by Eliana Wallace
In the opening pages of his book Trump: The Art of the Comeback, Donald Trump outlines his top ten keys to success. There, among such tips as “golf,” “get even,” and “always get a prenup,” Trump writes: “Let some paranoia reign! You’ve got to realize that you have something other people want. Don’t let them take it away.”[1] This quote would go on to define his volatile presidency. On January 6th, 2021, using the paranoia and widespread resentment of his followers, former president Trump rallied a group of malcontents to storm the Capitol building in Washington D.C. By analyzing the condition of his supporters through Nietzschean philosophy, we can more clearly understand the motivations and emotions that led to the insurrection of January 6th. And by dissecting the events directly before the insurrection occurred, we can interpret how the parasocial relationship Trump cultivated with his acolytes allowed them to overcome the state-person social contract and revolt, in line with the Hobbesian conception of a covenant. Using the philosophy of rebellion that both Nietzsche and Hobbes provide, it becomes obvious that the January 6th insurrection was the direct product of President Trump’s repetitive and skillful manipulation of the American public.
The concept at the heart of Nietzschean philosophy is that of master and slave morality. In his work On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche proposes that morality as seen by the upper and lower classes are two separate ideals. He argues that true good is built around the behavior of the ruling class and that the conceptions of justice as we understand them stem directly from the “noble, powerful, higher ranking and high minded.”[2] To do as the powerful do is to follow master morality. On the other hand, slave morality is a corruptive and deceptive force. Rather than being founded on the principle of “a triumphant yes-saying to oneself,” as master morality is, “slave morality says ‘no’ to an ‘outside,’ to a ‘different,’ to a ‘not-self.’”[3] This is the source of Nietzschean ressentiment. The lower classes look at the out-groups and allow their disdain for them to fester, poisoning them and creating values that lie, not in service of what is “good,” but in opposition to what is “evil.”
Connecting this concept to Trump and his followers is not difficult. Trump was the poster child for “no-saying,” and the majority of his campaign for office was built around vilifying out-groups and capitalizing on the fear and xenophobia that existed among his supporters. But there is a glaring issue with this comparison. The bulk of Trumpists identify as cis, straight, white men. In other words, the very people granted power by the system already in place. So how was it possible for slave morality to build among people who were, by all accounts but their own, the masters of their state? The drastic contrast between the rights of minorities when the country was founded and the freedoms that they hold today allowed Trumpists to believe that they were being “victimized and left behind.”[4] They began to perceive the increased liberty of historically-repressed groups not as equality, but as a reduction of their rights. Every motion that returned power to the hands of people of color, non-Christians, the LGBTQ+ community, or women was seen as a blow against the rights and freedoms of the “traditional” American. In some ways, they were correct. Criticism of white male behavior did rise alongside the increase of minority privileges. It did become harder for white male Americans to find work. Where the Trumpist logic failed, however, is that no one removed the right for white men to act in a way that was offensive to marginalized groups. People just stopped supporting the conduct. No government voted to keep white men out of the workforce; the acceptance of minorities into the job market simply saturated the hiring field with a greater number of competent workers.[5] Regardless of their true nature, the perception of the new freedoms granted to marginalized groups allowed the masters of America to believe themselves disenfranchised and oppressed despite all evidence to the contrary, clearing the way for slave morality to develop.
In his essay “The Trump Horror Show Through Nietzschean Perspectives,” Douglas Kellner proposes that Trump strategically used three types of resentment to polarize his devotees: race, class, and gender. Trump, who Kellner describes as having “deeply internalized a life-time of deep resentments,” was able to “tap into, articulate, and mobilize the resentments of his followers in a way that Democrats and other professional politicians have not been able to do.”[6] Trump capitalized on and fed the belief that these “undeserving” groups of non-white Americans were “unfairly using race as a form of merit, thereby threatening traditional norms and values that determine ‘who gets what’ in society.”[7] He was able to scapegoat immigrants and people of color as the inheritors of the freedoms that white Americans felt were being slowly taken away, and promised if elected to return power to his followers.[8] Throughout his time in office, Trump continued to prove himself a man heavily motivated by racial resentment, even defending the actions of white supremacist groups in racially motivated conflicts.[9] When he was voted out of office in 2020, his “allegations of election fraud centered around districts with large African American and Latino populations,” not only because they were the districts where Trump lost most dramatically, but because the basis of racial prejudice he had built into his election campaign predisposed his supporters to believe that people of color would go to any lengths to strip white Americans of their rights.[10]
There is perhaps a subcategory of race resentment that Kellner overlooked: religious resentment. Trump consistently berated and demonized Islam and the countries in which it was widely practiced. His attacks against Islam were not centered in a critique or disproval of their practices, but rather an ungrounded and generalized attack on the character of Muslim people. Throughout his candidacy and time in office, he referred to Muslims as terrorists, claimed that they hate America, and swore on multiple occasions to ban them from entering the country altogether.[11] While this was an encouragement of the fears already held by his predominantly Christian following (that their religion was dying and being replaced by other practices), it cannot be completely separated from race resentment. White Muslims were spared the bulk of the religious resentment Trump created, and people who appeared Middle Eastern were treated with fear and bitterness regardless of whether they practiced Islam or not. For this reason, religious resentment, though a powerful tool used on many occasions by Donald Trump to radicalize and frighten his supporters, is an extension of racial resentment, and not a separate category.
