Psychoanalyzing Trump's Messianic Rhetoric

How Freud Can Help Us Understand Trump's Religious Appeal

One feature of the adulation surrounding Donald Trump that has perplexed many commentators is his religious appeal, particularly to evangelical Christians. Trump’s evangelical followers often refer to him as a “savior” or “anointed one” singled out by God to rule the nation. A video titled God Made Trump created by a group of MAGA supporters called the Dilly Meme Team, opens with the voiceover, “On June 14, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump. ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, fix this country, work all day, fight the Marxists, eat supper, then go to the Oval Office and stay up past midnight at a meeting of the heads of state.’ So God made Trump.”

Trump leans into this messianic persona. He promoted the God Made Trump video, which was played at his campaign events, and has said that the attempt on his life failed because he has been singled out by God. MAGA believers have authored books with titles such as God and Donald Trump; Trump Prophesies; Trump’s Unfinished Business:10 Prophesies to Save America; Trump’s Bible: How Donald Trump’s Words and Deeds Reflect God’s Teaching; Trump, Blessed, Donald J. Trump and the Spiritual War; and God and the 2020 Election. Some of the MAGA true believers have argued that Trump’s victory was prophesied in the Book of Daniel.

I think that Sigmund Freud can help us make sense of what’s going on here—in particular, his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, which is about the psychology of religious belief. Freud argued that religious beliefs are illusions, but he used the word “illusion” in a special psychological sense. “We call a belief an illusion,” he stated, “when a wish-fulfillment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relation to reality.”

Freud claimed that religious illusions are responses to human helplessness—our vulnerability to the forces of nature, mortality, and of the suffering and injustice that is imposed on us by other human beings. Religious illusions are antidotes to the terrors of helplessness.

Thus, the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place.

Our awareness of our helplessness as adults resonates with memories of infancy-- “the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood” which “aroused the need for protection—protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one.” The immense power of religious illusions stems from the force of the wishes that animate them-- “the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.”

However, things are not so simple. Religions often exacerbate feelings of helplessness by making false threats, such as the threat of eternal damnation. Such threats are presented as so overwhelming that only a savior can protect us from them. Fascist rhetoric does the same. Fascist leaders threaten followers with suffering that only devotion to the leader-savior can ameliorate.

Hitler’s rhetoric conformed to this pattern during his rise to power. Konrad Heiden, a journalist who reported on the early days of the Nazi movement remarked: “The speeches,” he wrote, “begin always with deep pessimism and end in overjoyed redemption, a triumphant happy ending; often they can be refuted by reason, but they follow the far mightier logic of the subconscious, which no refutation can touch.” And Ian Kershaw writes in his biography of Hitler:

The themes of his speeches varied little: the contrast of Germany’s strength in a glorious past with its current weakness and national humiliation—a sick state in the hands of traitors and cowards who had betrayed the Fatherland to its powerful enemies; the reasons for the collapse in a lost war unleashed by these enemies, and behind them, the Jews; betrayal and revolution brought about by criminals and Jews;….the exploitation of ordinary Germans by Jewish racketeers and profiteers; a cheating and corrupt government and party system presiding over economic misery, social division, political conflict and ethical collapse; the only way to recovery contained in the points of the party’s programme—ruthless showdown with internal enemies and build-up of national consciousness and unity, leading to renewed strength and eventual restored greatness (Kershaw, 1998, p. 150).

British psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle argued that Hitler succeeded by manipulating Germans’ feelings of helplessness. He visited Berlin in 1932 and attended some of Hitler’s rallies. He described his experiences, and his analysis of them, in his article “The psychology of propaganda.”

[T]he speeches themselves were not particularly impressive. But the crowd was unforgettable. The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and to become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster … [that was] under the complete control of the figure on the rostrum [who] evoked or changed its passions as easily as if they had been notes of some gigantic organ.

Hitler’s rhetoric, he wrote, was “a method of inducing a temporary series of psychoses, often starting with depression, and passing, via paranoia, to a state of manic bliss.”

For 10 minutes we heard of the sufferings of Germany … since the war. The monster seemed to indulge in an orgy of self-pity [depression]…. Then for the next 10 minutes came the most terrific fulminations against Jews and Social-democrats as the sole authors of these sufferings [paranoia]. Self-pity gave place to hate; and the monster seemed on the point of becoming homicidal…. [S]elf-pity and hatred were not enough. It was also necessary to drive out fear … So the speakers turned from vituperation to self-praise [salvation/megalomania]. From small beginnings, the Party had grown invincible. Each listener felt a part of its omnipotence within himself. He was transported into a new psychosis. The induced melancholia passed into paranoia, and the paranoia into megalomania.

Trump’s rally speeches generally conform to the same pattern. Journalist Gwynn Guilford attended a number of Donald Trump’s rallies, and reported, “I went through the many reams of observations I scribbled down reflecting on the Trump rallies. Nearly every paragraph fit Money-Kyrle’s sequence.” Her descriptions of the reactions of his audiences are eerily similar to Money-Kyrle’s.

Spending three straight days in the audience taught me one crucial thing. The overlooked star of the Trump show is the crowd—the single-voiced creature that roars “Mexico!” when asked about wall construction, and emits a foghorn of boos when reminded of reporters cooped in a pen at the rear of the room. From within the Trump rally masses, I felt the strange sea-change that turns 20,000 individuals into one being, I felt its power swell, and sometimes it felt good.

Consider Trump’s speech of June 16, 2015, announcing his presidential run. It began with a depressing tale of loss, humiliation, and failure.

Our country is in serious trouble. We don't have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don't have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let's say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time…. When did we beat Japan at anything? They send their cars over by the millions, and what do we do? When was the last time you saw a Chevrolet in Tokyo? It doesn't exist, folks. They beat us all the time. When do we beat Mexico at the border? They're laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they're killing us economically.

Next, Trump switched to the paranoid mode, with a frightening narrative of invading predators:

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems…. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people…. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably -- probably -- from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.

Finally, he offered himself as America’s savior.

Now, our country needs…a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote “The Art of the Deal.” We need a leader that can bring back our jobs, can bring back our manufacturing, can bring back our military, can take care of our vets. Our vets have been abandoned…. We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again.

After reiterating the themes of depression and paranoia, Trump concluded “Sadly, the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.” Trump reiterated this pattern, with minor variations, in many of his rallies.

Hitler’s messianic rhetoric induced what historian Michael Burleigh describes as “paroxysms of mass emotion” by sinking “a drillhead into a deep-seated reservoir of existential anxiety, offering salvation from an ontological crisis” . By the same token, Trump, too, manipulates feelings of helplessness in those Americans that are already responsive to him, transforming them into true believers who are fanatically devoted to their God-appointed leader.