Secondary Delusions: Trump’s Totalist Mythology
Inside the dual-delusion loop that defines an authoritarian psyche.
The president of the United States is delusional. He believes things that are just not true. But what does that really mean psychologically? And how might it help explain some of his behavior?
This article will show several recent examples of Donald Trump’s delusional conduct, and explain how the people around him have helped him create a totalist mythology based on a dual-delusion system.
This is not a completely unheard of scenario historically, but none of the antecedents turned out well. Understanding the mechanics of the psychological spiral we’re all experiencing is critical to strategizing a solution for exiting this regime—and plotting a national recovery.
What Is a Delusion?
According to ScienceDirect:
A delusion is a false, unshakeable idea or belief which is out of keeping with the patient’s social and cultural background. The main features of delusions according to Jaspers (1959), besides their being false, are: (1) they are held with an extraordinary conviction and subjective certainty; (2) there is imperviousness to other experiences and to compelling counterargument; (3) their content is impossible.
Crucially, there are two kinds of delusions: primary and secondary. A primary delusion is a subjective experience that cannot be easily understood and is often described as “revelatory.” Donald Trump has many beliefs that fit this definition, like his conviction that American cities are in chaos: e.g. the empirically false claims that “Chicago has had 4,000 murders in a short period of time” and “Portland is burning down.”
A secondary delusion, on the other hand, “can be explained in the context of preceding affects or other experiences.” Secondary delusions are the judgment or the story created to explain or interpret the “revelations” of primary delusions.
Thus, secondary delusions are always interpretations, and are psychologically reducible, for example grandiose delusions in mania or persecutory delusions secondary to hallucinations.
As German-Swiss psychiatrist Karl Jaspers said:
“Secondary delusions… are the judgment based on the delusional experience.”
In Trump’s case, the secondary delusions are largely composed of: 1) conspiracies against him that must be destroyed, and 2) a mythology of his self-image that must be actualized in the real world to erase his narcissistic injuries from Epstein.
Stephen Miller, Delusionist
In a press conference with the top leadership of federal law enforcement Wednesday, Trump promised to send paramilitary agents and National Guard into more U.S. cities and admitted “I didn’t get elected for what we’re doing. This is many, many steps above.”
By saying this out loud, Trump is acknowledging that he is no longer executing on what voters want, he is doing what he feels must be done, and more specifically, what the people around him want—in this case Stephen Miller, whose “truest feelings… might be going a little bit too far.”
Every American deserves to live in a community where they’re not afraid of being mugged, murdered, robbed, raped, assaulted, or shot… I didn’t realize I was going to make this such a big factor in the admin--I didn’t really campaign--I campaigned on crime. But I never thought we’d go into every city and take a really safe city that we’ve all been living with the years and make them safe. And now it’s like a passion for me, and it’s a passion for the people behind me. So I didn’t get elected. I did get elected for crime, but I didn’t get elected for what we’re doing. This is many, many steps above. And I want to thank Stephen Miller... I’d love to have him come up and explain his true feelings. Maybe not his truest feelings. That might be going a little bit too far.
This was not offhand; Trump publicly locates Miller as the emotional and ideological source of his new crusade.
Trump’s Freudian slip about taking “a really safe city… and make them safe” is emblematic of his overall mental condition, but his immediate recognition of Stephen Miller as the architect of his plans—who has a darker layer of unspeakable “truest feelings”—is an important tell. This is a meta-commentary on his myth-making: Trump gets his primary delusions from Stephen Miller and then constructs secondary delusions folded into his personal mythology.
Pattern of Delusion
It’s not just Stephen Miller creating primary delusions for Trump. Another example of this process was Trump’s racist ambush of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in May, which was based on false and misleading information provided by Elon Musk—a pattern of Black-on-white violence, creating a primary delusion in Trump’s head. The secondary delusion that Musk wanted Trump to create was that there is a conspiracy against white people—and it worked.
It has been widely reported that Trump was shown old footage of violence from 2020 to make his determination that Portland should be invaded by ICE and the National Guard. And on Thursday, the White House released this fascist propaganda video designed to make the argument that Chicago requires a military takeover.
But the “chaos” in the video mostly comes from other states. The voiceover of Trump saying that Biden “left us with the largest law enforcement challenge in history…” is a secondary delusion based on a primary delusion created by false propaganda. Delusions, of course, lead to dangerous “solutions.”
“We’re not going to allow this kind of savagery to destroy our society.”
This same structure recurs repeatedly: shocking visual evidence (the ‘red-pill’), followed by an all-explaining conspiracy. This kind of totalizing system, where reality itself is bent to the needs of the regime, was described by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton.
