What Putin and Trump Can Teach Us About Humiliation. A Presentation of François Bafoil's work

François Bafoil, sociologist and emeritus research director at the French CNRS (CERI-Sciences Po), has recently published The Political Psychology of Populism. Trump, Poutin and the Roots of Humiliation, with Palgrave Macmillan. In this book he looks at a new form of populism, which he describes as pathological for society, through the trajectories of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. His approach draws on the work of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, and Norbert Elias. In this article, Bafoil provides an excellent introduction to this book, which constitutes the third work in the series he began with The Politics of Destruction (2021).

In looking at these two figures, the Russian and American leaders, I set out to understand three particular characteristics they share:

1. The origin of the suffering they constantly proclaim, which they use to present themselves as wounded individuals, as victims of enemies that have united against them;
2. The effects of this suffering in their discourse;
3. The ways in which they channel this suffering into a burning love for their followers, who come together in the masses that they incite to great violence, and whose energy they then direct against those they identify as their enemies. 

This suffering is linked to a feeling of loss. The loss of Russian and Orthodox greatness for Putin, and a loss of white Christian American greatness for Trump. Moreover, both these presidents seem to experience this loss as something stolen from them, and see themselves the victims of a theft committed by foreign enemies – whether by Ukrainian, Chechen, European, or American forces for the former, or by Black, Latino, Muslim communities for the other – who are all seen as banding together to capture  and corrupt the “soul” of the people. This theft becomes a theft of national identity, an inadmissible wrong that must be righted. Trump and Putin thus cast themselves as individuals who have been wronged and who merely seek vengeance.

In their eyes, their supporters become the way to exact this “vengeance”. On Capitol Hill or Red Square, they are the incarnation of their leader’s will, he who shapes the emotions of his faithful, belabouring their humiliation, smelting it in the fire of their shared love and sharpening it on the hatred of foreigners, to fuel the flames of resentment. The glowing virtues of their followers emerge in stark contrast to the condemnation of their enemies’ rottenness, of all those who do not acknowledge them as leaders and do not believe what they hold to be true.

The domination of the masses

The American and Russian masses differ primarily in the nature of the groups they are made up of, but also in their means of communication. The masses of Trump supporters are fascinating in that they became visible to all on January 6, 2021, after having long been mere potential. This was driven by the web chat “4chan” all over the United States, through the QAnon movement, apparently rooted even in the higher echelons of the federal administration. Long difficult to pin down, the QAnon movement fed representations of a conspiracy against democracy and against President Trump, which rumours attributed to paedophiles and Satan worshipers claimed to be among Democrat supporters. This movement coalesced around highly structured groups, such as the white supremacist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, but also around a vast nebulous network of activists from very diverse social backgrounds. Prior to the 2021 election, all had repeated the predictions of the coming “storm” and called for the “assault” against the alleged conspirators hiding in the Capitol. 

By contrast, the Russian masses correspond less to informal tentacular networks than to more traditionally organized forms of support, based on the mobilization of activists (particularly those of United Russia, Putin’s political party). Alongside these activists, we observe other structured groups, the epitome of which is the Wagner militia group. 

Washington, USA - 06 January 2021. Protestors descend upon Capitol Hill to contest the certification of the Presidential Election. 
Photo by Valerio Pucci for Shutterstock

Love. Hate. Sex drive. 

Whatever their differences might be, these two groups are in themselves the subject of their leaders’ discourses, shaping the masses according to their own fantasies of grandeur, and promises of coming salvation. That is why this audience is the site for the sublimation of both love and hate, a love that cannot mask the hatred of the other, and which spills over into calls for violence and murder. The mass is in fusion and operates as a form of “wish fulfilment”, to use Freud’s term for dreams.

