MAGA's Bloodlust

The research on why ordinary people cheer for executions and extrajudicial killings has been sitting in peer-reviewed journals for decades. Nobody in MAGA media has wanted you to find it.

The Endorsement Gap

The most consequential finding in five years of research on MAGA and political violence is also, rather predictably, the least circulated. MAGA Republicans are more likely to endorse political violence than any other measured group, while simultaneously maintaining, with entirely straight faces, that they wouldn’t dream of committing the violence themselves.

A 2025 nationally representative survey published in Injury Epidemiology confirmed both halves of that finding across a sample of 8,896 respondents. This gap between endorsement and personal willingness is the structural architecture of modern radicalization. The endorser does not need to throw the punch; the endorser needs only to communicate that throwing it is entirely acceptable (Wintemute et al., 2025).

The same survey found that MAGA Republicans were substantially more likely than non-MAGA non-Republicans to endorse racism, hostile sexism, xenophobia, QAnon beliefs, Christian nationalism, homonegativity, and Islamophobia. The conventional narrative likes to pretend these are isolated prejudices, but research consistently associates these exact beliefs with an elevated risk of political violence across populations and political contexts. The researchers concluded that a large group sharing a political identity, wedded to a belief that political violence is justified, creates a climate of acceptance that raises the risk it will occur (Wintemute et al., 2025).

The second wave of the same longitudinal survey, published in 2026, added a finding that the self-defense framing MAGA deploys simply cannot accommodate. Support for political violence actually increased after the 2024 election. The share of respondents saying violence is usually or always justified to stop an election from being stolen rose from 6.8 percent in 2024 to 9 percent in 2025.

Consider the timing: the election had already been decided. The threat the endorsement was supposedly responding to had passed, yet the endorsement grew anyway. A position that expands after the justification for it disappears was never about the justification (Wintemute et al., 2026).

Piazza and Van Doren’s 2023 peer-reviewed study in American Politics Research documented the mechanism linking Trump approval to violence support directly. Using a nationally representative survey of over 1,500 adults, the researchers found that individuals who approve of Trump are significantly more likely to endorse positive characterizations of the January 6 Capitol attack and to support the use of political violence more broadly.

The effects of Trump approval on political violence support were mediated through racist and xenophobic attitudes. Trump supporters disproportionately exhibited those attitudes, and those attitudes drove the violence endorsement. The relationship between the leader’s rhetoric and the population’s willingness to endorse political action on its basis is measured, not assumed (Piazza & Van Doren, 2023).

ABC News documented 54 criminal cases in which Trump was explicitly invoked in court records in connection with violence or threats. In 41 of those cases, the perpetrator echoed Trump’s rhetoric directly; in the remaining 13, the perpetrator acted in defiance of him. Those 41 cases are the endorsement gap operating precisely as designed. The endorser communicated that the target was acceptable, the actor received the communication and acted, and the man at the top never had to get his hands dirty (ABC News, 2020).

Webster, Glynn, and Motta’s 2023 peer-reviewed study in Political Psychology documented the emotional architecture beneath this phenomenon: partisan schadenfreude, the experience of pleasure at an out-group’s suffering, which is most prevalent among ideologically extreme voters. More than one-third of Americans are willing to vote for a candidate who has promised to enact policies that disproportionately harm supporters of the opposing party.

There is clear experimental evidence of demand for candidates who promise cruelty among those who exhibit high schadenfreude. Between 5 and 15 percent of the public actively supports or enjoys threats of violence directed toward the other party. The harm, it turns out, is the point.

The Permission Structure

Individuals with high Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) were not, as some short-sighted commentators seem to think, invented by Donald Trump in 2015. The psychological architecture Bob Altemeyer began documenting all the way back in 1981 has been a stagnant fixture of the American population for as long as anyone has bothered to measure it.

What changed in 2015, and accelerated through both of his terms, was the signal. Authoritarian followers do not aggress randomly; they are far too cowardly for that. They aggress only when they believe, with absolute certainty, that right and might are on their side.

