Trump’s obsession with violence is more than a grotesque fixation on power and cruelty; it is a commentary on politics as pathology, a grim theater in which authoritarianism reveals its inner logic. What he offers is not governance but the intoxication of destruction, the fetishization of cruelty, and the performance of violence as ritual. On the individual level, it is the grotesque display of a delusional mind that can only feel alive through the embrace of terror, that finds its emotional register only in the language of threat and annihilation. This is obvious in his AI-generated meme on Truth Social where he targets Chicago by threatening that he will go to “WAR” with the city. The image posted on September 6th “depicted him as Robert Duvall’s character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.”

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Trump’s obsession with violence is more than a grotesque fixation on power and cruelty; it is a commentary on politics as pathology, a grim theater in which authoritarianism reveals its inner logic. What he offers is not governance but the intoxication of destruction, the fetishization of cruelty, and the performance of violence as ritual. On the individual level, it is the grotesque display of a delusional mind that can only feel alive through the embrace of terror, that finds its emotional register only in the language of threat and annihilation. This is obvious in his AI-generated meme on Truth Social where he targets Chicago by threatening that he will go to “WAR” with the city. The image posted on September 6th “depicted him as Robert Duvall’s character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.”

In the doctored image, Trump not only cast himself as a cinematic icon of militarized madness but paired it with a menacing caption. The post invoked his plan to unleash the National Guard on Chicago, echoing his earlier militarization of Washington, D.C., and underscored his desire to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The caption’s most telling moment, however, was a grotesque parody of Duvall’s infamous line from the film. Transforming “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” into “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump collapsed cinematic war fantasy into his ongoing campaign of immigration terror, turning the language of mass suffering into a punchline of authoritarian bravado.

What emerges from this spectacle is more than a provocation; it is a declaration that cruelty is both pleasure and policy, a gleeful admission that state violence has become theatre, and that politics itself has degenerated into necropolitics: a regime in which sovereignty is measured by the power to decide who suffers, who is dispossessed, and who is left to die. This grotesque performance exposes the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture, where cruelty is transfigured into pleasure, violence becomes the grammar of belonging, and politics is reduced to a performance of derangement. In Trump’s hands, deportation is stripped of its bureaucratic disguise and reimagined as an ecstatic ritual of exclusion — a celebration of malignant aggression that reveals the fascist subject in its most naked form, finding joy only in the infliction of suffering.

Let us be clear: Trump’s glee in the cruelty of deportation is nothing less than an unabashed celebration of white supremacy. His words are not incidental; they crown a long record of racist commitments. This is the man who has praised the Confederacy, vilified DEI initiatives, and weaponized ICE with Gestapo-like tactics overwhelmingly aimed at people of color–practices that echo the racial terror of the Klan. His assaults do not stop with bodies; they extend to culture itself. By targeting the ideas, books, and voices of critical Black figures, he advances a cultural purge that carries chilling resonances with Hitler’s campaign to erase Jewish, Marxist, and liberal intellectuals. In both instances, the logic is the same: to erase difference, to terrorize the vulnerable, and to secure power through the destruction of memory and the annihilation of dignity.

Trump’s racist obsession with mass deportations is inseparable from his militarized vision of politics. In his social media post, he invoked war against Chicago, threatened the deployment of the U. S. military to  Los Angeles and Washington D. C., and celebrated state violence as the solution to social problems. This is more than racist demagoguery. It reveals how authoritarian cultural politics operates as a spectacle of education—normalizing war, glorifying white Christian nationalism, and erasing democratic memory.