More specifically, Trump’s and Putin’s masses seem to me to be the exact incarnation of the notion that Freud analysed in his 1921 text Group psychology and analysis of the Ego. The group is the site for love that is “inhibited in its aim”. It is not the site for sexual union between two beings in the form of intercourse (between members of the group or between them and the leader) but rather a sublimated form of this union made possible by the identification of each group member with the actions and discourse of the leader, and on the other hand the substitution of the image of the latter for the various individual superegos. Freud breaks down the experience of love which connects the ego to the group by the intermediary of the leader, through the dynamics of identification and repositioning of the libidinal factors between ego, other, and the dynamics of subjection and adoration, humility and deification, and so forth. One phrase in particular seems to encapsulate his thinking on this point: “we are aware that what we have been able to contribute towards  the explanation of the libidinal structure of groups leads back to the distinction between the ego and the ego ideal and to the double kind of tie which this makes possible – identification and substitution of the object for the ego ideal.”1 The leader now takes the place of the former authority figure (the biological father figure) who was unable to satisfy the individual, and comes to fulfil this expectation and desire. I analyse this projective and substitutive dynamic on the base of a shift in the quantum of love energy, through the emotions of resentment and humiliation that structure this love that is “inhibited in aim”, that everyone bears within the group, in a form that is both contained but ultimately violently discharged. Sexual energy, libido, is thus at the heart of the group, and of politics more broadly. 

In the group, sexual energy operates at several levels – firstly in the excitement that runs through members united in the love they bear for each other and for the leader, but also in the love of the leader for them in the role of the fulfilling father. Donald Trump seems to exude painful suffering at the mention of a lost Eden, in the form of the American nation that he promises to make “great again.” Indeed, it was as though he was filled with love when he asked his followers – after noting that the assault on the Capitol had failed – to go home: “I know how you feel, I know you are hurt, I know your pain. But go home and go home in peace. So go home we love you.” He concluded his speech with the promise to never forget this day: “Go home with love and peace. Remember this day forever.”2

Vladimir Putin also casts himself in the role of the prophet who shows the way forward, as well as the father of the nation who protects his children, mistreated by neighbouring countries. The day that Russia annexed four Ukrainian provinces (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia), on September 30, 2022, Putin declared: "For decades, these people, others tried to tear away their historical truth, to destroy their traditions, they tried to prevent them from speaking Russian, make them renounce their culture and it did not work. These people carried the love of their homeland in their hearts, and transmitted it to their children, and that is the reason we say that Russia is not merely opening the doors of our home to our brothers and sisters but also opening our hearts. Welcome home!3

For both leaders, sexual appetite is also the celebration of rape that they publicly boast of – Trump proclaiming his irrepressible sexual desires in 2016, provoking indignation even in Republican ranks, or insulting the women who accused him of rape, saying they aren’t his type. Putin demonstrated the same macho attitude when, at the beginning of the war, he told Volodymyr Zelensky he should lie down and take orders “like a girl.”

Similarly, sexuality can be seen in the barely hidden hatred of all those whom – according to these leaders – pervert the nation. This includes the LGBT community but also all those who do not share the macho ideal of these pack leaders, Trump-style buffoons, or Putin-style “tough guys.”

Finally, another aspect of how sexual energy impacts the group can be seen in the emergence of specific individuals within it, nebulous prophets, who consider themselves vested with a genuinely supernatural mission. In both these groups the same image of the mage appears, and in both instances, it bears the same name: Shaman. In the mass of Trump supporters, Shaman is Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley, known as Jake Angeli, member of QAnon, who swaggered around the Capitol during the January 6 assault, with all the accoutrements of a Native American chief, bare-chested, with a long-haired horned headdress like a trophy taken from the enemy, covered in tattoos and a lance in hand. In the Russian group, Shaman is name of the young singer, who followed Putin onstage outside the Kremlin on September 30, 2022, to sing his hit song “I am Russian,” in which he proclaimed his desire for freedom and harmony with the world, far from the hostilities of war:

“I am Russian until the end
I am Russian, my blood comes from my father
I am Russian, I was lucky
I am Russian, in spite of the whole world.”

While the audience waved Russian flags and chanted after him “I am Russian for and against everything”, all united against the wrongful intentions of surrounding enemies.

Humiliation and resentment 

Sexual power is connected to the humiliation that both these leaders, and their followers, reserve for their adversaries. They say they have suffered this same emotion at the hands of arrogant enemies, those who stole their lost Eden or who claim to exclude them from the international community. They then turn this against all those whom they accuse of weakness, claiming they must be humiliated because weakness is a confession. Everyone remembers the Russian security council meeting of February 21, 2022, during which Vladmir Putin set out to publicly humiliate Sergey Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s spy services. This can also be seen in instances where Donald Trump has publicly mocked respectable public figures such as the infectious diseases specialist Anthony Fauci, the Muslim captain Humayun Khan, killed in Iraq, or the federal judge Gonzalo P. Curiel, whom he accused of botching a trial because he was Mexican. This humiliation is fed on resentment, born of wounded identity, humiliation by foreigners, and all the non-national “others” seen as profiteering from the host country.

