Psychological Analysis of Trump's Crusaders

While dozens of psychologists have analyzed Trump, to explain the man’s political invincibility, it is more important to understand the minds of his staunch supporters.

Whether we want to or not, we must try to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon, as it has completely swept the nation and also fiercely divided it. What is most baffling about it all is Trump’s apparent political invincibility. This should also motivate us to explore the science underlying such peculiar human behavior, so we can learn from it, and potentially inoculate against it.

KEY POINTS

A 2016 study found that “…the racial and ethnic isolation of Whites at the zip-code level is one of the strongest predictors of Trump support.”
A 2017 study found a direct link between national collective narcissism and support for Donald Trump.
A 2016 survey of 406 US adults found that those who scored high on both SDO and authoritarianism were more likely to vote for Trump.

Trumpism has become increasingly worrisome, and borders on the pathological. Not that all Trump supporters are racist, mentally vulnerable, or fundamentally bad people. But it can be detrimental to society when those with degrees and platforms try to demonize their political opponents. and just as harmful to pretend that there are not clear psychological factors that underlie much of Trump supporters’ unbridled allegiance.

Terror Management Theory—which has been supported by hundreds of psychology and neuroscience studies—explains how Donald Trump used fear to divide America, and offers insight on how to begin to bring people together. We do that with a scientific and spiritual worldview that I call The Cosmic Perspective.

The Republican party, going at least as far back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” has historically used tactics that appealed to bigotry, such as lacing speeches with “dog whistles” — code words that signaled prejudice toward minorities that were designed to be heard by racists but no one else.

While the dog whistles of the past were subtler, Trump’s signaling is sometimes shockingly direct. There’s no denying that he routinely appeals to racist and bigoted supporters when he calls Muslims “dangerous” and Mexican immigrant's “rapists” and “murderers,” often in a blanketed fashion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a recent study has shown that support for Trump is correlated with a standard scale of modern racism.