Trump’s war is aimed not only at immigrants, people of color, and all who refuse his vision of white supremacy, but also at history itself. Controlling memory—whether by intimidating the press, defunding public broadcasting, or rewriting historical narratives—undermines the public’s capacity to recognize and resist fascism. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley warn, Trump’s manipulation of memory is a deliberate fascist strategy: it disarms the public by making white supremacy appear natural and inevitable. Shea Howell underscores the stakes: in destroying the sources of our collective past that celebrate justice and equality, Trump rewrites history to elevate white Christian American men and render everyone else disposable. She writes:

Over the last six months they have been systematically destroying the sources of our collective past that celebrate the best of our cultural aspirations.  Attacking universities, defunding public broadcasting, intimidating news sources, renaming battle ships, and making up statistics are all essential to rewriting history in ways that emphasize the importance of one group of people, white Christian American men, and the insignificance of everyone else.

To grasp the deeper cultural and psychological appeal of Trump’s celebration of violence, it is necessary to situate his rhetoric within a longer history of critical reflections on the fascist personality and subject. The history of fascism produced a number of commentaries on the fascist personality and subject, notably by Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, and Freud. Reich wrote in 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascismin which he  integrated Marxism and psychoanalysis. He insisted that fascism grows out of an “irrational character structure” in which repressed drives are transfigured into obedience, hatred, and a perverse pleasure in cruelty. Reich’s insights were later deepened by Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality, who noted that the fascist demagogue eroticizes violence, offering his followers the delusional notion that cruelty is a source of collective pleasure. Freud had already warned in Civilization and Its Discontents that aggression is woven into the very fabric of human drives, a force that seeks expression in humiliation, exploitation, and annihilation when left unchecked by culture and conscience. Trump’s photo and commentary make clear how his embrace of violence fuses cruelty with pleasure. Erich Fromm later sharpened this analysis with his concept of “malignant aggression.” Fromm suggests that such aggression was not defensive but ecstatic, a passion for annihilation experienced as intoxicating. Trump’s post embodies precisely this malignant aggression, turning state violence into a spectacle of pornographic pleasure and belonging, a ritualized performance in which militarized cruelty itself becomes the ground of agency.

What emerges here is not the sober, if sometimes cruel, language of governance under gangster capitalism, but the delirious performance of spectacularized sadism, where violence becomes the end itself and the exclusive mode of state rule. Trump’s boast is more than a grotesque slip of the tongue; it is the utterance of a deranged mind for whom cruelty is the only register of feeling, and terror the only idiom of power. This is politics transfigured into pathology, a criminogenic mode of rule that normalizes lawlessness, and a necropolitical order that elevates the management of death and suffering into the very principle of sovereignty. Here, governance is reduced to the staging of annihilation, and the state is recast as an apparatus of terror whose legitimacy lies in its capacity to inflict pain, humiliation, and disposability.

Trump’s post reflects not only the brutality of the times but also the evolution of a distinctly American political madness. In his early public persona, he embodied the caricature of the greedy capitalist — a clownish, inflated version of Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, burnished through his performative role in The Apprentice. As president, his demeanor took on the cold, manipulative cruelty of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, obsessed with control and the spectacle of his own authority. Now, in his descent, he mirrors Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Christian Bale’s deranged investment banker whose polished exterior masks a voracious appetite for violence and annihilation. Trump has morphed into something even darker: an unhinged Darth Vader of American politics, propelled by obsession, revenge, and cruelty, terrifying in his capacity to transform governance into a theater of sadism.

The historical trajectory of genocidal violence from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its account of the Congo holocaust to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with its vision of Vietnam as madness, to the rise of American fascism under Trump, makes clear a grim continuity. Across these histories, violence is not simply a tool of domination but a ritual of supremacy and subjugation, a performance that turns cruelty into destiny and annihilation into governance. At the center of this continuity lies culture itself. Too often it functions as a form of pedagogical terrorism, normalizing cruelty, shaping desires, and producing the formative conditions for demagogues to thrive. What unites these moments is the transformation of violence into both pleasure and policy, where terror is rendered ordinary and suffering becomes the currency of power. Trump’s boast about “loving the smell of deportations” situates him squarely within this lineage. It is the contemporary face of a necropolitical culture that manufactures the fascist subject, treating human beings as disposable and turning mass suffering into a spectacle of national strength.

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