Donald Trump is a pathocrat.
The Age of Trump is defined by its pathocracy: a society ruled by the emotionally, psychologically, morally, intellectually, and spiritually sick, whose behavior spreads throughout the population and becomes the new normal.
Donald Trump and his enablers and followers have repeatedly defined deviancy down. There is no bottom. It will take the American people years, if not decades, to climb out of the pit.
Last Monday, Donald Trump gave a speech at a midterm campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, where, speaking about the Iran war, he said, “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The audience reacted with a mix of cheers, applause and laughter.
Here is the full quote:
And again, remember with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let it, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over very soon. It’s essentially almost over with. They always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it, let me tell you. They need it, but it’s going to end very soon, and it’ll end one way or the other and your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.
A nuclear attack on San Diego or Los Angeles could kill millions of Americans.
Trump also spewed out conspiracist fantasies about “communist socialists” and “radicalized lunatics” declaring, “We’re going to beat them big. This is the most important midterm election….”
Trump continues to live in his own alternate reality:
They gave us the dark age of America. That was two years ago. We were living in a dark age, but we quickly turned that into the golden age of America. It’s the golden age….
But now the radical left, Democrats want to burn it all down. They want to burn it down. You see these lunatics that they’re running in Michigan and Texas all over the place. They’re just lying. Their whole life is talking about radicalization and stupidity.
This man commands America’s nuclear arsenal, and with it the power to destroy the world several times over.
Trump and his spokespeople spent the last week trying to “clarify” his comments about Los Angeles and San Diego.
On Tuesday, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung claimed that the “media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality.” He continued: “[Trump] was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.”
Last Thursday, Trump raged on Truth Social:
The Fake and Artificial News is out there trying to say that I’m inviting the enemy to bomb San Diego and Los Angeles when, in actuality, what I was talking about was that a temporary increase in the price of Gasoline is a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon and, if you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles? All I was doing was making a comparison between paying a little more, for a short time, for Gasoline, versus the bombing of our Major Cities. Everybody knew that, the Fake News knew it as well, but they continue to go out and say that I am asking the enemy to bomb two Cities that I love. It’s totally clear what I say but, these people are Degenerates, and think they can continuously get away with Fake News!
This is textbook propaganda: distraction, projection, and gaslighting.
Predictably, too many among mainstream news media continued to normalize Trump’s extremely dangerous behavior by presenting his remarks as a misunderstanding, as “Trump just being Trump,” as hyperbole, or that he was really talking about gasoline prices. A week later, the mainstream media has mostly thrown Trump’s remarks about the possible nuclear annihilation of two American cities down the memory hole. They are bored. The attention economy feeds off novelty.
I offer this basic test for determining the true meaning of Trump’s comments about nuclear war and the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego.
In language, meaning is created by the relationship between the speaker and, in the example of a political speech, the audience and the larger context.
Donald Trump said, “[L]et them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The audience laughed, cheered, and applauded. Trump did not stop talking or clarify his meaning and intent. He also did not chasten the audience for their reaction or tell them that Iran must be stopped and that there is nothing funny or entertaining about nuclear war. Instead, Trump smiled and continued speaking, appearing pleased with himself.
The audience did not boo or heckle him, look stunned, go silent, or otherwise visibly show their disapproval. Taken together, Trump’s language and the audience’s response suggest that the destruction of these cities — and the potential deaths of millions of Americans — was acceptable or perhaps even amusing to the MAGA people at the rally.
Research has repeatedly found that Trump’s MAGA people are more likely than other Americans to express support for political violence against perceived enemies.
A simple counterfactual also exposes the double standard surrounding Trump’s comments about the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego.
If Obama or another Democratic president were to make a comparable statement about a Republican-led city such as Houston or Mobile, many of the same people now defending Trump would be demanding that Obama be removed from office, tried for treason, convicted and then imprisoned — or worse.
This is also part of a much larger pattern in which Trump tries to silence his critics and mute democratic life.
He has repeatedly threatened to use the military and federal law enforcement to “invade” Democratic-led cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles. In a series of speeches to members of the military last year, he called Democrats “gnats” that needed to be “taken care of.”
Trump has repeatedly threatened to withhold federal money from blue states and cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Illinois, California, New York, and Minnesota, if they do not support him and his MAGA agenda. This is de facto political extortion and not normal governance in a democracy.
In a video shared on social media, historian Timothy Snyder, a leading expert on authoritarianism, warned that Trump’s statements about Los Angeles and San Diego signal Trump’s obvious willingness to take extraordinary measures to remain in power against the will of the American people.
“Telling Americans that it would be acceptable, or even good, if San Diego were destroyed, if Los Angeles were destroyed by Iran…tells us where his mind is. His mind is exclusively focused on staying in power. It’s exclusively focused on himself. There is no care for Americans there. There’s only an obsession with perhaps having less control over things than he has now. It’s a very clear sign of just how wrong things have gone, when the American president can stand in front of Americans and fantasize about millions of Americans being killed.”
Listen to Professor Snyder.
The danger lies not only in what Trump may soon do, but in how the repeated normalization of once-unimaginable behavior has conditioned many Americans to accept it.
In his 1993 American Scholar essay, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a trained sociologist, argued that American society has repeatedly redefined deviant and antisocial behavior as acceptable. As society kept lowering its standards, behavior once considered wrong and intolerable became normalized and routine.
In a 2000 PBS interview, Moynihan recalled reading a story about a mass murder in the Bronx where seven people were killed. What struck him was not the horrible murders themselves, but the details about a mother who saved her infant by hiding it under a bed.
“The fact that seven people had been shot in the back of the head was not interesting at all. And I thought of that wonderful example of gangland violence, the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago, when Al Capone’s men rubbed out seven of Bugs Moran’s men. Well, it became the subject of national legend. And so the idea clicked. We could no longer deal with the amount of murder going on in Manhattan and the Bronx, so we had to sort of say, well, only special murders get attention. And you can take this pattern of avoidance and defining deviancy down all across the society.”
Two decades later, in 2016, Trump bragged that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters.
He was proved correct. Trump was elected twice despite his attacks on the country’s democratic norms and institutions, its sense of normalcy, and its basic standards of human decency. Even more damning, Trump was reelected after he attempted to nullify the 2020 election and his followers attacked and overran the Capitol on January 6. For many of his MAGA people, these are not disqualifying acts, but rather reasons to vote for him.
By supporting Trump, tens of millions of Americans have chosen to define deviancy down and, in doing so, have elevated fascism, authoritarianism, and other antihuman forces that are imperiling the safety and future of the United States and the world.
Donald Trump gives his MAGA followers permission to be their worst true selves. What will happen if Trump and his MAGA Republicans lose the upcoming midterms and eventually the presidency? What remains of their collective normalcy may fall out completely, unleashing even more disinhibition that extends well beyond Trump himself.
Chauncey DeVega is a politics and opinion writer whose work considers American democracy, inequality, political power, and the enduring significance of race in American society and the wider world. He was formerly a senior politics writer at Salon. His essays and commentary have been cited by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, The Atlantic, and other leading publications. He hosts two podcasts: The Chauncey DeVega Show and The Truth Report.
