How did a cluster of toxic, binary attitudes get from the heads of small boys and Silicon Valley into the heart of Trump’s administration?
Trump has shoved us rudely back into a world order where mobsters rule. He and his henchmen hold liberal democracy, humanitarian action, sovereignty and the rule of law in contempt. Driven by material and ideological self-interest, they aim first to destroy, then remodel, society in their own tech-fantasy image.
Governments, legacy media and industry have cowered in response, but there is also knee-jerk resistance to the possibility that we may accidentally have unlearnt the lessons of 1930s Germany. The lawless US coup we’re witnessing is just too alien, too alarming.
To build resistance to Trumpworld we need to look beneath the surface action to its ‘nuclear core’, the psychology that fuels it.
Small boys: the formation of binary thinking
The tech bro giants who are so admired by Trump and so integral to his administration best exemplify Trumpworld’s psychological core. This core is a cluster of attitudes that carve the world into tightly interconnected groups of binary opposites: superior vs inferior, dominant vs subordinate, powerful vs weak, black vs white, normal vs abnormal, male vs female, self vs other, etc. Musk is a particularly extreme but also illustrative case.
During childhood, Musk endured physical and mental bullying, both within his family and at school where he was marginalised as a nerdy, technically gifted oddball. Experiences such as these, in Musk’s case, exacerbated by autism, are petri-dishes for longer-term binary attitudes. They generate a sense of victimhood common amongst adult Incel types and the urge to overcome vulnerability through extreme physical and/or intellectual prowess. These compensatory attitudes reinforce others in the binary network: ‘being a tech genius or belonging to the same club also lends me unassailable levels of power, normality, masculinity, control’, etc.
Key features of binary thinking are that it blocks the process of growing up and, in males, often fosters misogyny. Thus, we find Musk currently arrested in the teen mindset of a 15-year-old, unable to develop the nuances of adulthood. He’s still playing out his early fanatical obsession with his comic book hero Superman and the compulsive need for drama and attention he shares with Trump. He’s still sharing shrill posts proclaiming that ‘only high status males should participate in government because women (and low testosterone men) are incapable of critical thought’; he’s still m aking lewd jokes about breasts, and still expecting people to laugh at his removing the ‘w’ from Twitter.
Big Boys: from startups to supremacy
Political writer, Kara Swisher who worked closely with Silicon Valley’s tech fraternity, notes their culture of blatant contempt for women. Musk’s own misogyny now extends to the workplace where, for example, 14 women are suing him for failure to prevent ongoing sexual harrassment in his companies Tesla and Space X.
Swisher also observed enthusiasm in Silicon Valley for the Great Replacement theory, which holds that white Europeans and Americans are being deliberately replaced by “inferior stock” from South America, Africa and Asia. Trump’s own view, as stated in his election campaign, that “non-white immigration is an existential threat to the nation” is now regarded as mainstream in the administration. Once again, we see binary attitudes working together in the diktat that the line between black and white and the dominance and superiority of self as white over other as black must not be blurred.
Earlier in their careers, tech bros Musk and Zuckerberg harnessed their skills briefly to progressive aspirations such as the Paris Climate Accord and social media as a force for good. But these outlooks later buckled under the combined weight of business self-interest and older, more powerful binary habits of thought. Tech as a social good could also have been financially lucrative but, arguably, was sidelined because, as a humanitarian, communitarian mission, it is at odds with the binary need to dominate, control and self-serve espoused by the tech bro community.
Boys in charge: Musk, Trump and the politics of dominance
The binary attitude patterns that drive Musk tells us much about the US administration, notably the outspoken misogyny of Trump himself, Vance, Hegseth, Gorka, Kloster, and many other members of his ‘alpha male’ manosphere. This unashamedly explicit anti-female bias is on full display in Trump’s demand that Romania releases Andrew Tate.
It also explains the administration’s raging contempt for the untidy liberal shadings of wokeness, and of DEI as a community whose very existence subverts the binary order of things, including the comfortable dualities of male vs female. Trumpworld thrives on a rigid, censorious understanding of what constitutes ‘normal’.
Additionally, the cluster underpins the administration’s open embrace of the rigidly authoritarian, intolerant, far-right politics of Netanyahu. It could, and should, also have provided a vantage point for foreseeing the Vance / Musk endorsement of the anti-woke, anti-immigrant AfD and Trump’s alliance with Putin. Europe should not be “shocked”.
The conceited tech bros now in charge act, like kids in a toyshop, with uncouth, unselfconscious naivety, buoyed and blinded by their stunning electoral success. It’s beyond their wildest dreams that the infantile broligarchy they concocted in their bedrooms could suddenly have acquired supreme, potentially world-dominating, powers. They are giddy with it.
Where is Trump?