Trump was also able to utilize the class/elite resentment held by the lower and middle classes. This use of resentment is the most impressive solely because it was the only grievance Trump mobilized that was directly against his interests. Trump was a businessman before he was a presidential candidate, and at the time of the 2016 election, he had a net worth of 3.7 billion dollars.[12] Despite his undeniable wealth, Trump was able to associate his opponent Hillary Clinton, a woman “of middle class origins who had worked her whole life [… with] sectors of the rich who supposedly financed and controlled her.”[13] Neither Trump’s lifestyle nor campaign structure worked against the rich. As president, he imposed tax cuts that benefited corporations and the uber-wealthy and controversially refused to divest from his businesses while in office. Trump employed this class resentment again after he was voted out of office, accusing Joe and Hunter Biden of financial misconduct in his January 6th speech.[14] He made baseless claims tying both men to operations in Moscow in order to imply that Russia and other corrupt, financially-driven third parties had tampered with the election on their behalf. Despite being a multi-billionaire, Donald Trump was able to prey on the fears of his lower and middle-class supporters and build a Nietzschean ressentiment against his opponents in both the 2016 and 2020 elections based on their “elite” status.
The third resentment type Trump used to grow and radicalize his supporters was gender resentment. This was particularly notable in 2016 when he was running against Hilary Clinton, the closest America has ever come to electing a female president, but his use of this resentment continued through his time in office. Gender resentment articulated the prevalent fear among American men that they were becoming obsolete. They were vexed that women were gaining power and recognition, particularly in the workforce. Men felt they were being unfairly criticized for their misogynistic comments and views, and they felt emasculated by no longer being assumed to be the sole or even predominant breadwinners for their households. For these men, Trump represented the lost ideal. He used derogatory language towards women at almost every opportunity, in public, with seemingly no fear of the consequences. As Kellner says: “for males in crisis, Trump provided a powerful image of the successful man who kept women subservient, and who embodied a powerful, hyper-patriarchal, and successful image of manhood.”[15] Trump built on this gender resentment among his followers, first against Hilary Clinton in 2016, and then to oppose Kamala Harris in 2020. When he was not in an election, Trump used the misogyny of his fanbase to attack and discredit Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, and any other woman who had a voice opposed to his own in the political world.[16] This built a strong sense of ressentiment against women in power and allowed Trump to sow seeds of governmental distrust among his supporters.
It is clear after examining the various tactics Trump used in his campaign, presidency, and insurrection that his was a “political movement based on fears, anger, and suffering which he claimed he and he alone could address.”[17] It is not an exaggeration to say that Trump’s near-constant encouragement of his follower’s ressentiment won him the election. This basis for his following made it relatively easy to convince them that, when he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, it was a calculated effort by those victims of racial, class-based, and gender-based resentment to regain the power that Trump had taken from them during his presidency. It was easy to convince them that these groups, bitter at being denied the power they had “stolen” from the white, working-class American man, would take drastic measures to remove the man trying to “redeem the country and make it great again.”[18] It is obvious that this sense of ressentiment among Trumpists created a volatile political environment after the Republican loss in 2020, and laid the groundwork for the insurrection to come. Nietzsche’s concepts of slave morality and revolt make clear how the Trumpist community was primed and manipulated towards rebellion, but how did these self-declared “patriots” allow their anger to make them rise against their beloved country? For that, we need to examine these events through the ideas of another philosopher: Thomas Hobbes.