“Right,” in Altemeyer’s precise formulation, means their hostility has been endorsed by an established authority. Without that crucial endorsement, the aggression remains entirely private, confined to the ugly things people think but dare not say, and what they feel but do not act upon. With it, however, the aggression surfaces: organized, socially validated, and aimed with laser precision at whoever the authority has conveniently designated as the target (Altemeyer, 2006).

Altemeyer’s own experiments documented this mechanism with a chilling precision that no amount of breathless political commentary can replicate. In one study, he gave subjects the opportunity to deliver electric shocks to a helpless individual attempting to master a list of nonsense syllables. The subject could choose the level of shock for each mistake, and the punishment was explicitly sanctioned by the experimenter.

The results were entirely predictable: the higher the subject’s RWA score, the stronger the shocks they delivered. Notice the crucial nuance here: the authority did not instruct them to maximize the pain. The authority simply opened the door, and the authoritarian walked right through it.

Altemeyer also found that high RWA individuals tend to go remarkably easy on authorities who commit crimes, to blame the victim rather than the system producing the victimization, and to experience a deep, personal satisfaction, what he aptly called “relishing being the arm of the Lord,” when they can punish people the authority has designated as deserving of it (Altemeyer, 2006).

The emotional architecture Webster, Glynn, and Motta documented in 2023 and the psychological architecture Altemeyer documented across four decades arrive at the exact same ugly mechanism from two different directions. The schadenfreude is the visceral pleasure of the sanctioned punch; the RWA framework is the formal permission slip (Altemeyer, 2006; Webster et al., 2023).

Newman, Merolla, Shah, Lemi, Collingwood, and Ramakrishnan documented the contemporary activation of this architecture in a peer-reviewed study published in the British Journal of Political Science in 2021. The dynamic is quite simple: in the absence of prejudiced elite speech, prejudiced citizens sensibly constrain their prejudice. In the presence of prejudiced elite speech, particularly when it is tacitly condoned by the cowardly silence of other elites, the prejudiced are suddenly emboldened to both express and act upon it.

The most damning finding in the study is that subsequent condemnation by other elites does almost nothing to suppress the prejudice once it has been activated. Trump’s rhetoric did not magically create new racists or manufacture new authoritarians; it merely deactivated the social constraints that had previously suppressed the expression of what already existed (Newman et al., 2021).

Ruisch and Ferguson documented the measurable, real-world result of this in 2022 in Nature Human Behaviour. Across 13 separate studies including over 10,000 participants, explicit racial and religious prejudice significantly increased among Trump supporters during his first term, while individuals opposed to Trump actually showed decreases.

The researchers concluded that changing social norms explain this entire pattern. The normative environment itself shifted, and people dutifully updated their expressed prejudice accordingly. Trump supporters perceived that expressing raw prejudice had become more acceptable since his election, and that perception directly drove greater personal prejudice among them (Ruisch & Ferguson, 2022).

Moniz and Swann’s 2025 longitudinal panel study in PS: Political Science & Politics documented the self-sustaining mechanism that keeps this permission structure stable long after it is activated. Trump supporters whose personal identities were “fused” with Trump before the 2020 election were found to be significantly more likely to believe the “Big Lie” as the years passed.

It is a closed, pathological loop: believing the lie strengthened their fusion with Trump, which naturally made them far more receptive to additional wild claims in his narrative, which in turn strengthened the fusion further. Within that self-reinforcing loop, Trump’s personal adversaries became the supporter’s adversaries in a visceral, non-negotiable way. The permission structure, in short, becomes identity-constituting (Moniz & Swann, 2025).

Predictably, the lazy counterargument that the exact same psychological architecture exists on the left has been tested directly, and it has failed. Altemeyer spent years attempting to find high-scoring left-wing authoritarians in North American samples using a Left-Wing Authoritarianism scale he developed alongside the RWA scale. He largely could not find them.

Now, to be fair, Conway and colleagues in 2021, and Costello and colleagues in 2022, developed independent LWA scales and confirmed that the construct is empirically real. Indeed, Costello’s team found that LWA can predict behavioral aggression. However, it produces a significantly lower overall prevalence and a far weaker association with sanctioned aggression than RWA does in Western democratic populations.

