U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he participates in a signing ceremony in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 14, 2026.
On Thursday during an executive order signing, Cabinet members and other loyalists of President Donald Trump went on to applaud for a "bizarre" amount of time, in an incident that New York Times columnist Jamalle Bouie suggested reveals something important about MAGA's "authoritarian" dynamic. In Bouie's estimation, even Trump's allies are "afraid" of him.
As Bouie explains, Trump "signs the executive order and then they all start clapping and they keep clapping. They're clapping for a long time. It's as if they're afraid to stop clapping, or someone fears being the first to stop clapping." He shows a clip of the incident, and indeed, the clapping is drawn out for an unusual amount of time. History, notes Bouie, provides a famous parallel.
"It involves one Joseph Stalin," explains Bouie, "whose subordinates were afraid to stop clapping at an event for fear of being the first to stop clapping, and thus coming under the suspicion of their notoriously narcissistic, paranoid, and generally insane boss who might well send them to the gulag or just have them executed that night for being the first to stop clapping. Now, Donald Trump is not going to send any of those people to a gulag. They're not going to be executed. But he does have the psychology of a dictator. I've recently been reading a lot about Mao Zedong and modern Chinese history, the Chinese revolution, and the events that followed, and one thing that I find quite striking is the extent to which Mao is a recognizable personality type. Again, extremely narcissistic, very paranoid, self-absorbed, unable to kind of understand the existence of other people. Someone who is indifferent to most details until he becomes monomaniacally focused on a particular set of details and wants to micromanage them. Someone who demands endless praise from everyone around him, holds grudges forever, and constantly lashes out when he is unable to get exactly what he wants."
"Sounds familiar," asserts Bouie. "Trump very much is cut from the same personality cloth. And it makes sense then that his subordinates would be extremely fearful of doing anything to upset him for fear of his wrath or vengeance, even if that's only going to take the form of them being yelled at. But these people are cowards and they don't like to be yelled at." According to Bouie, this dynamic will truly be put to the test if the Democrats flip Congress. As he notes, polling shows Democrats winning generic ballots by 15 or more points, and "if you had to translate into seat gains... that would look like a situation where Democrats have won about 260 seats in the House, about 55 or 56 seats in the Senate, and they control 30 governorships. It is kind of a catastrophic collapse for Republicans."
In the face of this "broad public repudiation," asserts Bouie, "and really an early sign that his legacy is going to be quite dismal after he leaves office and certainly after he passes," Trump will be unable to "sustain that kind of narcissistic injury...so it's a real concern to me what he does to compensate for that." The president's reactionary personality, warns Bouie, could have unknown consequences. "Does he escalate the war on Iran even further? Does he look for ways to lash out and destroy further parts of Washington DC? How does he respond to that kind of narcissistic injury? Because that is how you should understand his psychology: someone who is mostly driven by the desire to affirm his own sense of self and his ego and to avoid injury to those things."