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The Trump Symptom: Diagnosis, Prognosis and Treatment

Intervention in the panel discussion “Geopolitical Discourses in the Americas”, moderated by Hilda Fernández and organized by Lacan Salon of Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday, March 15, 2025

Diagnosis

There are obvious differences between Donald Trump and other presidents of the United States. It is necessary and important to analyze these differences. We must not deny them, but we must also consider, following both Marxist materialist dialectics and the Lacanian logic of the signifier, that differences are always established within a structural identity that gives sense to the different and opposite terms. I want to talk about this identity because I have noticed that it is emphasized by a large part of the Mexican people, especially the popular sectors, when they compare Trump with his predecessors and especially with Joe Biden.

Like Trump, Biden was a staunch ally of Zionism and an accomplice of Netanyahu in Gaza genocide. The Biden administration systematically violated the rights of immigrants and deported them in large numbers, also like Trump. Biden also resembles Trump in many other things, such as his complete subordination to capital, the defense of neoliberal capitalism, favoritism toward those close to him, the discretionary use of tariffs in favor of the United States, the reproduction of neocolonial trade relations with the Global South and the imperialist interference in other countries. Considering all this, one could almost say that Biden was a Trumpist.

What is certain is that Biden and Trump are not as different as they appear at first glance. It is difficult to detect important qualitative differences between them. It seems that the differences are more of an intensity or degree. Perhaps we can say that Trump is the same as Biden, but worse. Or perhaps it is more correct to maintain that Trump is nothing more than the continuation of Biden by other means, more extreme means, as in Clausewitz, where war is the continuation of politics by other means.

Trump is something like Biden without political correctness. Or better yet: Trump is Biden who comes out of the closet. Trump is an unashamed Biden, more sincere, or, if you prefer, more obscene, more cynical.

Trump’s greater obscenity and greater cynicism, like his other attributes, are obviously not his attributes as a subject, as a subject of the unconscious, of desire, as conceived in psychoanalysis. These attributes are rather, in Marxist terms, Trump’s attributes as a particular personification of capital at a specific historical moment. As early as 1848, Marx and Engels noted how cynical and obscene capitalism was compared to feudalism. This cynicism and obscenity are accentuated in neoliberalism and then further accentuated in neo-fascism, in the advanced neo-fascist phase of capitalism, as personified by Trump.

What Trump personifies, neo-fascist neoliberalism, is not accepted as such by many political analysts. Many consider it an essential contradiction and therefore an impossibility. According to them, the same thing could not be both neo-fascist and neoliberal, since fascism would be the opposite of liberalism. This idea is not only a liberal illusion, but also sometimes a ploy to exalt liberalism because of its contrast with what was most repudiated in the 20th century. In any case, this is a mistake, as Franz Neuman demonstrated by exposing the ultra-liberal capitalist foundation of Nazism.

What Neuman demonstrates is what we have always known in the Marxist tradition: that Nazism and now neo-Nazism, like fascism and now neo-fascism, are defensive expressions of capitalism in its moments of deep structural crisis. These pathological expressions are symptoms in the strict psychoanalytic sense of the word, a sense invented by Marx, as we know from Lacan. In this psychoanalytic sense, the symptom personified by Trump reveals a truth that was better concealed by Biden, Obama and others.

The truth revealed by Trump is the truth of capitalism. This truth is that of the essential operations of the capitalist system: class division, exacerbation of inequality, concentration of wealth in certain countries and people, exploitation of man by man, instrumentalization of laws and institutions, commodification and resulting corruption of everything that exists, prioritizing commodity exchange value over the intrinsic value of things, degradation of culture, devastation of nature, and extraction of the living to convert it into more and more dead money. Typically, all of this is covered up and in some way repressed by the capitalist state, but Trump uncovers it, thus allowing a return of the repressed. Trump thus operates as a symptom: as the personification of the neoliberal neo-fascist symptom of capitalism.

Prognosis

One can even take comfort in seeing how Trump’s cynical and obscene appearance finally confesses, clearly, sincerely, at least a small part of everything the US government has always been for us in Latin America. For us, the United States was never exactly the guardian of our democracy, our freedom, and our prosperity. US governments were quite the opposite: saboteurs of our democracy, enemies of our freedom, and causes of our poverty, whether as invaders, plunderers of resources, sponsors of death squads, promoters of military coups, and unconditional allies of oppressive and exploitative oligarchies.

After all the United States has done to us, what more can we expect? What could be worse than all the American misdeeds we have suffered so far? Many Mexicans, both experts and ordinary people, are alarmed to think that the designation of drug trafficking groups as terrorist groups could provide a justification and legal avenue for the United States to militarily attack Mexican territory. Some even fear that the United States will do what it does best: massive bombings, the destruction of cities, the annihilation of thousands of people, and the complete dislocation of society and the state, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

There are even those who believe that the Trump administration would be capable of perpetrating, either in Mexico or elsewhere, genocides like the one the Israeli state has just committed in Palestine. This seems highly unlikely, but it is true that there are deep affinities between Trump and Netanyahu, as evidenced by Trump’s proposal for ethnic cleansing and tourism developments in Gaza.

