How It Happened: Why America Mirrors Donald Trump
A complete theory of how America was trained not to hear what he says—but to feel what he feels.
For five years, I have been constructing a model of how America went wrong and why Donald Trump and offshoots like QAnon are so deeply embedded in the American psyche. I’ve written about most, if not all, of these concepts before, but this is my best complete explanation for our current dilemma in one interconnected theory grounded in well-established science and psychology.
I’ve done my best to define any terms that may be unfamiliar and provided source material to make it easy for anyone to understand it in context—or to expand their knowledge further.
Introduction
The staying power of Donald Trump’s psychological hold on millions of Americans is one of the enduring mysteries of the 21st century. Despite an endless supply of evidence of his criminality, corruption and deviance, a large minority of the body politic still remains dutifully attached.
In this article, I will outline how this happened, why it retains its power, and what it means for all of us if we don’t break the system that sustains it.
This theory describes:
The Five-Step Process of Online Brainwashing
Emotional Mimesis and Mimetic Synchrony, an extension of Girardian theory
How interlocking operant conditioning loops and hypervigilance drive the system
How this is creating a regime of Epistemological Totalitarianism
Our structural descent into Organizational and Governmental Decompensation
Why all of this established a seemingly unbreakable national trauma bond
Where this is going: the surveillance-carceral-epistemic state
Every component of this system is grounded in well-established clinical psychology, neurobiology, and information theory. While this system was no accident, the theory is independent of who created it. It describes how people are coaxed, traumatized and entrapped into a system that has no exit, and how the psychology of one man is on the verge of permanently bringing down the American experiment.
Part I: The Five-Step Process of Online Brainwashing
Brainwashing, or undue influence, is not a metaphor or a conspiracy theory. Everyone who has been captured by Donald Trump’s personality cult has been brainwashed through a highly efficient, ruthless system of psychological, physiological and neurobiological capture which creates an intense trauma bond mirroring Trump’s own psyche.
1. Redpilling and Trauma
“Redpilling” is a euphemism for psychologically bombarding a human being with emotionally destabilizing digital content designed to traumatize the subject.
Trauma is a psychological and physiological response to an overwhelming event that exceeds the mind’s ability to process, regulate, or integrate, often resulting in lasting disruption to perception, memory, and identity.
Content that depicts a world under threat along with narratives and visuals of pedophilia, violence, terror, and secret conspiracies arrayed against America and Donald Trump are designed with the specific intent of generating trauma and creating an epistemological break. It makes the subject question the entire concept of truth.
2. Dissociation
Dissociation is a psychological defense mechanism in which the mind detaches from reality, memory, emotion, or identity in order to protect itself from overwhelming stress or trauma.
Dissociation evolved to be a healthy response to trauma. If someone’s mind can’t process an event in real-time, especially when it believes it’s in danger, it creates a psychological break from the identity experiencing the trauma, and develops a new identity that is still able to function.
Normally, this is temporary and the person reintegrates the identities, but in prolonged cases of trauma, the secondary identity can subsume the original. From the DSM-V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders on dissociative disorders:
Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion: Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion (e.g., brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive, torture, long-term political imprisonment, recruitment by sects/cults or by terror organizations) may present with prolonged changes in, or conscious questions of, their identity.
3. Salvation
A dissociated, traumatized person is in an extremely vulnerable state. They are effectively split, between an identity who is in overwhelming mental anguish, and a second identity created to try to analyze the situation and escape danger.
This is when the savior, or the prophet, arrives to provide a solution. It speaks to the second identity, the new personality, which is depersonalized from the trauma. Whether it’s Trump, or Q, or some other prophet of the system, it encourages the new identity and offers hope—and redemption.
“You have been chosen. Do your own research.”
4. Refreezing
The Unfreeze → Change → Refreeze process is well-established in psychology.
From Kurt Lewin, to Robert Lifton, to Dr. Steven Hassan, it has been shown that cultic systems universally break down a person’s defenses by “unfreezing” them through trauma, making changes to the subject’s belief system and personality, and then “refreezing” the new personality.
