Today (4 March 2025) Trump put into effect his threats to withdraw military support from Ukraine and impose steep tariffs on Canada, China and potentially Mexico. Following reaction from Europe, Trump’s vice-president J.D.Vance described the UK as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war for 40 years”.  Such a derisive opinion of a supposed ally ill behoves the vice-president of a country that Ronald Reagan called a beacon of freedom.  But it’s the kind of talk from Trump and his acolytes we’ve become used to.   Trump’s recent attack in the Oval Office on the President of Ukraine demonstrated (not for the first time) that he has no interest in behaving presidentially as the leader of a democratic country. The most astonishing evidence of this was January 6th 2021, when he effectively led an assault on the US Capitol, the building that represents his system that had elected him president. Evidently, he felt a need to sabotage the political and system he formally upheld.

Such ambivalence is characteristic of a personality type that was defined at the end of the second world war by Theodore Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt Group of social scientists.  Their groundbreaking work The Authoritarian Personality (1950) – along with works by associates such as Erich Fromm’s (1942) Fear of Freedom – was widely read during the 1950s and 1960s as the world tried to understand the horrors of fascism: Hitler, Nazism, and the Holocaust.  Adorno and his mainly Jewish colleagues argued that people whose dynamism and initiative are thwarted by familial, social and economic experience may develop a personality fixated on power.  This authoritarian/fascist personality displays both sadistic and masochistic traits: both the desire for conquest and control and the desire to submit.  

By all accounts, Trump’s father was a dangerous role-model who displayed contempt for “weakness” in his personal and business affairs.   He bullied and exploited business partners, employees and tenants, especially people of colour and other “minorities”.  Trump himself suffered and learned from this cruelty.  He survived by providing himself with the brittle assurance and confidence his father exhibited.  His speeches are loaded with repeated claims of achievement: he is a very stable genius who recruits the best people and has the highest ratings.   He has learned to lie so naturally that he has almost convinced himself. His mythically “successful” career has been built on terrorising others. His hold over the men who form the majority gender in the Congress Republican Party, not to mention the millions who form his base, derives from their parallel pathology: their desire to be, and to be led by, a “strong man”.   J.D.Vance, who joined Trump in bullying Zelensky, is an example.   These traits are redolent of the masculinity cult of Andrew Tate. 

Lie and bluster as he will, Trump’s deeper desire for the support his father denied him is unabated.  There is much speculation about Putin’s hold over Trump, but, whatever the history, Putin is clearly Trump’s father-figure: distant and cruel like his father, but possessed of enviable power.  The danger of the current situation is that Trump’s pathology transcends other loyalties and boundaries.  He has often stated his contempt for soldiers and others who are prepared to fight and die for what they believe.  He has no belief except in power.  Like a Mafia gangster, he accused Zelensky of disrespect.  Zelensky’s courage means nothing; he is the weak player in this game, and must be abandoned if he will not allow Ukraine to be exploited by the US and Russia.  In Trump’s fantasy world of power, he will become leader of an empire including Canada and Greenland, while Putin can possess Ukraine and other Baltic states.  They will be partners in ultimate global power.  

The tragedy is Trump’s and the world’s. We are all endangered by a deeply wounded and dangerous individual who should never have got anywhere near the presidency and is living out his childhood trauma at global cost.