Sacred Science
Robert Jay Lifton outlined eight criteria of ideological totalism in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (1961). Each describes a psychological environment that enforces absolute belief and suppresses independent thought:
Milieu Control: Regulation of communication within and outside the group; control over information, relationships, and social contact.
Mystical Manipulation: The orchestrated appearance of “higher purpose” or destiny; events are framed as signs of a sacred plan.
Demand for Purity: Division of the world into pure vs. impure; constant pressure toward ideological cleansing and confession.
Cult of Confession: Continuous self-disclosure and self-criticism used to police loyalty and extract conformity.
Sacred Science: The group’s doctrine is treated as ultimate truth, beyond question or empirical testing.
Loading the Language: Use of clichéd, reductionist jargon that compresses complex issues into emotionally charged slogans.
Doctrine over Person: Personal experience and evidence are subordinated to the ideological narrative; if facts conflict with dogma, the facts are denied.
Dispensing of Existence: The right to exist (morally or physically) is reserved for true believers; outsiders can be dehumanized or destroyed.
Note
’s BITE Model, which provides a simple matrix for diagnosing and understanding the control that cults exert, incorporates and extends much of Lifton’s work.While Lifton was careful to note that this kind of totalist system is a continuum of behavior and the term should not be wielded as an epithet, I think for anyone who watches the Trump regime, it’s easy to look over each of Lifton’s criteria and see a very strong match. But I want to focus on one component here: Sacred Science.
In Lifton’s words:
“The totalist milieu maintains an aura of sacredness around its basic doctrine. This sacred quality is not necessarily theological, but can be expressed in secular or scientific terms. What counts is that the doctrine is considered to represent the ultimate moral vision of the good and the true.”
Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Free Press 1961, p. 426.
In Lifton’s schema, this is the point where ideology becomes myth—when political claims are infused with moral and even cosmic certainty. This describes the Trump regime across all government functions. For example, I’ve written extensively on the dangerous moves the regime is making at HHS, CDC, and NIH, which are all based on what Lifton called Sacred Science.
Trump said this in the White House Thursday, with RFK Jr. behind him:
“Well autism is like a whole different thing. When you look at, it was one in 20,000. Now it’s one in 12. If you look Bobby, we have different numbers, but one in 12, one in 28, one in 32. There’s a couple of different numbers out there, but it’s one in a very, very different number than it used to be. It used to be one in 20,000. And that was not that long ago, 20 years ago or so. And now they had something for boys, for babies, baby boys. It’s one in 12. I heard one in 10, Bobby. I heard another one, you know, different lists, but when you think of that, it’s not even sustainable, but there’s something artificial. When that happens, that’s not like a natural. And then you have certain groups of people that literally don’t have autism and they’re not taking some of the things that we’re taking. So we’re working very hard.”
In this case, RFK Jr. is playing Trump’s Sacred Scientist. When asked directly why he hired RFK Jr. when so many in his own party reject RFK Jr.’s dangerous ideas, Trump’s answer is always a version of: “he’s a little bit different. I like that.” In other words, it has nothing to do with health, it’s all about a better story to tell.
Trump has a primary delusion about autism, created by a grade school statistical fallacy—the claim that “one in 20,000” had autism “20 years ago” vs. “one in 12” now. While his statistics are wrong to start (autism rates are about ~one in 36), the rise in autism diagnoses over the last fifty years is simply the result of more doctors being aware of autism. But that is not an exciting story, so Trump has built a secondary delusion to explain the fallacy—a mysterious “something artificial” which he will be the one to find.
“So we’re working very hard.”
Arch de Trumph
Trump’s self-mythologizing reached an entirely new level Wednesday evening when he had a gathering of his donors to boast about the various additions and alterations he’s making to the White House and Washington DC. These plans include a large Arc de Triomphe-style monument at the circle where the District meets the Arlington Memorial Bridge—literally the bridge between the North and South, a symbol of reconciliation.
But Trump does not stop there, he mythologizes further by deliberately bear-hugging Confederate traitor Robert E. Lee, a general responsible for tens of thousands of American deaths, with a total falsehood:
“And we showed another building in our--it’s the art. So that circle that’s Arlington Memorial Bridge, is you know, it’s sort of the most important one, a very important structure. And at the end of it, the circle. […] And then they were, in 1902, they were going to build a Statue of Robert E. Lee. would have been OK with me. A lot of people wouldn’t have liked it. But would have been OK with me. Would have been OK with a lot of the people on the show. But they didn’t do that. And so for years and years it sat, and every time somebody rides over that beautiful bridge going right to the Lincoln Memorial, it’s so beautiful, right? It’s--they literally say something supposed to be there. So it’s lady Liberty.”