Notionally, Trump is in charge though not obviously in control. He is displayed as the head of a unified, competent administration. But was the head in charge of the body when Musk visited Germany to talk up the AfD, or called for Starmer to be deposed, or when Vance visited Munich to put Europe in its place? By staying silent on these forays, Trump tacitly lends them his blessing, thus presenting himself as still one step ahead of his “shadow presidents” and avoiding humiliation.
It’s also likely that Trump is being continually radicalised by his own administration. He’s surrounded by a noisy team of extremists, bent on global tech and ideological control. He’s certainly internalized the broligarch vision of tech as the ultimate solution. By keeping up with his administration’s extravagant missions he preserves both his place in the Big Boys Club and the virility mantle he wears to disguise his septuagenarian decline. Presiding vengefully over his wrecking ball executive orders and the lawless chaos unfolding around him serves the psychic function of a beauty treatment, enabling him to feel empowered, rejuvenated, and still virile.
The boys go abroad: global consequences
All of this, notably the quest for male supremacy, the binary contempt for ‘a feminised world’ and the magnetic pull of authoritarianism, is evident in the US administration’s response to the Gaza and Ukraine crises.
Trump’s attack on Zelensky as a freeloading ‘dictator who started the war with Russia’ looks bafflingly foolish. But it’s completely explicable if viewed as a binary message about supreme power. His vindictive lie reminds the world that ‘I (“King”) Trump am all powerful, whereas you are weak. My proof is that the world is so beholden to me, I can say absolutely anything with impunity; this fully reaffirms my absolute prepotency’. Shameless lying is a key Trump superpower.
Similarly, Vance’s tirade at the Munich Security Conference was an outing abroad for the strutting arrogance and hubris of the ‘alpha male’ mindset. In a single speech he managed to alienate and patronise the room by delivering a breathtakingly rude yet irrelevant populist diatribe about free speech. This bizarre focus on culture wars in a context crying out for international negotiation demands an explanation.
Vance’s central purpose was not to discuss solutions to the Ukraine / Russia conflict but, essentially it seems, to inform European leaders why they’d been excluded from the ‘Big Boys Club’. In accord with Medvedev’s description of Europe as a “frigid spinster mad with jealousy and rage”, Vance’s contemptuous message was that ‘the US and our brothers call the shots now and adjudicate the world’s future. Whereas (aside from parties like the AfD whose ideology mirrors ours) you, Europe, have been frozen out of talks because you are woke, weak and inferior’.
This macho disdain was also illustrated by the US’s initial exclusion of Zelensky from negotiations with Russia and in the ruthless diktat that Ukraine won’t be allowed to join Nato, won’t get its territory back, and won’t get US military aid. And we see it the in the exclusion of the Palestian people from talks with Netanyahu, the dismissal of Gaza’s sovereignty, and the brutal plan to ethnically cleanse the region.
The contempt displayed by Vance and others in their ‘Bully Club’ exclusions is also reflected in the DOGE’s swaggering ‘move fast and break things’ approach to policy. Business interests are a factor in this posturing but so, centrally, are displays of virility, prowess, dominance, and disdain for vulnerability. Withdrawing staff from US agencies that manage critical infrastructure, including nuclear facilities and aviation, is ‘off the scale’ reckless. But there’s a nihilistic pleasure in exercising the power to break things and scare everyone witless (notably vulnerable groups like civil service employees and migrants) that outweighs concerns about the damage yet to show.
Somehow, something has gone terribly wrong and attitudes that should have been confined to making people’s life hell in some playground or small office, escaped from Pandora’s box and are now driving the construction of a technobrat programme to dominate the world. The lucky Vance must feel truly ‘pumped’ to find he can hurl the venomous insults that feed his binary ego at the leaders of almost an entire continent.
Dangerous alignments
Commentators tend to predict events in Trumpworld by reference to its business interests. But underlying these interests is a nuclear core of interconnecting binary attitudes that dominates the US administration and provides its overarching vision for policy making. This attitude complex expresses itself incessantly as a hunger for perfect prowess, ruthless individualism and absolute control through fear, misogyny, racism, anti-woke and anti-DEI sentiment.
Trump is the conduit for an authoritarian, white male supremacist world view that is dominated by the muscular forces of his tech oligarchy and that holds inclusivity, altruism and social reform in contempt as ‘feminised’ and weak. It’s this underlying dynamic that best explains Trumpworld’s dark replay of so many aspects of 30s Germany and its shocking alignment with authoritarian interests elsewhere.
If we’d played closer attention to this dynamic we might have been better able to predict and perhaps even head off the frightful New World (dis)Order we find ourselves in.
Claire Jones writes and edits for West England Bylines and is co-ordinator for the Oxfordshire branch of the progressive campaign group, Compass
Image credit: Gage Skidmore – Creative Commons
Left Foot Forward doesn’t have the backing of big business or billionaires. We rely on the kind and generous support of ordinary people like you.
You can support hard-hitting journalism that holds the right to account, provides a forum for debate among progressives, and covers the stories the rest of the media ignore. Donate today.