Finally, a 2026 peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Social Psychology by Baldner and colleagues concluded that while authoritarianism in response to a perceived threat is certainly possible on the left, it remains substantially more prevalent on the right. In the actual populations where it has been measured, authoritarian aggression concentrates heavily on the right, and the permission structure it produces concentrates right there along with it (Altemeyer, 2006; Conway et al., 2021; Costello et al., 2022; Baldner et al., 2026).

The Designated Targets

The authority designation mechanism only activates when the figurehead at the top points a finger and names a threat. What we have seen produced since 2025 is a grimly bureaucratic list of these named targets, each accompanied by a policy that involves death or detention without trial, each framed as a necessary surgical measure to improve society, and each dutifully endorsed by the MAGA base.

Remarkably, this occurs with absolutely no meaningful demand for the constitutional or legal standards that this same base claims to value when the targets happen to be people who look like them.

On April 24, 2026, the Department of Justice released a 48-page report titled Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty. The document directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reinstate firing squads, electrocution, and lethal gas, while simultaneously calling on Congress to expand the reach of capital punishment to drug trafficking, a category of offense that does not require anyone to die.

Now, the United States ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1992. Article 6 of that treaty permits the death penalty only for the “most serious crimes” pursuant to a final judgment by a competent court. The UN Human Rights Committee has explicitly ruled that drug trafficking does not meet this threshold.

Thus, an administration that relentlessly styles itself as the defender of American law is proposing to blatantly violate a treaty it signed thirty-three years ago. Yet the MAGA base, which spent years howling that Democratic criminal justice reform was “soft on crime” has not emitted so much as a whimper demanding to know how executing drug mules squares with our international legal obligations (U.S. Department of Justice, 2026; ICCPR, 1966).

This formal bloodlust is merely the institutional version of what the administration has already been doing, rather casually, at sea. The 2026 National Drug Control Strategy, released by the White House in May, explicitly celebrated what it described as “numerous successful military strikes” against sea-based drug smugglers.

According to NPR, more than 200 people have been killed in these strikes since September 2025. When questioned, a senior defense official confirmed to Congress that 47 vessels had been struck, but when asked if the quantity of drugs entering the United States had actually decreased, the official confirmed that it had not.

Legal scholars across the political spectrum, experts in the laws of war, and members of Congress from both parties have quite rightly described these actions as extrajudicial killings. The military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians, even suspected criminals, who have not been charged, tried, or convicted of anything. The International Narcotics Control Board, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Special Rapporteur have all condemned the strikes. The MAGA base, predictable to the last, has remained silent (White House, 2026; NPR, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026).

Turn your eyes to the deportation machine, and the disregard for law becomes even more systemic. The ICCPR’s Article 9 states that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, that detainees must be informed of charges, and that everyone has the right to challenge their detention before a judge.

The deportations to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison have violated every single clause of that article simultaneously. Human beings have been shipped off to one of the world’s most dangerous prisons based on nothing more than tattoos, without convictions in American courts, without judicial review, and without any mechanism to challenge their fate.

The treaty applies to everyone under US effective control, a control exercised the moment the handcuffs went on. The base that draped itself in the flag of “law and order” has not bothered to ask which law authorizes the indefinite caging of people who have not been convicted of any crime (ICCPR, 1966; Human Rights Watch, 2025).

The mass ICE detention program operates under similarly ghoulish conditions. As of February 2026, a staggering 69,000 people were detained. Five innocent civilians have been documented as murdered by ICE officers, and forty-six people have died in custody. To achieve these numbers, the administration lowered hiring standards and slashed training times.

The base describes this as a regrettable necessity for national security. But let us be clear: the people who died in custody had not been convicted of crimes carrying the death penalty. Several had not been convicted of any crime at all (American Immigration Council, 2026).