In his most famous work, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes posed the idea of contract law. This states that the concept of good and bad comes from the contracts people form with each other. In his school of thought, “[t]he definition of injustice is […] the not performance of covenant.”[19] He goes on to outline what this contract looks like as it pertains to the relationship between the people and the governing power of a society. Hobbes posits that this contract between the people and the head of state is different because it grants ultimate power to the sovereign. They become what he calls his “Leviathan.”[20] Once a sovereign is in place, Hobbes claims there can be no limit to its ability. Nothing the Leviathan could do would put them in violation of the contract because they are all-powerful. By extension, none of the subjects of the Leviathan can ever be free from its rule, as the contract would never be broken.[21] The only end to the sovereign-subject covenant in Hobbes’ conception would arise if the sovereign stopped being able to protect its people, as all contracts are formed through self-preservation.[22]
Hobbes did not support the idea of democracy because it places additional limitations on the sovereign, imposing a time constraint on their power and forcing them to cede their control to another after their set term in office. During the elections and subsequent turnover, the sovereign is unclear, placing the state back into its pre-societal condition of war.[23] Hobbes believed that each transition of power invited rebellion because, though revolutions were unjust when a sovereign was in place, elections returned the community to the condition of war. Trump’s manipulation of Hobbesian contract law and its failings is the factor that allowed his followers to lean into their ressentiment and eventually revolt against the American government.
Donald Trump utilized Hobbesian contract law to incite the January 6th insurrection in two distinct ways. First, he as sovereign alienated himself from the preexisting contract between the state and the people. Then, he convinced his people of the impossible, that the president-elect had broken the sovereign’s contract. “Trump refused to campaign like any presidential candidate before him” in that he essentially founded his candidacy on the fact that he was distinctly not a politician.[24] In Trump: The Art of the Comeback, years before he ever announced his intentions to seek office, Trump wrote that he was “too honest, and perhaps too controversial, to be a politician.”[25] Trump used the bold and unapologetic way he insulted minorities to set himself apart from other politicians, and, astoundingly, he managed to construe it as openness and honesty. He seemed to put forth the idea that the other candidates weren’t better people than he was, they were just lying in order to get elected. As discussed above, this unabashed prejudice comforted a large number of people, but it also served the purpose of divorcing him, a politician, from the image of one. This separation he created between his public identity and the stereotypical politician’s identity acted in service of forming a separate contract with his supporters. Using the parasocial relationship he had with his followers, Trump built a covenant with them that was unattached to the office of the president. His repetitive assurance that he was not a mindless governmental puppet allowed Trumpists to believe they were in service, not only of the state itself, but the sovereign-elect. Throughout his campaign and ensuing four years in office, Donald Trump fed and cultivated this contract. Every low blow aimed at women, Wall Street, people of color, or Muslims only made him appear more like that ideal Leviathan. That “mortal god.”[26] Trump was not a politician. Trump was honest. Trump was strong. Trump was protecting “true” Americans. Then Trump’s four years were up. He ran and lost the 2020 election. He was no longer going to be the president.
But he had the support of thousands upon thousands of people, most of whom held systemic power and, thanks to his guidance, a strong and violent ressentiment. So Trump told his followers that the “election was stolen from [them], from [him], and from the country.”[27] It is little wonder they believed him. By electing him in the first place the Trumpists had already accepted his claims that he was the only honest politician. But it went beyond that. When Donald Trump stood before his supporters on January 6th, he told them the state had broken its contract with the American people. He told them that, rather than maintaining the free and fair elections promised to the people by the state, the Biden administration had tampered with the results in order to oust Trump from power. He told them that the only way to protect the Constitution was to prevent the “brazen and outrageous election theft” from being certified.[28] He told them they were “allowed to go by very different rules.”[29] He told them to storm the Capitol. The total absence of sovereign control as Hobbes would have understood it is when the public “perceives that there is no effective institutional check operating on its behalf,” and Trump was able to make his defeat appear to his people as the elimination of the last true protector of their freedoms.[30] They saw the removal of Trump from office – in favor, no less, of a ticket including a woman of color as vice president – as a violation of their contract with the state, which had, for all 248 years of its life, supported and protected the interests of white men above all others. The Trumpists were able to see their contract with the state as void, utterly overpowered and replaced by the contract that Trump had spent years building. It was this perceived contract, eclipsing the one they made with the American state, that allowed the Trumpists to rationalize their revolt. They retained the idea that they were patriots because Trump was able to convince them that he was the Leviathan. He was the Sovereign. He was the state. So it was easy, really, to make them march. To make them choose him over the country they claimed to love so much. To make them attempt to overthrow democracy in the United States of America. Trump manipulated his public image and the relationship he carefully cultivated with his devotees in order to supersede the contract they had formed with the state and incite them to attempt an upheaval of democracy in the United States of America.
