Derangement and Adulation: When Politics Becomes Mythology
Few instincts run deeper or prove more dangerous than our craving for moral simplicity. Confronted with confusion, uncertainty, or fear, we flee toward clear boundaries — good and evil, us and them, truth and lies. We shape complex realities into reassuring narratives, populated by heroes and villains who embody absolutes that never entirely exist in human form. Our minds are built for story, for myth, not ambiguity. And in Donald Trump, we have found the perfect myth-maker — not simply a politician, but a figure onto whom an entire culture projects its hopes, hatreds, and, most tellingly, its need to believe that the world can be rendered in binary terms.
Love and hate, though seemingly irreconcilable, share a fevered intensity that detachment never approaches. Fanaticism and cynicism, for all their rhetorical distance, are united in their contempt for nuance. In our moment, nowhere is this paradox more vividly illustrated than in the public reception of Donald J. Trump — a man who, in transcending political categorization, has become a mirror and a myth, reflecting and reshaping the psyche of a nation.
Trump no longer occupies the domain of ordinary political figures. He is now a cultural Rorschach test, revealing as much about the observer as the observed. In the Jungian sense, he has become archetypal: not simply a man but a projection of collective desires, fears, and identities. To his supporters, he is a redeemer — flawed perhaps, but authentic, strong, and willing to confront corruption that others avoid. To his detractors, he embodies democratic decay, a demagogue whose existence imperils the republic. On the edges, both reactions are intense, all-consuming, and blind to contradiction.
And in their intensity, they converge.
Each side constructs a moral binary — good versus evil, salvation versus collapse, renewal versus demise— in which Trump becomes the central character in a national morality play. In doing so, they ensure that he remains the axis of public discourse, regardless of whether the attention is adoring or adversarial. He is elevated, sanctified or vilified, but never quite human. And herein lies the danger: not in Trump himself, but in our growing incapacity to see the world and each other in anything but mythical terms.
It is said that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, but this banal observation understates the psychological truth: both are forms of enthrallment. They capture the imagination, narrow the aperture, and render the object of emotion both larger than life and less than real. When one loves too intensely, flaws are reinterpreted as features. When one hates too completely, complexity collapses into caricature. Both reactions disable discernment.
This dual obsession is evident in the figure of Trump. To his loyalists, he symbolizes defiance and restoration — a man who disrupts a corrupt elite, speaks plainly to forgotten communities, and restores a sense of masculine resolve in a culture perceived as effete. Every indiscretion becomes a sign of authenticity; every breach of decorum, a badge of fearlessness. Conversely, his critics view him not only as a flawed politician but as a moral aberration — a singular threat to the constitutional order, an avatar of racism, misogyny, and authoritarian instinct. Each misstep is read as evidence of pathology; every utterance a prelude to disaster.
In this mutual enthrallment, both sides grant Trump an exceptionalism that transcends his actual governance. He becomes a totem, a vessel, a mythology. Ironically, those who claim to resist him most fervently often devote more attention to him than his supporters. In their ceaseless rebuttals, they reinforce his centrality. In their efforts to marginalize, they amplify. And so the loop tightens: derangement and adulation, though cloaked in opposition, operate as mirror images. Whatever their intent, both derangement and adulation arrive at the same destination, where emotional clarity replaces intellectual honesty, and complexity gives way to performance.
In a polarized culture, the temptation to divide the world into categories of friend and foe, hero and villain, becomes nearly irresistible. It offers not only psychological comfort but moral license. Complexity, by contrast, demands patience, ambiguity, and the discomfort of partial truths.
Binary thinking thrives in environments of uncertainty. It relieves the burden of discernment by offering prepackaged certainty. But in doing so, it flattens reality. It renders the opponent irredeemable, the ally infallible, and the moderate suspect. In such a climate, skepticism is confused with betrayal, and independence is a form of heresy. Dialogue gives way to declaration; inquiry is replaced by orthodoxy.