Lest anyone think this mechanism is reserved solely for foreign nationals, Trump has demonstrated that the crosshairs can be flipped onto Americans the moment political utility demands it. On September 22, 2023, Trump took to Truth Social to attack the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, a decorated four-star general with forty years of service, writing: “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”

Milley’s crime? Making backchannel calls to China in the final chaotic months of Trump’s first term to assure Chinese military leaders that the United States was not planning a surprise attack. Milley stood by the communications. Republican Representative Paul Gosar eagerly echoed the call for execution the very same day. Fox News chose not to cover it; the party did not object; the crowds did not object. General Milley was forced to take personal safety precautions for his family (CNBC, 2023; Media Matters, 2023).

Finally, the designation mechanism can be scaled up to encompass an entire population, as demonstrated by the recent declaration regarding Iran. At the G7 Summit in June 2026, Trump remarked: “If they don’t behave, we will go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head. Because they’ve misbehaved for 47 years.”

When the statement drew inevitable scrutiny, MAGA media scrambled to argue that “civilization” referred strictly to the Iranian government, not its civilian population, deploying a sophisticated sociological distinction between state and people that these same commentators would look upon as treasonous if an adversarial nation applied it to the United States.

The distinction itself isn’t wrong as a matter of political theory. It is the cynical, selective application of it that gives the game away. A threat that requires delicate semantic parsing when it drops from the lips of an American president, but would be rightly labeled an act of war if uttered by Iran’s Supreme Leader, is not a principled position. It is the permission structure operating out in the open, deciding whose threats require nuance, and whose require condemnation (Reuters, 2026).

The Retributive Framework and Why It Does Not Work

The justification is always deceptively simple: drug traffickers are killing Americans; migrants are bringing crime; the wretched souls in the CECOT prison deserve precisely what they get. Each variation on the theme carries the exact same core claim: removing or breaking these specific people will magically make society cleaner and safer. It is an argument that requires only two things, that the designated target be understood as a threat, and that the inflicted harm feel vaguely proportionate to the danger.

Yet, the actual criminological literature on whether these draconian, punitive approaches do anything at all to reduce crime has reached conclusions that the MAGA media takes great care never to circulate. Indeed, the political framework sustaining these policies has never once been forced to engage with them.

Rose, Kuiper, Reinders Folmer, and van Rooij published a peer-reviewed study in Crime Science in December 2024 that documented this massive chasm between punitive policy preferences and actual evidence with unusual, quiet precision. Punitive approaches to deter offending remain wildly popular despite a distinct, embarrassing lack of evidence regarding their effectiveness.

The study found that simply presenting scientific criminological evidence about how deterrence actually works reduced participants’ preferences for harsher punishment across the board, from minor burglary all the way to homicide. The finding is as significant for what it implies as for what it directly states: public support for punitive policy is not, and has never been, grounded in evidence about what reduces crime. It persists entirely independent of that evidence, and it softens the moment facts are introduced.

The crowds cheering for the execution of drug traffickers and endorsing military strikes on uncharged suspects at sea have not been shown an atom of evidence that these approaches reduce drug use or trafficking. The administration has not produced that evidence because it does not exist. Even the 2026 National Drug Control Strategy, which so loudly celebrates those sea strikes, was forced to confirm through a congressional hearing that the quantity of drugs entering the United States has not decreased by a single gram (Rose et al., 2024).

If one bothers to look at the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ own data, the spectacular failure of decades of retributive criminal justice policy inside the United States becomes glaringly obvious. A staggering 68 percent of released prisoners were rearrested within three years of release in the most recent comprehensive national study. By year ten, that number climbs to 82 percent.

The US Sentencing Commission further confirmed that sentence length produced essentially no variation in recidivism rates, which stubbornly fluctuated between 50.8 percent for short sentences (between six months and two years) and 55.5 percent for much longer ones (between five and nine years). Longer sentences, in short, do not produce lower reoffending.

The entire incapacitation framework, the comforting idea that removing people from society naturally reduces crime during the removal period, conveniently ignores what happens when that removal inevitably ends. A 2025 meta-analysis in Criminal Justice and Behavior synthesizing 27 separate studies found that restorative justice programs were associated with a 17 percent reduction in the odds of recidivism compared to traditional, brutal punitive approaches. The evidence base for what actually reduces reoffending has been available and consistent for decades; the policies currently being endorsed simply refuse to look at it (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2018; Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2023; US Sentencing Commission, 2016; Fulham et al., 2025).