This used to require an insulated compound, like David Koresh or Jim Jones built for their authoritarian cults. Now these dynamics can all happen through your phone.
In the Trump system, you are traumatized and dissociated by content and messages, presented with a change through a new savior and a new ideology, and then the “community” on 4chan, Facebook, Twitter or Telegram provides a welcoming place to land—but only as long as you mirror the group’s new emotional norms. Deviate, and you’re exiled. You are being refrozen.
5. Mimetic Synchrony
Once the subject has been unfrozen through trauma, changed to a new personality and belief system, and refrozen into a new identity, cognition is replaced with emotional entrainment. Subjects begin to move, speak, and feel as one. This is not persuasion—it’s possession.
They are not hearing him. They are feeling him.
Mimetic synchrony is why Trump’s personality cult doesn’t behave like a political movement, it behaves like a flock of birds or a school of fish.
Part II: Emotional Mimesis — Beyond Girard
René Girard’s mimetic theory attempts to explain human behavior through the concept of mimetic desire, or the instinct to want what someone else wants. In his model, this leads to mimetic rivalry and scapegoating. He proposed a triangulated system between the subject, another person who acts as the model, and the object of desire.
Mimesis is the process by which humans unconsciously imitate the behaviors, emotions, or desires of others, shaping identity and perception through social reflection rather than individual intention.
Girard’s theory has merit, but Girard ultimately framed Christianity—particularly the crucifixion—as the universal solution to mimetic rivalry, limiting the theory’s secular applications. Here are Girard’s model and my more generalized model of emotional mimesis in comparison.
Emotional mimesis is the process of subconsciously imitating someone’s emotions, e.g. Donald Trump’s, such that the subject’s identity is effectively a mirror of the model.
The result of the Five Step Process to Online Brainwashing is that the subject‘s mind is tied neurologically to the savior. When Trump is angry, his followers feel angry, no matter what he’s saying or whether it makes any sense. The words don’t matter. They don’t hear him. They feel him. Their emotional mimesis puts them in mimetic synchrony with his psyche.
Emotional mimesis is instantaneous, contagious, and devoid of logic or reason. This is why it is nearly impossible for individuals to separate themselves from the system without help, and why they behave so uniformly.
Part III: Hypervigilance and Operant Loops
Hypervigilance is a state of heightened sensory and emotional alertness triggered by trauma, in which the brain remains constantly on guard for potential threats—even when none are present.
Hypervigilance powers the system. By creating mass paranoia, and fear of Satanic pedophile Democrats, immigrants, trans people or any other chosen target, traumatizing propaganda makes the subjects constantly check their phones, refresh the Q boards, or check for the latest “Truth.” But to harness hypervigilance you need a mechanic—a way to channel the paranoia into action.
Operant conditioning theory, developed by B.F. Skinner, posits that behavior is shaped and maintained through reinforcement and punishment, with variable-ratio reinforcement producing the most persistent and addictive responses.
Operant conditioning is the root neurological cause of numerous addictions, including gambling and internet addiction. When operant conditioning is controlled by an infinite loop, like doomscrolling on the internet, addiction is sure to follow. The subject doesn’t become addicted to the reward, they become addicted to the system of reward and punishment.
The internet at large and Donald Trump consist of two interlocking operant conditioning loops. The subject is both doomscrolling the internet, or their favorite platform—like Twitter/X, Facebook or Telegram—locked in one rapid infinite loop of trauma and reinforcement, while they wait for a Truth or an Air Force One appearance to validate their emotions in another, slower infinite loop.
Neurologically, this double-whammy presents no outlet for escape. If the internet loop wears off, the Trump loop sucks you back in. If Trump is not giving you reinforcement, the internet will—24/7, infinitely.
These dual-frequency interlocking loops are further enhanced by prophets, or entities blessed by Donald Trump. This includes “Q” which was a classic operant conditioning loop. You never knew when a “Q drop” was coming so you were always waiting for it, trapped in a hypervigilant vicious cycle where thinking is replaced by ritual, and emotions are regulated by an anonymous 8chan account.