When his campaign, presidency, and final actions before the insurrection are examined through Nietzschean and Hobbsian philosophy it is clear that Donald Trump is not, contrary to public image, a stupid man. He successfully built and ran a campaign designed to validate and feed the core fears of the majority of the American public. By convincing his followers that the increasing inclusivity and power being given to minorities was weakening America and victimizing hardworking citizens Trump managed to build a slave morality and ressentiment among his followers despite their master status in society. He continued to scapegoat and vilify these marginalized groups throughout his time in office in order to stoke the race, class, and gender resentment existing in his supporters. When he eventually lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump then managed to use the prejudice he had bred to convince a huge sector of the American people that the election process was corrupted for the sole purpose of removing him from power. He leveraged the relationships and reputation he had built to mobilize many thousands of people to attempt a hostile takeover of the American government with the end goal of reinstating him as the president. This level of tactical manipulation is not the mark of an idiot. It is the evidence of a smart, malicious man who posed the greatest threat ever seen to American democracy.
On January 6th, 2021 former president Trump used the resentment and fear he had carefully curated among his fanbase to incite an unlawful and dangerous attempt to overthrow American democracy. The emotions and motivations of his followers are best understood through Nietzschean philosophy, as Trump’s constant fear-mongering throughout his time in the public eye worked to build a ressentiment and slave morality among his people. He then manipulated Hobbsian contract law to convince his devotees that they were acting as patriots and, rather than participating in a criminal coup d’etat, were defending their beloved country. Nietzsche and Hobbes provide compelling and accurate interpretations of the morality of rebellion that help explain the Trumpist psychology that led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, as well as exposing the calculated way in which Trump manipulated his followers to begin the insurrection.
Endnotes
[1] Donald Trump and Kate Bohner, Trump: The Art of the Comeback (New York: Times Books, 1997), 233.
[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1998), 10.
[3] Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 19.
[4] Darren W. Davis and David C. Wilson, “‘Stop the Steal’: Racial Resentment, Affective Partisanship, and Investigating the January 6th Insurrection,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 708, no. 1 (July 2023): 89.
[5] Marta Tienda and Ding-Tzann Lii, “Minority Concentration and Earnings Inequality: Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians Compared,” American Journal of Sociology 93, no. 1 (July 1987): 141–65, https://doi.org/10.1086/228709.
[6] Douglas Kellner, “The Trump Horror Show Through Nietzschean Perspectives,” in Nietzsche and Critical Social Theory: Affirmation, Animosity, and Ambiguity, eds. Christine A. Payne & Michael James Roberts (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 61.
[7] Davis and Wilson, “‘Stop the Steal,’” 85.
[8] Douglas Kellner, “The Trump Horror Show,” 64.
[9] Trump, Donald. October 22, 2020. “Second 2020 Presidential Debate”
[10] Davis and Wilson, “‘Stop the Steal,” 85.
[11] Trump, Donald. October 9th, 2016. “Second 2016 Presidential Debate.” December 7, 2015. “Donald Trump on Muslims.” March 19, 2016. “Trump on CNN.”
[12] Dan Alexander, “Here’s How Much Donald Trump Is Worth,” Forbes, April 2, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/article/the-definitive-networth-of-donaldtrump/?sh=a0e6df2a8ede.
[13] Douglas Kellner, “The Trump Horror Show,” 65.
[14] Trump, Donald. January 6, 2021. “Speaking From the Ellipse”
[15] Douglas Kellner, “The Trump Horror Show” 65.
[16] The Week US Rafi Schwartz, “69 Things Donald Trump Has Said about Women,” theweek, January 23, 2024, https://theweek.com/donald-trump/655770/61-things-donald-trump-has-said-about-women.
[17] Douglas Kellner, “The Trump Horror Show,” 66.
[18] Douglas Kellner, “The Trump Horror Show,” 66.
[19] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 89.
[20] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, 109.
[21] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, 111.
[22] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, 114.
[23] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, 118-127.
[24] Marc Benjamin Sable and Angel Jaramillo Torres, Trump and Political Philosophy: Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Civic Virtue (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 257.
[25] Trump and Bohner, Trump: The Art of the Comeback, 186.
[26] Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, 109.
[27] Trump, Donald. January 6, 2021. “Speaking From the Ellipse”
[28] Trump, Donald. January 6, 2021. “Speaking From the Ellipse”
[29] Trump, Donald. January 6, 2021. “Speaking From the Ellipse”
[30] Sable and Torres, Trump and Political Philosophy, 119.
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