In reality, after what has happened in Gaza, everything seems to be permitted. Perhaps we should see in Gaza an experiment like the Spanish Civil War just before World War II. Just as Europe ended up suffering what it had allowed to happen in Spain, so the world could now suffer what it has allowed to happen in Gaza.

What I’m trying to say is that the devastating violence against Palestine could once again be turned against the West. This is also what happened in World War II for Aimé Césaire, who saw in Nazism and fascism an inward retreat of colonial and imperialist violence, so that Europe suddenly did to itself what it had always done in its American, Asian, and African colonies. Sadism thus returned to its masochistic source.

One of the great lessons of psychoanalysis, a lesson made explicit by Lacan, is that self-destruction is at the origin and at the end of the detour of destruction. Perhaps this is why the Western capitalist devastation of nature and other cultures quickly turns back toward Western culture and could end up destroying capitalism itself. The problem with the capitalist system is that it directly satisfies the death drive through what Marx represented as the vampire of capital that devours all living things to turn them into dead capital. This distinguishes the economic system of capitalism from the symbolic system of culture, in which the drive can stray and thus persist as the life drive.

With the advance of capitalism, culture is gradually subsumed within capitalism. Capitalist accounting gradually gains ground on the cultural fabric. Ultimately, only the capitalist system remains, which cannot even survive itself, its jouissance that Lacan understands as possession for possession’s sake and as satisfaction of the death drive.

The jouissance of capital, transmuting all living things into more and more accumulated dead capital, cannot but consume itself. This self-consumption of capitalism was already predicted by Lacan when he introduced the capitalist discourse. The same self-consumption was also predicted by Marx. In the end, when everything has been transformed into capital, there is nothing left to transform, and the system collapses.

The risk of capitalism’s collapse is part of what is symptomatically revealed through Trump. Isn’t Trump’s neo-fascist neoliberalism, with its obscene and shameless appearance, the best expression of the capitalist discourse, of capital that tends to eliminate all barriers to jouissance, all ideological, institutional, and political mediations, in order to link itself directly to itself and thus destroy itself? The question now is whether we are facing the end of the world or the end of capitalism.

Treatment

In the face of the jouissance of capital revealed in Trump, there are several strategies that have been developed in the tradition of anti-capitalist struggle, which have repeatedly confirmed their effectiveness and which remain effective today. There is no need to recall them now, but it is worth referring to six possible actions or attitudes in which Marxist sensibility coincides with that of Freud and Lacan:

1. First, we must distrust the signifiers that have entered capitalist accounting. The big Other subsumed in capital is not as reliable as that of language. The symbolic system allows for the reproduction of human culture, but the capitalist system only serves the accumulation of capital. The cumulative jouissance of this capital governs the signifiers that enter the orbit of its system, such as those inscribed in the culture industry or on social media.

2. Although we distrust capital, we need to trust the signifier and its power. We must continue to believe in the big Other, continue to talk and listen, and continue to discuss. We cannot limit ourselves to acting, for action only has symbolic efficacy to the extent that it interprets and enacts the roles of signifiers. The rejection of these signifiers is part of the fascist project of what Walter Benjamin described as aestheticization, understanding it as an imaginarization and de-symbolization. Neo-fascism is also a rejection of the symbolic, of words and thought, in favor of headless, imaginary, specular action.

3. We must avoid imaginary aggressive specular relationships such as those in which we would respond to American nationalism with Canadian or Mexican nationalism. This exacerbates the nationalism that is part of the problem and therefore cannot be the solution. Faced with nationalism, the only alternative is internationalism. The social bond between absolutely different subjects is what can free us from the narcissism of small differences between an omnipotent self confronted by the other.

4. We should not delude ourselves with the imaginary omnipotence of our own egos. The individual can do very little. Resistance can only be collective, social, not individual, political, not psychological.

5. Nor should we psychologize and thus depoliticize what is happening. The situation is political, not psychological. The problem is neither Trump’s personality, character, nor his jouissance. The jouissance that should concern us is the impersonal jouissance of capital in which we are trapped through our production and consumption.

6. In the face of capital’s jouissance, we must follow Antigone’s example in Lacan’s Seventh Seminar and not give in to our desire. We would simply have to give in strategically in order not to give in, like Sygne de Coufontaine in Lacan’s Eighth Seminar. In any case, the radical nature of not giving in is crucial. One is radical by going to the root, and the root is desire, a desire like that of communism. This communist ideal must continue to exist to keep the corresponding desire alive, but also to not narrow the political spectrum of possibilities. When the consistent left that remains faithful to its radicalism is lost, everything shifts to the right: the left becomes centrist, the new center becomes right-wing, and the right becomes the far right.


OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
David Pavón-Cuéllar (15 de marzo de 2025). The Trump Symptom: Diagnosis, Prognosis and Treatment. En lugar de la psicología. Recuperado 20 de abril de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/13jwq


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