Part IV: Epistemological Totalitarianism
This system of cognitive control is uniquely powerful because it captures both the unconscious and conscious minds of its targets. Through trauma, dissociation, and emotional mimesis, the unconscious mind is rewritten to reflect the psyche of the leader. Through operant conditioning and hypervigilance, the conscious mind is trained to be constantly on alert to perform, obey, and punish deviation.
The result is total enclosure: emotional identity is mirrored, and behavioral response is conditioned. The subject has not been persuaded—they have had their operating system replaced.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge—how we know what we know, and how we distinguish truth from belief or illusion.
In a healthy society, epistemology is shared across the full range of human institutions. Normally, reality-testing is distributed across a variety of sources which can be actively compared to provide the subject with a shared, consistent picture of reality.
But in a society driven by trauma, hypervigilance and operant conditioning loops, meaning-making is confined to specific sources which define truth through emotion. When a population has been put into mimetic synchrony with a leader, you no longer have a political movement, you have a mirror into one man’s psyche amplified across millions trapped in emotional mimesis. Trump’s followers never consciously ask, “How does what he says make me feel?”, their subconscious asks, “How is he feeling?” before the thinking part of the mind even has a chance.
This is epistemological totalitarianism, where the leader, the group, or the state not only has control of what the truth is, but controls the process of meaning-making itself.
Contradictions are loyalty tests
Doubts are disloyal
History is what the leader says, not what’s in the books
Truth is not discovered, it is dictated
Donald Trump named his social media site “Truth Social” as an open declaration of his sole ownership over the epistemic reality of his followers, and of his own messianic narcissism. Trump’s “Truths” are not messages, they are emotional cues to direct his followers how to feel.
Part V: Organizational Decompensation
Decompensation is the breakdown of psychological or systemic stability under sustained stress, where previously functioning mechanisms collapse and are replaced by dysfunction, distortion, or chaos.
Just as individuals lose their ability to compensate under stress, so do systems. When an organization is mimetically attached to the psyche of a decompensating leader, the organization decompensates along with them.
There are numerous historical examples of this phenomenon, like the last days of Jonestown, the end of Idi Amin’s reign of terror, and Hitler in the Führerbunker.
People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and its far more dangerous cousin, malignant narcissism, can be both very attractive to people mimetically—narcissists are extremely good at projecting confidence—and extremely dangerous in a leader. Donald Trump is, by all standards, a malignant narcissist with sadistic tendencies. This is also known as the Dark Tetrad.
When a narcissist suffers a wound to their ego, the most grievous wound of all, they may decompensate by acting out, projecting their own failures on to others, and demanding loyalty tests of their victims. If the narcissist is unable to stabilize themselves they may fall into narcissistic collapse.
Narcissistic collapse is a sudden breakdown in a narcissist’s psychological defenses triggered by ego-threatening loss, exposure, or humiliation, often resulting in rage, paranoia, or withdrawal.
When a government is mimetically synchronized to a leader in narcissistic collapse, it is not just the leader that collapses. The government itself goes with them. Parts of the government totally unattached to the tribulations of the leader will begin decompensating along with him. Grandiosity, projection and paranoia become the modus operandi of the state.
Signs of Decompensating Government:
Functional paralysis masked by aggressive rhetoric
Loyal incompetents put into positions of power
Institutions mimic the pathologies of leadership
Policy decisions made for symbolic effect, not results
Law enforcement turns inward to punish epistemic deviation
The government is no longer governing. It is mirroring.
This is not merely dysfunction. It is psychological collapse at government scale. Entire agencies behave like cult members mirroring their leader’s mood—because, in essence, they are.
Part VI: Trauma Bonding at National Scale
A trauma bond is a psychological attachment formed through cycles of abuse and intermittent reward, where the victim becomes emotionally dependent on the very person or system causing them harm.
This dynamic is well-documented in cases of domestic abuse, hostage-taking, and cult indoctrination. It is defined by the behavior of the victim clinging to their abuser despite knowing they will be abused again. It is enforced by operant conditioning, a cycle of abuse and rewards. The relationship becomes an emotional dependency, with the victim terrified to leave, even if the relationship is the root of their suffering.
