Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
Donald Trump: Decoding His Apparently Contradictory Politics
By A. Carter-Wilson
The prevailing narrative around Donald Trump holds that his political instincts have grown internally inconsistent — a confusion of style masking an incoherent program. To lift a tariff, then reinstate it; to declare Iran’s enemies as allies and vice versa — the reading is obvious: unpredictability has replaced strategy.
But this framing confuses symptom with diagnosis. If one steps back from the familiar commentary about “chaos” or “instinct,” two things become apparent: first, that predictable mechanisms underlie these shifts; second, that psychoanalytic thought already provides frameworks for understanding exactly how and why they operate in public life. The challenge is not to identify them — but to recognize them when they manifest through political rhetoric rather than clinical behaviour.
Two lines of thinking illuminate Trump’s approach with particular clarity: the work of Sigmund Freud on mass psychology, and Wilfred Bion’s epistemology of “beta elements.” Both have been taken up in varying degrees by scholars working across several disciplines — from political psychology to media studies — but neither has entered mainstream commentary. That omission is precisely what allows the contradiction narrative to persist.
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Freud on Group Psychology: The Ego Ideal and the Leader as Object of Projection
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud introduced what he called the ego ideal: an internal standard against which individuals measure themselves, into which they project their aspirations (and fears) rather than expressing those directly. The crucial mechanism in a crowd, for Freud, is that subjects do not simply share ideas — they identify with each other through the same ego ideal, replacing mutual independence with a collective emotional structure bound to an external figurehead.
Trump’s tariff reversals map precisely onto this dynamic. Imposing steel tariffs enacts protectionism as the “external force” (the persecutor); withdrawing them simultaneously positions Trump as the savior who has negotiated a better arrangement under duress. The audience need not observe either policy detail — only experience the emotional arc: threat, then rescue. Reinstating barriers later is neither a reversal nor an admission of error; it is another cycle in an unbroken feedback loop.
The same mechanism applies to Iran declarations. When Trump labels the IRGC a terrorist organisation and negotiates arms deals weeks apart, both moves serve Freud’s Sitz im Leben: they activate distinct emotional registers within the crowd without requiring internal consistency. What conventional analysis calls contradiction is, under psychoanalytic scrutiny, identification in motion — voters experience themselves as powerful whenever their projection receives vocal articulation from the leader figure, regardless of content coherence.
Freud went further. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he argued that groups generate a “powerful aggressivity” which requires an outward target precisely to prevent its internalisation within the group itself. Trump’s rhetorical oscillation — threatening China one cycle, negotiating with Iran the next — functions as the necessary pressure valve: aggression projected externally, absorbed collectively, exhausted in satisfaction rather than resolution.
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Bion on Epistemology: Thinking and Non-Thinking as Political States
Wilfred R.D. Bion (1896–1979) developed what is now known as beta-element theory — the distinction between raw, unprocessed psychic material that resists symbolisation (“beta elements”) and transformed meaning that can be stored, reflected upon, and communicated (“alpha function”).
Applied to political rhetoric, Bion’s framework reveals something conventional discourse struggles to hold: Trump’s contradictions are not failures. They reflect an epistemological mode where beta dominance ensures statements are experienced as emotional acts rather than doctrinal commitments. When one reads a tweet declaring Iran “in extreme danger” or praising a foreign leader, the statement functions at the level of affect — it is felt before it is parsed. Its purpose is discharge, not doctrine.
This framework explains several observations that baffled earlier analysis: why Trump abandons policies entirely once their emotional work seems complete; why his rhetoric intensifies rather than clarifies as pressure increases; and why counter-factual corrections rarely shift the underlying narrative. Beta-dominance produces statements engineered for immediate impact, not durable meaning — because under Bion’s model, the function of a beta-element utterance is precisely to bypass alpha processing in the recipient.
The political result: policies that appear contradictory when viewed through an institutional lens are coherent when understood as emotional performances calibrated by rhythm. The tariff lifts and reinstatements read differently depending upon when one observes them — not because Trump has changed his mind, but because different audience states activate at different points in the cycle. Protectionist rhetoric inflames; conciliatory statements pacify. Both produce group cohesion through opposite emotional registers precisely as Freud described: crowd unity achieved by externalising aggression against whichever “other” dominates attention at any given moment.
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What This Means for Trump’s Second Term
If beta-dominance explains how Trump operates rhetorically, it also implies structural vulnerability to his own electoral base. Bion noted that groups sustained entirely on alpha-function collapse when faced with information whose emotional valence exceeds their capacity for symbolisation — in effect, a crisis of comprehension that triggers panic or aggression rather than reflection.
Trump’s audience has been conditioned toward this mode: tariff threats are felt as protection; Iran declarations are experienced as strength. The contradiction narrative is therefore doomed to fail precisely because it asks voters to judge emotional enactments as policy. That mismatch explains the persistent gap between factual critique and electoral behaviour — a finding entirely consistent with both Freud’s group psychology and Bionian epistemology.
The real question for Trump’s successors, as much as those of his critics, is whether institutions built upon alpha-function assumptions can accommodate an electorate whose political expectations are calibrated to beta-dominance. That tension — between institutional rationality and emotional mass behaviour — defines the current American experiment more accurately than any polling data or tariff table.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.