This degradation carries real consequences. A society unable to entertain competing perspectives is a society increasingly incapable of solving problems. The most urgent challenges of modern life require layered thinking, provisional conclusions, and an openness to revision. Binary thinking is not only inadequate to these tasks; it is antithetical to them.
And in the vacuum left by nuance, theater rushes in.
To fully grasp the psychological machinery behind the Trump fixation, we must turn to René Girard and his concept of mimetic desire. Human beings, Girard observed, do not desire in isolation. We learn what to desire by watching others. Our desires are imitative, triangulated through models. And when multiple agents desire the same object or status, rivalry ensues.
Applied to politics, this theory reveals a paradox: the more we oppose a figure, the more we are drawn into his orbit. Trump is not simply supported or rejected; he is replicated. His rhetorical style, antagonisms, and performative aggression — these are not confined to his base. They appear in the discourse of his critics, who adopt his tactics even as they denounce his character. In seeking to defeat him, they become like him.
This is mimetic entrapment. It transforms politics into identity warfare, in which affiliation supersedes argument. Trump ceases to be a policymaker and becomes an identity marker. What matters is not what he does but what he signifies. So, the opposition is no longer about policy disagreement. It is about self-definition. To be against Trump is to be a certain kind of person; to be for him, another.
The result is a closed loop, where the figure at the center exerts gravitational force by symbolic necessity. Trump becomes indispensable to the very people who claim to reject him. Their identity requires his presence.
This transformation from person to symbol does not occur spontaneously. It is cultivated, monetized, and reinforced by powerful institutional forces. Chief among them is the media, both traditional and social, which does not merely report on Trump but perpetually reconstructs him as content. The algorithms do not care whether engagement stems from outrage or admiration. All that matters is that it flows.
Trump is uniquely suited to this environment. He is fragmentary, quotable, visually striking, and relentlessly provocative. He produces moments. As such, he is the perfect node for a media optimized for virality. Each appearance, each utterance, each scandal becomes another pixel in the mythos — a narrative that demands our participation.
And we comply. Not because we are deceived but because we are exhausted. In a world of accelerating complexity, myth offers relief. Trump becomes not just a political actor but a symbolic anchor in a disorienting age. He provides, paradoxically, a kind of clarity: someone to love or to loathe, to defend or to denounce. In this sense, the myth is not imposed upon us. It is co-authored.
When political life becomes mythologized, democratic culture begins to erode. The institutions that mediate disagreement are reduced to stages for performative combat. Trust disintegrates not just in individuals or administrations but in the possibility of a shared reality. This is not polarization; it is vertigo.
In such a state, all events appear staged, all outcomes predetermined, and all gestures suspect. Cynicism becomes a survival strategy. And in this vacuum of meaning, the allure of the strongman intensifies. We begin to yearn not for process but for resolution, not for governance but for catharsis. Where democracy once honored disagreement as generative, it has been eclipsed by a politics of expulsion, where opposing views are not challenged but condemned.
This is the endgame of mythic politics: not authoritarianism imposed from above, but a collective abandonment of ambiguity. We no longer seek truth. We seek narrative coherence.
What, then, remains? If derangement and adulation are twin distortions, and myth supplanted reality in our political imagination, how might we recover a more grounded form of citizenship?
The answer is neither dramatic nor glamorous. It lies in the slow, uncelebrated cultivation of discernment — of humility, patience, and ethical restraint. It requires resisting the reflex to react, to posture, to perform. It asks us to speak in sentences rather than slogans, to listen for what is not being said, and to bear the discomfort of not yet knowing.
This is not disengagement. It is a different kind of engagement that refuses the manipulative logic of symbolic politics. It is the courage to live without a script, to stand in uncertainty without immediately resolving it. In short, it is a return to the real.
But it is also something more: it is the courage to dissent from within. It means holding our allies to account even when silence feels safe, conformity feels righteous, and dissent feels like betrayal. The real, after all, is not tidy. Yet it is precisely in those messy, uncertain spaces — between outrage and adoration, between myth and reality — that democracy can be renewed.