Friedrich Nietzsche based his distinction between the weak and the strong (which he called “aristocrats”)  on the resentment he saw as the great negative strength against the strength of life : it is the strength of the weak who hold back their response for a long time,  constantly dwelling on their vengeance in order to wreak it at the best possible time, when their enemy least expects it. For this reason, resentment is the tool of those who conceal themselves, and who make the most of their circumstances and the time available to better satisfy their frustrations.

This analysis of resentment can feed into two other theories in understanding group psychology today. 
The first is that of Max Weber, who coined the notion “theodicies of suffering”. This term refers to the range of justifications that various kinds of victims – political or professional – construct by building imaginary realities intended to appease the suffering they have experienced and compensate for present injustices, transformed into future salvation. 
The second notion is from Freud, who also explored the worlds of the imaginary, thought to compensate for a fundamental lack, a radical neglect, fathomless frustration, but only to emphasize the dynamic response in terms of hatred or destruction of the other. Shakespeare’s Richard III is the emblematic figure of this. Crippled at birth, despised by women, and the butt of children’s jokes, he constantly seeks vengeance for the injustice of nature, and ravages everything around him. Men, women, and children all fall under his rage at having been subject to the prejudice of cruel nature. Hatred, the negative image of stolen love, is both the driving force and legitimating principle of action.
This expressive ressentiment in the form of a feeling of injustice, in this case the supposed theft of the nation’s history – that profoundly wounds the narcissism of the individual – is well illustrated by Trum and Putin. The masses, that they shape, consent to this resentment, which matures slowly before ultimately exploding in an overflow of rage and destruction.                                      

Hatred 

The two leaders differ on hatred: Trump hates and denigrates his opponents; Putin hates and destroys them. This difference is based on their particular institutional structures, their vision of the other, and their use of language.

Hallucination

What the masses express through the voices of Trum or Putin is a form of collective hallucination. The hallucination of an identity shaped in the discourse of love and hate supposed to reflect the image of lost community, but even more the identity found in and by the group, on the basis of the valuing of brotherly love and the exclusion of foreigners. These are hallucinations of a victory that is yet to come, as a representation of the self, pure and unified, forever virginal, like a nation that returns to a state of untouched nature.

Hallucinations are a psychological reality that, in response to a fundamental lack experienced as a wound by the person who considers themselves a victim of some prejudice, are substituted for objective reality, shared by all, as common sense. A hallucinated reality is imposed on all, if the institutions of force, police enforcement and legalized murder impose it as the only admissible reality. Totalitarianism and the many regimes that fall under it more or less, determine the range of hallucination in the extent to which by the use of excessive force, they impose it and bring it to life in individual psyches and collective representations as the only reality possible. Each time, the imposition of such a reality involves the destruction of categories of time and space, collective and individual. But it also involves the affirmation of a history that is different from that experienced, due to the elimination of whole segments of collective memory, by the shifting or condensation of shared markers, the inversion of causal relations etc. All of this is associated with the constant use of police violence to constrain and oblige individuals to consent. We can see that the categories of (original) trauma and the narcissistic wound, as well as those of lack and the repetition of action, are connected to love and hate, but also to desire and libido (inhibited or expressed) to account for the constant lies, which ultimately impose a reality that is merely semblance, excluding any other form of reality. The imaginary is substituted for reality and nothing remains but hallucination.

This analytic framework for hallucination allowed me, on the one hand, to understand how the figure of political authority is constructed in business and in the state, under the soviet regime and under radical Islamic regimes (Politique de la destruction, 2021), and on the other hand to understand the figure of the prostitute in the late 19^th century (La femme hallucinée, 2022). Both of these figures are the result of a combination of authoritarian political, medical, and cultural discourses that seek to erase the social space by reducing it to its most hideous aspect. 