Webster, Glynn, and Motta’s 2023 partisan schadenfreude research helpfully explains why this evidence base is so aggressively ignored. A sizable portion of the American public is perfectly happy to vote for candidates who explicitly promise policies that disproportionately harm supporters of the opposing political party. The strength of one’s ideological identity predicts a greater acceptance of statements tapping into support for, and outright enjoyment of, partisan-directed violence.

These policies are not failing to reach the evidence because their supporters are waiting for a briefing. The positions were formed long before the facts arrived, and evidence cannot dislodge what was never built on evidence in the first place.

The schadenfreude research documents that between 5 and 15 percent of the American public actively supports or enjoys threats of violence directed toward the other party. For this particular cohort, the question of whether military strikes on drug-running boats actually reduce drug imports is completely beside the point. The harm inflicted on the designated target is the point. The policy is merely the vehicle; the emotional satisfaction of the blow is the true destination (Webster et al., 2023).

Donald Trump has explicitly cited authoritarian regimes that summarily execute drug dealers as the exact model the United States ought to emulate. He has said it publicly, repeatedly, and with his characteristic lack of subtlety. The crowds, far from being horrified, did not object.

This brings us to the core of the psychological matter: popular support for mass killing is easily manufactured the moment an authority figure successfully designates a target as a mortal threat to the social order. The people who approved of Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody drug war in the Philippines, for instance, were not card-carrying sociopaths; they were ordinary citizens who had accepted a specific framework. Within that framework, eliminating drug users and traffickers by any means necessary registered as sound public policy rather than state-sponsored atrocity (Altemeyer, 1998; Wintemute et al., 2025).

This is the exact same framework operating in the United States when MAGA supporters cheer for military strikes on uncharged suspects at sea, endorse execution for drug offenses, and defend deportations to the horrors of CECOT based on nothing more than body ink. The psychological architecture is completely identical. The authority figure is different; the designated target is different; but the underlying mechanism remains precisely, chillingly the same.

The Consistency Test

A principle, by its very definition, must hold regardless of who happens to occupy the Oval Office. A permission structure, on the other hand, is entirely parasitic, it survives only as long as the designated authority is the one pulling the levers. The policies we have examined thus far have never been subjected to anything resembling a principled analysis by the MAGA base; they are swallowed whole simply because Donald Trump pointed the finger. The ultimate consistency test is straightforward enough: what happens when the exact same policy, the identical sums of money, and the same bloodcurdling rhetoric originate from a different source? The historical record provides an answer that is as consistent as it is deeply revealing.

Consider the absolute frenzy that accompanied the Obama administration’s 2016 settlement of a decades-old legal dispute with Tehran. The United States returned $1.7 billion in Iranian funds, a sum that included $400 million in principal paid before the 1979 revolution for military hardware that was never delivered, plus roughly $1.3 billion in accumulated interest mandated by a Hague tribunal ruling. The money belonged to Iran. The US had been sitting on it for decades, and the payment merely resolved a legal claim Washington was destined to lose anyway. Yet Trump spent eight long years howling at campaign rallies, across social media, and in press briefings that this was “ransom,” “treason,” and “cash on pallets.” The MAGA base dutifully repeated the mantra. The weakness, the surrender, the supposed betrayal of the Iran deal became the foundational text of modern conservative grievance. The standard was clear, absolute, and unsparing: returning billions to Tehran was an act of rank treachery, and the rulebook notably omitted any escape clause for the partisan identity of the executive (Snopes, 2026).

Fast forward to the G7 Summit in June 2026. The Memorandum of Understanding signed by Trump involves the staggering release of between $24 billion and $25 billion in frozen Iranian assets, alongside an eye-watering $300 billion reconstruction fund. The twelfth point of the document spells it out with excruciating clarity: “The United States of America undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Naturally, Trump took to Truth Social to denounce the $300 billion figure as “fake news” manufactured by the Democrats, only for his own officials to read that exact text aloud on a subsequent press call. JD Vance then went on CBS on Monday morning to confirm it, before pivoting to deny it by Monday afternoon. The frozen assets are conceptually identical to the 2016 settlement, except the total sum is roughly 176 times larger. The standard that once branded $1.7 billion as high treason has vanished into thin air when applied to $324 billion. The silence is deafening (Military Times, 2026).

