Opinion
David
Brooks
Imagining
What’s in Trump’s Brain
Nov. 7,
2025
David
Brooks
By David
Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/opinion/trump-putin-authoritarianism.html
I feel as
if I’ve spent large parts of my life reading dreary studies on authoritarian
personalities. These are written by people like me, who despise
authoritarianism, and they are filled with the familiar psychological
diagnoses. The authoritarian comes from a loveless home; he is a bully driven
by secret insecurity; he is a psychopath who does not feel others’ pain. But
these studies never actually tell you how the authoritarians see themselves.
One 2022
novel, Giuliano da Empoli’s “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” narrated in the voice
of one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers, helped me understand the psychology of
authoritarian power as much as any of those studies — and not just inside
Putin’s mind but also inside the minds of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Narendra
Modi, Nayib Bukele, Elon Musk, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Viktor
Orban and all the rest of the global authoritarian wolf pack.
Last
month da Empoli, who is an Italian Swiss essayist, followed it up with a
nonfiction book, “The Hour of the Predator,” which describes both the wolves
who run governments and those who run tech companies.
Here are
a few things I’ve learned about how authoritarians exercise power.
Performance
artists. People
like Trump and Putin are not politicians; they are artists who create alternate
realities. They tell stories, invent alternative facts, enact daily dramas,
construct show trials and reinvent religions — they build a world. In their
world, the people who felt humiliated are now dominant and doing the
humiliating. Russia felt humiliated by the West in the 1990s. Many
working-class American voters have felt humiliated by coastal elites for
decades. In this alternative world, the snobs suffer. People support an
authoritarian not because they like this or that policy but because they
embrace the authoritarian’s artistic vision. Performance artists like Trump and
Putin can be dishonest, offensive and outrageous, but there is one rule: They
must never be boring.
Warriors
and bureaucrats.
In the minds of the authoritarian wolves, history is a Manichaean struggle.
It’s not between left and right or rich and poor; it’s between the warriors and
the weenies. The warriors see themselves as the strong ones, the men and women
of steel, the masters of aggression. They are the kinds of men you saw at the
Republican National Convention — Dana White, Hulk Hogan — the kinds of men Pete
Hegseth and JD Vance are playacting at. The warriors recognize one another —
the AfD in Germany; Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. There’s a hint of the wild animal
to them: no rules, no limits, just the law of the jungle.
The
bureaucrats, in their eyes, are the PowerPoint people, who went to law school
(like every Democratic presidential nominee after 1980) — the weaklings who
have segregated themselves at fancy conferences where they nibble canapés and
don’t have to encounter brutal reality. They are seen as emasculated types who
take paid paternity leave, admire the E.U. and get intimidated into telling you
their pronouns.
One of
Trump’s political strengths, da Empoli notes in his new book, is that he is
never seen reading a book. The experts understand nothing, and he scorns them.
In “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” one character says of Putin: “He never mentions
numbers. His language speaks of life, of death, of honor, of country.” In this
way, he positions himself against “accountants looking for glory, little men
who think that politics boils down to running a business council. That’s not
what it is at all. Politics has just one goal: to address men’s terrors.”
Verticality. Educated-class types like everything
to be horizontal. We like egalitarian manners and casual clothing and dislike
grandiose, gilt-edged ballrooms. The wolf, on the other hand, re-establishes
verticality. He is above you, in a grand palace, in a big office, commanding
others and dominating those beneath him.
What do
people want when terrorist attacks occur, when inflation seeps into the
economy, when the world is in flux? The authoritarian understands that they
will rush to anyone who will re-establish order, authority, hierarchy and
control. As da Empoli writes, “Vertical power offers the only satisfactory
answer, the only one that can appease man’s anxiety when exposed to the world’s
ferocity.”
Unpredictability. The wolf centralizes power and
generates fear among those around him. He plays endless dominance games. His
acolytes rise and fall on his whim. He never admits error. He is unpredictable
because nothing reduces people to submission as quickly as the threat of random
punishment. Any technocrat can do the expected thing, but the wolf is the
master of reckless action: Putin invades Ukraine. Trump declares a trade war on
the world. The wolf has inherited systems with procedures and norms, but the
wolf operates on manual overdrive. The human brain is programmed to focus on
the unexpected, so you can never turn away.
Clarifying
acts of violence.
The wolf needs to show he is the great protector. That means he needs to show
himself savagely destroying the forces of evil, and if the forces aren’t big
enough or threatening enough, he has to exaggerate them. Putin built his power
by attacking Islamic terrorists from Chechnya. Trump goes after immigrants and
alleged drug smugglers from Venezuela.
Stoking
and managing anger.
There is always a high level of anger and resentment in any society. The wolf
needs to find the right scapegoats in order to manage and direct that anger.
Putin turned on the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky because the people resented
the oligarchs. Trump turned on Musk because who really likes a guy who just got
a $1 trillion dollar pay package? Scapegoats can range from elite universities
to Democratic prosecutors to the corrupt generals in the Chinese or Saudi
regimes, but they will be found. Large portions of the public want the high to
be brought low.
Digital
Somalia. The real
world may still have some rules that preserve order. But online, it’s anarchy.
It’s the conditions the U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force operators found in
the movie “Black Hawk Down.” The wolves support anything or anyone who will
bring chaos: cyberattacks, extremists, crypto crashes, misinformation and deep
fakes. Antifa, antisemites or groypers — they’re all equally useful. Anybody
who maximizes chaos increases public demand for wolfish protection.
Greatness. In the minds of the wolves,
information-age elites have shriveled souls. They have been trained to be
pragmatic, utility-maximizing drones. They offer voters materialistic snack
food — a tax credit here, a student loan program there. The wolves see themselves
as those who have not forgotten how to be a human being. They talk about
greatness. They believe that the people want to experience camaraderie and
strength. They offer those people a release from triviality, dreams of glory
and honor. Mother Russia. Make America Great Again. A Chinese century. God’s
glory.
Throughout
this column I’ve been calling the authoritarians wolves. I mean it as an insult
— predators who are ravaging the world. But the authoritarians take it as a
compliment. They know they are wolves! But they believe the world needs wolves
to protect the good, decent people from the ruthless fancy people who are their
actual enemies. And here’s how authoritarianism feeds on itself: The more
wolves there are in the world, the more each nation needs to find its own.
David
Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about political, social
and cultural trends. @nytdavidbrooks
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