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I Was on I’ve Had It. Here’s Everything We Talked About.
I sat down with Jennifer Welch on I’ve Had It Podcast & IHIP News and we went deep.
Trump’s Obama obsession. Latent homophobia in the MAGA movement. Authoritarian religion as a pipeline to cult followership. The psychological wage of whiteness. The Dark Tetrad. All of it.
If you missed it, here is the full breakdown.
Why Trump Cannot Stop Saying Barack Hussein Obama’s Name
We opened with a clip of Trump using Obama’s full name in front of a group of children. Emphasizing it. Savoring it.
This is not random. This is not dementia. This is scapegoating operating exactly as designed.
Trump uses Obama as a proxy. When he attacks Obama, he is signaling to his base who the enemy is. And that enemy is not just one man. It is everything Obama represents. Black excellence. Intellectual credibility. Dignity in the highest office in the land.
But there is a deeper psychological layer underneath it.
W.E.B. Du Bois identified what he called the psychological wage of whiteness. For generations, poor white Americans were given a psychological consolation prize. You may be broke. You may have nothing. But you are white. And that means you are better than your black neighbor who is just as broke as you are.
That wage kept poor white people from organizing with poor black people around shared economic interests. It was a tool of division that served the wealthy class perfectly.
When Barack Obama became president, that wage collapsed.
You could no longer tell a poor white conservative that they were superior to Black Americans when a Black man held the highest office in the land. The whole permission structure broke.
That is why they go crazy for Obama. That is why Trump goes crazy for Obama. And that is why Megyn Kelly said out loud on her podcast that they have not felt the same since Obama was president. She said the quiet part loud.
Trump knows he can never be Obama. Obama was a statesman. He was measured, brilliant, and composed. Trump walks around carrying a bucket of shame and humiliation every single day because he knows it too. So he attacks. Over and over. Because that is what his father Fred Trump installed in him. You are a winner. Winners attack. Winners never admit they are wrong.
It broke him. And now he points that broken psychology at the one man he knows he could never be.
The Dark Tetrad and the Fanatics Who Will Never Leave
Jennifer asked about the hardcore MAGA base. The ones who will not leave no matter what. The ones who would watch him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and cheer.
From my research, the fanatical core of Trump’s base scores extremely high across four dark psychological traits. Psychologists call this the Dark Tetrad.
Narcissism. Machiavellianism. Psychopathy. Everyday sadism.
These are not people with clinical diagnoses. They are people with extremely high trait levels across all four dimensions. And the one thing that unites them is that they cannot be wrong. They were like this before Trump. They found a home in Trump.
People with these trait combinations will burn their own lives down before they admit they made a mistake. That is not a metaphor. That is what the research shows. They will destroy relationships, finances, and futures rather than concede they were conned.
My estimate is that 20 to 25 million of Trump’s followers fall into this category. They are not persuadable. They will only shift when the cult starts hurting them personally. Gas prices. Grocery bills. Tariffs. That is the only language that reaches them.
Authoritarian Religion Is the Pipeline
Jennifer brought up evangelical Christianity and she was right to.
The research backs this up completely. People raised in authoritarian households with black and white thinking and no tolerance for questioning are psychologically primed for a figure like Trump.
These are people who were taught as children that questioning the Bible is blasphemy. That complexity is sin. That the answer is always simple, always certain, and always handed down from above.
And then Trump walks in.
The same hair. The same suit. The rambling certainty. I alone can fix this.
For people raised to submit to that kind of authority, it is not a leap. It is a homecoming.
The data on evangelical support for Trump reflects this. It is not a contradiction that deeply religious people support a man who is the opposite of every Christian value they claim to hold. It makes perfect sense once you understand that for authoritarian followers, the structure of the authority matters more than its content. They are not looking for a moral leader. They are looking for a strong one.
And Trump gave them something the church always provided. Simple answers to complex problems. A clear enemy. A promise of restoration. That is the entire formula.
The Homophobia Research
This is the one that gets people.
In 1996, Henry Adams and colleagues at the University of Georgia ran a study on homophobia and sexual arousal. They recruited men who scored high on homophobia measures and men who did not. They showed both groups gay pornography while measuring physiological arousal.
Approximately 54 percent of the men who scored highest on homophobia showed significant arousal responses to the gay pornography. Among the non-homophobic men, that number was significantly lower.
The men most enraged by homosexuality were the most aroused by it.
This is reaction formation. A psychological defense mechanism first described by Sigmund Freud and later formalized by Anna Freud. When an internal impulse is too threatening to acknowledge, the mind converts it into its opposite. The feeling does not disappear. It gets weaponized outward as aggression toward the very thing it desires.
We see this everywhere in the MAGA movement. The obsession with trans people. The fixation on drag shows. The constant policing of other men’s masculinity. Straight men who are secure in their identity do not spend this much energy on the topic. They do not need to.
Trump himself is a case study. The unsolicited commentary on men’s physical appearances. The Arnold Palmer remarks. The UFC fighter. The microphone pantomime on the campaign trail.
His filter is gone. His narcissistic collapse is accelerating. And what is leaking out is exactly what the research would predict.
Jennifer told me that Grindr reportedly sees enormous spikes in activity at events like the Republican National Convention and Turning Point Charlie Kirk gatherings. Married MAGA men. Deep red zip codes. The data does not lie.
The loudest voices against gay rights are statistically the most likely to be suppressing exactly what they are legislating against.
The Permission Structure
We ended on something I think about a lot.
Trump did not just give permission to his low income base to be openly racist. He gave permission to the billionaire class to drop the social politeness they had been performing for decades.
Look at what these men say now. Look at how they behave publicly. The grievances. The performative victimhood from men worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
This is asymmetric norm enforcement. A pattern that appears in every authoritarian system throughout history. The rules apply to everyone except the people in power. You follow the law. They do not. You show deference. They demand worship.
And because people in this culture already treated billionaires like geniuses before Trump, the infrastructure for this was already in place. Trump just gave it permission to go public.
The French Revolution came for Marie Antoinette after “let them eat cake.”
The mob always comes eventually.
Thank you to Jennifer Welch and the entire I’ve Had It team for having me. It was one of the most fun and honest conversations I have had in a long time.
Once again thanks to my readers and watchers. I appreciate you.
Watch the episode on YouTube here:
Sources
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Adams, H.E., Wright, L.W., and Lohr, B.A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440-445.
Paulhus, D.L. and Williams, K.M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556-563.
Buckels, E.E., Jones, D.N., and Paulhus, D.L. (2013). Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2201-2209.
Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.
Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. International Universities Press.