The lawless military strikes at sea follow the exact same hollow logic. While experts in the laws of war, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, the International Narcotics Control Board, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the UN Special Rapporteur on counter-terrorism all scream that these are illegal extrajudicial killings, the base remains unmoved. More than 200 people are dead. Not one of them was ever charged, tried, or afforded a shred of due process. And as a congressional hearing quietly confirmed, the flow of drugs has not slacked by an inch. Yet the very same movement that spent the Obama years weeping over drone strikes as the ultimate manifestation of imperial executive overreach has entirely declined to call these sea strikes tyranny. They have demanded no congressional authorization; they have invoked no constitutional safeguards. Bob Altemeyer’s research explains this cognitive dissonance perfectly: the aggression is directed at an authority-designated target. The very same citizen who would have unhesitatingly labeled a Democratic president’s maritime executions an act of naked despotism will cheer them under Trump, simply because Trump opened the hatch (Altemeyer, 1998; NPR, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026).

Then there is the “civilization” statement, a masterclass in selective intellectual gymnastics. Hours after signing the aforementioned MOU, Trump turned around at the G7 and barked that if Iran didn’t “behave,” the US would go “right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head. Because they’ve misbehaved for 47 years.” MAGA apologists immediately rushed to their microphones to parse the semantic difference between a “civilization” and its “government,” earnestly arguing that the president merely meant the regime. It is a perfectly legitimate distinction in political theory, to be sure, but it is one they aggressively refuse to grant anyone else. When Iran’s Supreme Leader mutters apocalyptic threats regarding the destruction of Israel, MAGA rightly brands it as genocidal incitement demanding an immediate military response. The generous benefit of the doubt, the claim that “bombing their heads” only means targeting bureaucrats, is never extended to the adversary. The standard is determined entirely by who holds the microphone (Reuters, 2026).

This hypocrisy shifts from a political farce to a grave legal crisis when viewed through the lens of international law. By ratifying the ICCPR in 1992, the United States bound itself to the principle that every human being possesses an inherent right to life and liberty. The text contains no asterisk for targets designated by a populist president. It offers no exemption for suspects on boats in international waters, nor for individuals dumped into the cages of CECOT without a trial, nor for those the executive branch publicly decides should face a firing squad. The MAGA position forces a choice between two uncomfortable realities. Either the United States must formally withdraw from the treaty, a move no one in the movement dares propose because the geopolitical cost would be catastrophic, or it must maintain that the treaty applies to Americans while remaining completely blank to the people the administration is currently killing and detaining. This is the exact moral exclusion framework that Altemeyer spent forty years uncovering. The designation comes first; the dehumanization follows; the treaty simply evaporates (ICCPR, 1966; Altemeyer, 1998).

Where This Has Gone Before

Hannah Arendt spent the years following the second global conflagration attempting to parse how totalitarian systems had managed to manufacture mass atrocity out of the compliance of utterly ordinary human beings. Her analysis in The Origins of Totalitarianism, later refined to its most unsparing clarity during her reporting on the Eichmann trial, arrived at a structural conclusion that continues to terrify. Totalitarian regimes, whether of the Nazi or Soviet variety, did not produce their industrial-scale violence primarily through the deployment of sadists and psychopaths.

They produced it through administrative frameworks. Within these structures, specific groups were designated as objective obstacles to the natural or historical process. Once that designation was secure, the harm directed at them registered in the public mind not as murder, but as the mere execution of a sentence pronounced by a higher tribunal. Guilt and innocence became entirely senseless notions. The murdered were guilty simply because they stood in the way of the movement; the murderers were innocent because they were merely executing a directive, not making a moral choice.