2025

This interpretative framework appears all the more relevant today, to try to understand what Donald Trump has set in place during his second mandate, even though no one is fully able to grasp the contours of his action. Nonetheless, we have a number of elements at our disposal. In particular, the certainty, which he hammered home during his inauguration speech on January 20, 2025, of having been saved by God to fulfil a project of prosperity, such as American has never known, and which will set it apart among nations. References to God have been repeated in different forms on different occasions and are clues as to the “inspiration” that drives him, and which allows him to play the prophet of his people.

Such words are not to be taken lightly. They are the foundation of a regime based on hallucination, based on the substitution of psychological reality forged under the MAGA slogan, for objective reality shared by all. They are the reduction of truth to opinion, his opinion, and the systematic debasement and constant insult of those he labels adversaries.

To be able to impose such a vision of public action, a 30-chapter, 919-page document was prepared by 50 organizations and 360 experts, under guidance from the Heritage Foundation: Project 2025 (Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise. This document, subtitled Principles to Limit Government, Expand Freedom, and Strengthen America, is the proof of the intense preparation for government by Trump and his teams. Above all, it is a major characteristic of the Trump II era, compared to Trump I (2016-2020). Between these two periods we can note that opposition has weakened (notably among Democrats), public violence has increased, and internal cleavages within American society have deepened. Trump has been able to unleash his violence, mobilize the army to resolve police matters and enforce the peace, and eliminate all traces of Black Lives Matter outside the White House.

The introduction to Project 2025, seen as the continuation of the conservative revolution begun by Ronald Reagan, whose first text Mandate for Leadership dates back to 1979, lays out four avenues for public action: 

1. Restore the family as the centrepiece of American life and protect our children
2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.

The measures that are outlined in the rest of the programme concern all the aspects of the state of law that Trump suggests should be redefined or broken down. Where necessary, the army can be involved in internal affairs and against political opponents. In the past six months, part of this program for action has already been implemented. 

The text specifies that the enemies of the nation must be silenced, first among them judges and other legal figures (particularly those involved in cases concerning him directly); transgender people and migrants who pollute the white race; pro-Palestinian and woke activists, and other individuals labelled terrorists and leftists; scientists who develop the wrong science, who document human responsibility for climate change, and the spread of epidemics. Above all, and like an obsession that constantly feeds the desire for vengeance and the destructive machine: the leftist-wok-transgender-corruption that is working to destroy the American tradition of the white Christian male, whether in the tech world or in universities, in the Democratic party, or the deep state. This is a constant obsession.

Ultimately this is a programme for action that is highly structured and which radically throws into question the American state of law, substitutes fact with belief, supplants professional qualifications with obedience to the leader, imposes the primacy of opinion over the rule of law, rehabilitates convicted criminals (such as the insurgents of January 6, 2021), and finally seeks to re-establish the rights of the white, heterosexual, Christian father figure, over all other individuals allegedly aspiring to dominate America. 

Despite the numerous objections to the Trump II project, no one can know what reality will come from it. No one knows what will remain of the components of yesterday’s reality; or the dept of the impacts it will have in American society, and beyond, in the world. This is a consolidated hallucination that has become a widely shared frame of interpretation. It brings with it a risk of autocracy, this time hegemonic.  

François Bafoil co-directs the research group on social sciences and psychoanalysis at the CERI, with Paul Zawadzki (Paris 1). Find the publications and program for the group’s upcoming sessions on his page on the CERI website. See: https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/fr/content/sciences-sociales-et-psychanalyse.html

• 1. Sigmund Freud, 1921 Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi, OC T. XVI p. 68 ; Translated into English as Group Psychology and the analysis of the Ego, Trans. James Strachey, The international psychoanalytical press, 1922, 103
• 2. https://www.rev.com/transcripts/trump-video-telling-protesters-at-capitol-building-to-go-home-transcript
• 3. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtb5B1BxDNE
• 4. Houria Abdelouhaed, « Eh si, c’est un enfant ! », Le présent de la psychanalyse, 2023 / 2 (n° 10), p. 46.
• 5. « On ne peut torturer que celui que l’on torture est pensé comme non humain, come radicalement autre », Françoise Sironi, 1993, « Tu seras brisé de l’intérieur : tortue et effraction psychique », Revue de médecine psychosomatique, n° 36, cited in: Houria Abdelouhaed, art. cité, idem.