America into the unnecessary WW1, entirely fought to keep the Germans from aligning with Russia against Britain (see Gerry Docherty, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, 2014 and John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda, 2024).
Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, apparently echoing his BRIC’s sentiments, says Trump is an ‘incendiary’ self-absorbed all-powerful god-like Roman emperor who is a moral failure (BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China new world order).
Eminent former US Army officer and conservative Douglas MacGregor asserts Trump is impulsive and is not the person we voted for and is controlled by the oligarchs he surrounded himself with as well as London and New York banks. MacGregor asserts that what Trump promised during the 2024 election is all myth. Moreover, MacGregor says Trump is deluded to think that he must sell 1,000 US cruise missiles to Ukraine to attack civilian targets in cities in Russia to bring an end to the war (i.e., war crimes). But Trump can only go so far in gainsaying powerful senator Lindsey Graham, Congress and the Military Industrial Complex. MacGregor says Trump is coerced by Britain’s delusions of grandeur that they can exert the same power they had as a Neo-Colonial Empire pre-1945. But Trump rudely left Europe’s top leaders standing in a hallway for 45 minutes outside his office before he held court over the future of NATO with them. Was it theater?
Nuclear weapons inspector Scott Ritter says Trump is a pretend tough-guy bluffer and a narcissistic Neocon war hawk who continues to indirectly fund the Ukraine War despite his campaign promises to end it. Ritter sees Trump as Netanyahu’s lackey, but Netanyahu secretly takes orders from the Bank of London. Israel is not a self-made sovereign nation but was formed by London banks to control and plunder oil-producing states in the Middle East. Ritter says Trump doesn’t understand Russia, but does Ritter understand Israel is synthetic and weaponized? Israel is like the scapegoat child in a dysfunctional family who must do the “acting out” (behave badly) for European family elites and banks. Ritter is aware, but doesn’t mention, that should Trump refuse to countenance Britain he may end up like the other US presidents removed by British banks: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and JFK (witness the US Civil War, see Xavient Haze, The Suppressed History of American Banking: How Big Banks Fought Jackson, Killed Lincoln and Caused the Civil War, 2016).
Obama Pentagon advisor Col. Larry Wilkerson says Israel is “our tool but we make it look like we are their tool”. He says this deceptive role reversal is insanity. According to Wilkerson, Trump is poorly informed and has no independent advisors outside the Deep State (like himself) and follows junk advice. But Wilkerson acknowledges Trump’s instincts are to force Britain to fight its own wars. Wilkerson says Britain is living out its imperial dreams through the US as if it were still an empire.
Ayn Rand’s Psychology of Psychologizing and Trump’s Role Conflicts
One might think Trump must have a split or multiple personality disorder to garner all these critical psychological caricatures. To get a more accurate Polaroid-like real time picture of Trump we must abandon the American-Freudian tendency to describe politicians using psychoanalytic cliches. This is why libertarian Ayn Rand opposed evaluating politicians by psychologizing and mythologizing, preferring ‘objectivism’ instead in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
A conflicting social role framework is better than pop psychology from which to understand Trump in the circumstances he finds himself in circa 2025. The Big Picture circumstances involve the weaning of America off its alliances with the former European Colonial World Order (Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany) who are faced with bankruptcy and have instigated wars to capture the spoils of Russia, Ukraine and Gaza to rescue themselves.
One need not embrace the notions that Trump “trumps” his opponents with superior 4-D Chess skills, is a religious messiah, or has an ingrained pathological personality. Rather, Trump’s self, like our own selves, is not solid or fixed and moves from one expected situation and audience to another, called role alternation. If one wants to clearly understand Trump, they must enumerate the situations in which there is role conflict between all the roles he must play. But this isn’t done in modern journalism. Instead, short-hand psychological cliches often prevail (see Anton Zijderveld, On Cliches: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (1979).
Unlike the roles most people must fulfill, the role of president is chock full of political opponents, vested interest groups, the deep state and murderous enemies that result in seemingly inconsistent and confusing role behaviors to outsiders and critics. The irreconcilable moral conflicts of the presidency does not necessarily mean that Trump lacks “character”, necessarily has a split personality, or is a psychopath (see sociologist Peter L. Berger on the inconsistency between social roles in his Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, 1963). It means he is all too human. But he is in the proverbial situation of having to serve two-or-more masters at any one time.
This is why even the master teacher of how one sometimes must do evil, Niccolo Machiavelli, asserted that rulers must do religious penance for their evil actions in necessary emergency situations. But rulers should also avoid gratuitous public confessions or dramatic displays of their moral guilt. Nonetheless Machiavelli held that penance does not annul ultimate moral culpability for doing evil for which one may lose their soul. Machiavelli said that evil cannot be wished away or denied, because one can never get away with doing evil under cover of doing good (Niccolo Machiavelli, An Exhortation to Penitence, 1523 and Discourses I:6). However, I rather doubt anyone, outside devout Christians or Muslims, do private penance or confession with respect to the Gaza-Ukraine Wars. Trump may not be a psychopath with no conscience, but he has made it clear he wants to be the “winner”, which opens the door to moral dilemmas. However, Trump’s ridiculous proposal to develop Gaza as a resort is interpreted to be a nonserious political diversion to assuage Israel. Same with his pretend bombing of Iran. Ayn Rand’s ethic of “objectivity” offers clarity in such situations but no resolution to the moral dilemma involved.