The horror Arendt documented was not that exceptionally evil people did exceptionally evil things. It was that ordinary people, operating within a framework that had normalized harm toward designated out-groups, did not recognize what they were doing as evil at all (Arendt, 1951).

This analysis is strictly structural, not ideological. Arendt is not lazily arguing that the left and right are always identical twins, or that leftist ideology automatically produces the conditions she describes. Stalinism had long since abandoned any recognizable Marxist or socialist principle in favor of total domination as an end in itself; Arendt is explicit that she is analyzing the architecture of the system, not the ideological packaging used to market it. The ideology was merely the mechanism of recruitment. Total domination was the point.

What she documents is a recurring structural pattern: the designation of a group as an objective enemy of the state, the subsequent normalization of harm to that group as a necessary administrative function, and the systematic dismantling of the legal and moral guardrails that would otherwise constrain that harm. The pattern belongs exclusively to no single ideology. Its historical manifestations have emerged whenever these specific structural features are allowed to coalesce (Arendt, 1951).

The contemporary designation of drug smugglers, undocumented immigrants, and domestic political opponents as objective enemies of the social order is written plainly across the primary sources of our current moment. The framing of extrajudicial killings at sea as “successful operations,” and deportations without trial as “necessary enforcement,” is the exact administrative jargon Arendt warned us about, not murder, but the execution of a movement’s inherent law.

Furthermore, the deliberate removal of federal offices tracking domestic extremism, the elimination of hate crime prevention funding, and the systematic dismantling of institutional mechanisms designed to constrain this exact flavor of harm represent the precise structural preconditions she identified. It is the exact point at which the pattern becomes self-accelerating (Arendt, 1951; SPLC, 2026).

One need not look back to the mid-twentieth century for a template; Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war in the Philippines offers the most recent and precisely documented instance of this structural pattern operating within a democratic context. Between 2016 and 2022, Duterte designated drug users and traffickers as cancerous threats requiring total elimination, openly described the slaughter of suspects as a public service, and presided over a campaign that claimed between 6,252 lives by his own government’s sanitized tally, and between 20,000 and 30,000 by the estimates of human rights organizations and the International Criminal Court. Human Rights Watch fully documented the police routine of falsifying evidence to justify these unlawful killings.

The ICC eventually issued a warrant for Duterte’s arrest on charges of crimes against humanity, leading to his arrest in March 2025 and his subsequent transfer to The Hague. Yet, throughout the bloodiest periods of this campaign, Duterte maintained approval ratings consistently above 70 percent in Social Weather Stations polling.

The citizens approving of this policy were not consciously approving of murder; they believed they were approving of a cleaner, safer society. The designation came first, and the popular approval followed. The mechanism is precisely what Bob Altemeyer documented across four decades of RWA research: when an authority figure designates a target and signals that harm is sanctioned, the population scoring high on authoritarian aggression ceases to see violence. They see righteousness (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Al Jazeera, 2025; Altemeyer, 1998).

Donald Trump has explicitly cited this very model as a target for American emulation. He has stated publicly, repeatedly, and with a total lack of pushback, that countries executing drug dealers suffer far fewer drug problems, and that the United States should follow their example. He did not need to name Duterte; the blueprint he described was unmistakably Duterte’s. The crowds did not object. The party did not object.

The maritime military strikes that have killed more than 200 uncharged individuals since September 2025 represent this exact framework translated into active American policy, complete with the identical rhetorical justifications, the identical absence of due process, and the identical popular endorsement from a base that experiences state-sponsored killing as a necessary chore rather than a crime (White House, 2026; NPR, 2026).

The peer-reviewed political violence literature confirms what the historical record repeatedly demonstrates. Jasko, LaFree, Piazza, and Becker published a comprehensive comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

In the United States dataset, left-wing radicals were significantly less likely to deploy violence than their right-wing and Islamist counterparts. In fact, left-wing attacks possessed 45 percent lower odds of resulting in fatalities when compared directly to right-wing attacks. The data completely shatters the lazy claim of political equivalence. The researchers explicitly note that this asymmetrical pattern is entirely consistent with the psychological literature on RWA: aggressive tendencies are an inherent, measurable component of right-wing authoritarianism. Individuals high in RWA are structurally more hostile toward those who violate established norms than those low in RWA. The asymmetry isn’t a fluke; it is the predictable output of a documented psychological architecture (Jasko et al., 2022).