There is no record of such a plan including Robert E. Lee in 1902, although there was a Senate Commission. Trump’s addition of Lee was simply a construct of his own mythology—deliberately designed to equate the Confederacy with the Union and present himself as the historic healer of the divide between North and South.
The plan, which Trump demonstrated with toy-like models at his press conference, is to create a triumphal arch like Napoleon’s in Paris, Hitler’s unfinished plan for an arch to “dwarf” the Arc de Triomphe, and the arch Mussolini built when he captured Libya into his fascist empire.
Trump is exhibiting late-stage authoritarian myth-making behavior. He’s showing the psychological need to reorder the symbology of the world around him. This is not just his need exert dominance, this is about erasing history—both America’s and his own.
In this act of symbolic rearrangement—Confederate and Union, victim and savior—Trump displays the full architecture of secondary delusion: a myth that rewrites reality to protect the self.
Two-tiered Delusion System
There are no simple ways of diagnosing Donald Trump, much less diagnosing what’s wrong with America. However, it’s useful to understand the larger psychological mechanics that feed the spiral we’re in. One of those mechanics is a totalist system around Donald Trump. You can call it a cult, but it’s deeper than that.
Trump is a very psychologically vulnerable subject. He displays several observable risk factors for delusional or delusion-like thinking, including his malignant narcissism, ego-injury, and internal terror of Epstein, his age, his vascular problems, and his potential early dementia. When people like RFK Jr., Elon Musk, or Stephen Miller feed Trump misdated videos, or tell him scary stories about cities, he is more liable to be triggered emotionally and to believe what he’s told than the average person.
This kind of psychological manipulation effectively functions like a primary delusion: Trump is shown what he’s told is video of Portland on fire. Since he heard from the Mayor and Governor that everything is peaceful, this feels like a revelation. It sticks in his mind as something that needs an explanation. The explanation for the “fires” is already provided: “Antifa” is the secondary delusion that explains the primary delusion.
In this way, the Sacred Science of Trump—the doctrine that shall not be questioned—or as he named his own social media platform, “The Truth,” comes directly from delusions generated by Trump’s own aides. He is enclosed in a sealed, totalist system designed to feed himself stories that build on his personal mythology, his secondary delusional elaborations.
This loop—delusion, explanation, amplification—now defines the executive branch.
Shatter the Delusion
Trump’s delusions are contagious. When he believes something, he requires his followers to believe it too, regardless of the truth, legality, or common decency of the claim. For example, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said this Friday morning about the peaceful protests being planned nationwide Saturday:
“Now tomorrow the Democrat leaders are going to join for a big party out on the national mall. They’re going to descend on our capital for their much-anticipated so-called No Kings Rally. We refer to it by its more accurate description, the hate America rally… If you think about what’s going to happen here tomorrow, you’re going to bring together the Marxist, the Socialist, the Antifa advocates, the anarchist and the pro-Hamas wing of the far-left Democrat party. That is the modern Democratic party.“
These talking points are being parroted by numerous Republican lawmakers, not to mention people like Trump and Stephen Miller. This is Sacred Science, part of the doctrine that they are all required to internalize and repeat.
But these talking points are also strikingly similar to Goebbels’s rhetoric in the early 1930s who, while serving a Miller-like role to Hitler, built a mythology of a conspiracy between Marxists, Socialists, “Antifa,” and anarchists that quickly led to the creation of a one-party state. The only substitution in the GOP‘s formulation is “pro-Hamas” instead of Jews.
You can’t talk someone out of a delusion. That is their nature; they are irrational.
However, delusions are not permanent; they can be broken—and the easiest way to do it is to present incontrovertible evidence that the delusion is false until it becomes too psychologically burdensome to maintain. That’s why we need millions of people, whoever you are, and whatever you believe, to make a big show at the NoKings marches on Saturday.
You can’t talk someone out of a delusion; by definition it resists reason. But delusions aren’t permanent. They shatter when reality becomes too heavy to ignore.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction—and the distinction between true and false—no longer exist.”
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Thank you Jim for pulling back the curtain and exposing what’s really happening. It seems you are years ahead of the mainstream media and general population. One day, I hope Americans understand what we’ve been living through. The sooner the better. Much gratitude for your continued work and research. You connect the dots in ways few do or can.
The effort, research, and insight you share in your work is invaluable. Thank you.