Donald Trump has created a national trauma bond with his “base.” It’s not that they really believe him, it’s that they are terrified not to believe him. The thinking part of the process has been short-circuited. It is mass emotional mimesis.
They don’t hear Donald Trump. They feel him.
The technological and psychological systems which form and maintain this trauma bond and the emotional mimesis that results, create an alternate reality in which anything that contradicts the leader’s feelings is not just wrong, it is treason punishable by excommunication. The trauma bond is reinforced across the system, so that any crisis—no matter how damning—only deepens the follower’s identification with the leader’s victimhood.
Part VII: Final Form — The Surveillance–Carceral–Epistemic State
A system that has cognitively captured some of a population, but not all, is deeply challenged by the constant flow of cognitive dissonance from information that does not comport with its narratives and emotional mimesis.
Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort experienced when a person holds two or more conflicting beliefs, values, or perceptions, prompting an urge to resolve the inconsistency—often by altering one’s view of reality.
If the system is a government, its goal will be to either capture, or force into submission, the remaining free-thinking population.
A government attempting to achieve total domination of the population will do this through three primary modes of control: surveillance, violence, and epistemic control of all institutions and sources of information.
Traditional surveillance focused on behavior, on location, and on actions of the subject. The new surveillance regime is not focused on your current behavior, it has enough information to not only surveil what you do, but what you think, and what you will do in the future. By aggregating a massive amount of personal, private data and public information on every person in the population, the new surveillance state will be able to enforce reality by identifying cognitive dissidents.
It is one thing when people are threatened with social media backlash, or other personal problems if they go outside the lines of the leader or group, it is another when they are threatened with a massive internal paramilitary force that can enforce the truth as defined by the government through violence. Open displays of sadism, lawlessness and suffering by such a government are not a bug, but a central feature. They take the “debate” out of the realm of words and enforce it with the fear of masked thugs breaking down your door.
The final and most insidious of the tactics of such a totalitarian government is epistemic control, which is the seizure of all sources of independent truth, in order to ensure that the cognitive dissonance introduced by objective reality does not impact their goals. It makes independent thought nearly impossible because there is no real information for it to grow. This is why a regime will attack institutions like universities, institutes of science, and media networks.
Once all three of these systems come together, there is no escape. There is only compliance:
Surveillance detects deviation before it is spoken.
Violence and carceral threats punish emotional noncompliance.
Epistemic control ensures no objective reality can take hold.
The surveillance-carceral-epistemic state is the final form of dominance. For every citizen not in the circle of elite control is a dystopian existence where thought, emotion and truth are provided for you. Deviation will be found, punished, and extinguished.
Conclusion—Epistemic War
The emergence of Donald Trump, and the seemingly impossible adhesive quality of his personality, is no accident. The system that created him was planned, tuned, and tested live on millions of human beings. It is not just psychological war, it represents epistemic war on the population—that is, a war on reality itself.
The solution to this problem requires both collective and individual action. It requires dismantling of the system from the ground up because this is what the system was, in large part, designed to do—to create addictive operant loops, pipelines to trauma, and weaponized social dynamics.
While this article is not focused on solutions, by enabling an understanding of the problem at both a granular and national scale, perhaps it will provide a chance to stop the system from advancing to its final form, total human dominance.
While human beings still exist, there is hope. No system will be able to fool all of the people all of the time, regardless of its sophistication or brutality, but we are in a crucial moment for human civilization. The epistemic war has not been won, yet.
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This is everything that people in power don’t want us to know! It’s brilliant.
Another great article Jim! I listened to your British narrator while cooking and misheard "cognitive dissonance" - thought I heard "dissidents". As I noted some of your poimts om a post-it, I realized that my phone's many spy tools could be noting me noting you and flagging me, just like that, as a cognitive dissident. Surely Substack is providing a wealth of data to the Thought Police, I just hope they are being persuaded to think like us.