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.

The history of fascism produced a number of commentaries on the fascist personality and subject. Some Commentaries by Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, and Freud are relevant here. Reich long ago in The Mass Psychology of Fascism 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. Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality deepened this insight, noting 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 in this photo and commentary makes clear how his embrace of violence ties cruelty to 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 but sometime 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 theatre of sadism.

The historical trajectory 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. What unites these moments is the transformation of violence into both pleasure and policy, where terror is normalized 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 logic that treats human beings as disposable and turns mass suffering into a spectacle of national strength.

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