Arendt’s most chilling warning is also her most direct. Totalitarian solutions, she observed, may very well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations. These temptations will inevitably resurface whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of human dignity.

The temptation does not present itself as an ideological choice. It is entirely structural, available to any population under sufficient stress, provided there is an authority figure willing to point a finger and designate a group as the root of the problem.

The framework does not require a fully formed totalitarian state to begin its work. It requires only a designated target, an authority figure who grants permission, a population whose psychological architecture is primed to endorse sanctioned harm, and the systematic removal of the institutional checks designed to prevent that endorsement from turning catastrophic. All four conditions are currently documented and operational. The evidence of where they lead is already written in the history of the twentieth century. It is up to us whether we choose to read it (Arendt, 1951).

The Institutional Check and What Happens Without It

What the Trump administration has engaged in since 2025 is not merely a policy shift, but a systematic, state-sanctioned blindness. The administration eliminated the three largest federal hate crime prevention grant programs, summarily cutting approximately $38 million in funding that had previously supported local prevention initiatives across the country. To ensure the erasure was thorough, the Department of Justice terminated 56 hate crime prevention and anti-extremism grants, while the Department of Homeland Security quietly gutted its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships.

Bureaucrats were instructed to ban the very term “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” from Department of State communications. In a fit of petty censorship, the DOJ went so far as to scrub from its own website a peer-reviewed study concluding that far-right attacks continue to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism. The national database used to track domestic terrorism and hate crimes was dismantled; the Department of Defense inspector general position charged with oversight of extremist activity within the ranks was eliminated. The state, quite simply, decided to stop looking (SPLC, 2026).

The 2026 National Counterterrorism Strategy, released while these dismantlements were underway, reads like a document from an alternate reality. It explicitly identifies “antifa” and “radically pro-transgender groups” as the primary domestic threats. It makes no mention of right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the cold, peer-reviewed data documents that right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks killing 112 Americans over the past decade. Left-wing militants, by contrast, were responsible for 35 attacks and 13 deaths.

The administration dismantled the entire tracking infrastructure for the dominant threat while aggressively elevating the smaller one to top billing. The lethal irony of this strategy was exposed just six weeks after its release. Tycen Proper, a 19-year-old from Knox County, Ohio, radicalized through a Christian extremist group on TikTok and a documented admirer of Adolf Hitler, had planned to detonate explosive-laden drones over the White House UFC event, intending to shoot the panicked crowd as they fled. His mother called the police, and the FBI managed to foil the plot. The threat the administration’s strategy chose to ignore nearly massacred attendees at the administration’s own birthday party (Intercept, 2026; NBC News, 2026).

Wintemute and his colleagues published the fourth wave of their longitudinal survey on political violence in 2026, and its warnings are stark. Support for political violence has steadily increased after the 2024 election rather than dissipating. The electoral grievances the endorsement had been nominally tied to have passed, yet the share of respondents claiming violence is usually or always justified to stop a stolen election rose from 6.8 percent in 2024 to 9 percent in 2025. The researchers noted that robust violence prevention efforts are urgently needed as the 2026 midterms approach. It is a warning shouted into a void, published into an environment where the administrative tools required to act on it have been methodically defunded and torn down (Wintemute et al., 2026).

Hannah Arendt identified the precise mechanism that makes this diagnostic blindness so uniquely dangerous. The ordinary people who participated in historical state-sponsored violence did so because they had accepted an institutional architecture in which certain groups were designated as objective enemies of the social order. Within that closed loop, the harm directed at those groups registered not as atrocity, but as mere administration.

The institutional checks, the independent oversight committees, the tracking databases, the hate crime prevention grants, exist precisely to interrupt this process of normalization before it becomes irreversible. Once those checks are removed, the public does not even recognize what it has lost. The architecture itself has prepared them not to notice (Arendt, 1951).

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