The Fear Merchant
How Trump Sold a Nation to Itself
It is one of the most uncomfortable truths of modern democracy: the people, when afraid enough, angry enough, and isolated enough from reality, can be made to betray everything they claim to value. Donald Trump understood this innately, not as a student of political theory but as a master of spectacle. He didn’t need to understand the research on authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, or the backfire effect. He only needed to sense it. And once he did, he weaponized it with the precision of a man who had nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Fear, in Trump’s hands, became a cudgel. Not fear of economic collapse or foreign invasion, but fear of the Other: immigrants, Muslims, Black protesters, transgender Americans. The faces changed depending on the context, but the message never did. The world is dangerous, he said. They are coming for you. And only I can stop them. It was the classic strongman appeal, as old as politics itself, but dressed in the vulgar trappings of reality television. What made it work wasn’t policy or performance, but a psychological shortcut wired into millions of Americans—the same shortcut identified by researchers like Bob Altemeyer and John Jost, who studied how authoritarian followers respond to threat with obedience, aggression, and a desperate need to restore the status quo (Altemeyer, 1998; Jost et al., 2003).
This wasn’t an accident. Trump didn’t stumble into authoritarianism; he rode it like a wave. His base, many of whom score high in Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO), responded not to evidence or logic, but to dominance displays. The crueler the remark, the more they cheered. The more a journalist or judge or scientist pushed back, the more they believed he was the victim of a plot. In the minds of his most devoted followers, Trump became not just a man, but a symbol—the last bulwark against a world they no longer understood (Duckitt & Sibley, 2010).
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is not that Trump is unique, but that he is entirely familiar. History is littered with leaders who rose to power on the fumes of national humiliation and collective anxiety. Hitler’s rise came after economic ruin and the Treaty of Versailles. Mussolini exploited the chaos of post-World War I Italy. In both cases, authoritarian personalities in the population responded to fear by surrendering their autonomy to a strong leader. They didn’t do this while twirling mustaches or saluting tyranny. They did it while claiming to defend their country from chaos, crime, and moral decay (Hofstadter, 1964).
Trump did the same, albeit with a modern twist. His propaganda came not through state-run radio but through cable news and social media. His base did not wear uniforms, but red hats. And yet the structure of the manipulation remained eerily consistent. First, stoke fear. Then, manufacture enemies. Then, undermine institutions—the press, the courts, the electoral process. Finally, claim sole legitimacy as the voice of the people (Dean & Altemeyer, 2020).
Trump didn’t do this because he cared about his followers. He did it because it worked. He has consistently shown contempt for the very people who revere him—mocking their faith, exploiting their pain, and doing nothing meaningful to improve their lives. Yet his support persists. Why? Because his base has been conditioned to interpret every criticism of him as an attack on themselves. As studies on motivated reasoning and collective narcissism reveal, once a leader is enmeshed with group identity, any challenge to that leader becomes a personal affront (Golec de Zavala et al., 2020; Nyhan & Reifler, 2010).
He feeds his supporters misinformation, and they accept it without scrutiny. Tornberg and Chueri (2025) show that radical right populists lie more frequently and with greater impunity, and their followers are less likely to fact-check them because of ideological trust. When Trump said he won the 2020 election, despite courts, audits, and officials from his own party confirming otherwise, his followers believed him. Not because the facts supported it—but because he said it, and because reality is negotiable when your identity is on the line.
Even when Trump commits the very acts he accuses others of—attempting to overturn an election, weaponizing the DOJ, enriching himself through public office—he is seen as a victim. He is politically persecuted, they claim, though somehow he remains wealthy, powerful, and on track to potentially return to office. If this is political persecution, he is the most successful prisoner in history. Convicted felon or not, the illusion persists: that he is a martyr, not a manipulator.
The contradictions are endless. He says the justice system is corrupt—unless it protects him. He says the media is fake—unless it praises him. He claims to defend democracy—while trying to overturn its results. His supporters don’t see the hypocrisy because they aren’t analyzing his claims; they are defending their worldview.
Even now, years into this political psychodrama, millions remain under the spell. They believe Trump is the victim, that he is being persecuted for telling the truth. They deny his lies even when they are on tape. They embrace policies that hurt them economically, socially, even medically, because the pain becomes part of the loyalty ritual. If you can still believe, after everything, then you must be right. It is not a political stance; it is a faith (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010).
This is not to say all Trump supporters are delusional or hateful. Many are misinformed. Many are disaffected. But none of that changes the outcome. The data is clear: Trump’s rhetoric increased prejudice, normalized political violence, and undermined democratic norms. The people cheering him on are not doing so despite this. They are doing so because of it (Newman et al., 2020; Saeri et al., 2015).
We must abandon the comfortable myth that reason alone can pull a society out of this mire. Populations can be manipulated. They always have been. Fear is a scalpel, and in the wrong hands, it performs surgery on the national character. Trump didn’t invent that dynamic. But he mastered it. And unless we reckon with how easily so many followed, we will be doomed to watch it happen again, in a new form, with a new face, promising once more to make the country great again by dividing it to pieces.
References
Altemeyer, B. (1998). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.
Dean, J. W., & Altemeyer, B. (2020). Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. Melville House.
Duckitt, J., & Sibley, C. G. (2010). Personality, ideology, prejudice, and politics: A dual-process motivational model. Journal of Personality, 78(6), 1861–1893.
Golec de Zavala, A., Dyduch-Hazar, K., & Lantos, D. (2020). Collective narcissism and in-group satisfaction predict opposite attitudes toward refugees via attribution of hostile intentions and help. Journal of Personality, 88(3), 605–624.
Hofstadter, R. (1964). The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Vintage Books.
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375.
Newman, B. J., Hartman, T. K., & Taber, C. S. (2020). The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially Inflammatory Elite Communication. British Journal of Political Science, 50(2), 1-20.
Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When corrections fail: The persistence of political misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303–330.
Saeri, A. K., Ogilvie, C. A., & La Macchia, S. T. (2015). System justification in responding to disasters. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 15(1), 89–112.
Tornberg, A., & Chueri, T. (2025). When do parties lie? Misinformation and radical right populism across 26 countries. European Journal of Political Research (forthcoming).