Trump’s Situation Box and Split Speech
Moreover, Trump is subtly re-aligning the US with the new economic order of BRICS by condemning Russia and China in public while otherwise ingratiating himself with Putin and Jinping. Does speaking tough to appease the military and industrial complex while speaking backstage with Russia and China reflect a “multiple personality disorder”, impulsivity, idiocy or realpolitik? I tend to believe Trump’s contradicting speech is pragmatic but often uses bombastic diversion from his real behind the scenes dealings. Trump’s speech for domestic consumption is not the same as his emissarial discussions.
The charges of Trump being a psychological sock puppet oddly comes at a time when:
• Trump successfully pulled off an ice-breaking summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
• Has temporarily mobilized the National Guard to cut off any repeat of the staged race riots and arson in Blue Cities financed by 25 high tech corporations centered in San Francisco in 2020-2022.
• Has requested the DOJ to pursue RICO anti-racketeering charges against George Soros who used US AID funds to weaponize city prosecutors against the safety of the citizenry.
• Has taken moves to capture control of the Federal Reserve Bank.
• Has exercised his power to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid under the USAID program for “woke, weaponized and wasteful” spending authorized by Congress on the grounds it contradicts US interests.
• Trump’s HHS Director Robert Kennedy Jr. fired the new CDC director after which the CDC staff spilled into the street to protest under the rationale of a threat to public health. No AI replacement at CDC.
No, the Ukraine War is not solely about NATO incursions and threats to Russia’s safety. Rather, the war is an attempt by bankrupt Monopoly Capitalist Globalists centered in London to steal and plunder the resources and oil of East Asia and the Southern hemisphere with threats of proxy wars fought by the US and Israel, while threatening nuclear war (see Alex Krainer, The Coming Collapse of Britain, August 2024). Nor is the US-Israel proxy war with Russia in Ukraine a war against “Communism”, as the British manufactured Russian Gulags never happened (see Solzhenit-SPIN: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag was a Deep State British Lie, Aug. 19) and the Cold War was a hoax (Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed It on the Jews, 2024). And after 1991, Russia abandoned Soviet style Communism, only to have their markets plundered by Wall Street.
Facetiously, at least Trump has plenty of experience with bankruptcies and turning around money losing casinos! I’m not a Trump promoter, but psychologizing and mythologizing indicates to me such writers don’t know whether the binds that Trump finds himself in would stand the test of morality or not; they can only psychologize or mythologize it.
Even former advisor to President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, in his article “Can Trump Find a Way Out of the Box He is In?” wrongly believes NATO incursions on Russia are the sole blame for the wars when it is more likely they are wars of extraction, piracy and kleptocracy between two systems of world governance: the fast-declining globalist European former colonialist British (American) empire and the emerging BRICs New World Order of cooperation, sovereignty, sound money, and the prospect of peace. Trump apparently wants to eventually transition the US to the BRIC’s bandwagon. My guess is that Rand would find that objectively more virtuous than psychologizing about Trump’s personality.
Is Trump His Own Court Jester?
Ancient Greece and Rome institutionalized the role of the court jesters, satirists and poets such as Juvenal, Horace, Homer and Aesop who had the freedom to talk and mock princes candidly, albeit comically, without punishment. In medieval Britain, there were street jesters such as Punch and Judy that used puppetry and comedy to exercise their license to free speech. The Roman emperor Commodus was his own jester, which may explain the so-called insanity of other Roman rulers such as Caligula and Nero who attempted to transcend the invisible chains that bind rulers from telling the truth. But the French Revolution ended the institutionalized role of the court jester. And Jeffrey Epstein was no court jester!
In his book The History of Court Fools by Dr. John Doran (1858), stories are told of princes who have had to play the role of fool or their own jester. One such ruler was Nassir of the Netherlands who took delight in puppet shows. At one such puppet show, the king encroached close to the stage and using a pair of scissors cut the strings to the puppets, adding some comedy to the presentation. Perhaps Trump’s sometimes “unpredictable” actions, bullyism, and crude speech should be understood in the same context of cutting the puppet strings with its “Perfidious Albion” of parasitical and war mongering Great Britain and Western Europe rather than some nebulous clichés of psychological moral failures.
Psychologizing Trump is Useless: Or is Trump His Own Court Jester? Judge Andrew Napolitano, Alastair Crooke, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Col. Douglas MacGregor, Col. Larry Wilkerson, Ayn Rand The Psychology of Psychologizing, Paul Craig Roberts, Wayne Lusvardi
