How Roy Cohn Created Donald Trump and His Narcissistic Nihilism

 

In 2018, Donald Trump became enraged because he thought Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not doing enough to protect him from investigations of Russian support for his 2016 presidential campaign.  At one point, he shouted, "Where's my Roy Cohn?"  

Roy Cohn (1927-1986) had been Trump's lawyer and fixer for thirteen years from their first meeting in 1973 to Cohn's death in 1986.  For me, the two best accounts of how Cohn created Trump are Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark's new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn's Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump (Scribner, 2026) and the 2024 biographical movie The Apprentice, which is easily available at Amazon Prime Video.  Trump described this film as "a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job" and described those involved in the film as "human scum."  That means it's totally accurate.

Cohn first gained national prominence as a young Justice Department prosecutor who won the court case that led to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for Russian espionage in 1953.  He then became the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who was attempting to expose government employees who were communist spies or those who were homosexual and thus "security threats" because they could be blackmailed into becoming spies.  

In his work with McCarthy, Cohn became known for his ruthless methods that were often illegal and unethical.  He was also known for his hypocrisy in exposing homosexuals in government.  He was a homosexual although he always denied it publicly.  

From the late 1950s to his death, Cohn was a practicing lawyer in New York City whose clients included the most powerful and prominent people in politics and business as well as organized crime.  He was often prosecuted for his criminal behavior, but he was never convicted.  Finally, however, in 1986, he was disbarred by the New York State Supreme Court for unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients' funds, lying on a bar application, and falsifying a change to a will.  A few months after his disbarment, he died from the complications from AIDS. 

When Cohn first met Trump in 1973, Trump was working for his father's real estate company.  The Justice Department had just filed a suit against Fred Trump's company charging them with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act.  According to the Justice Department, thirty-nine Trump-owned apartment buildings in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island had systematically barred blacks from renting.  Their applications had been marked by a large "C," to identify the applicants as "colored."  Four Trump building superintendents were willing to testify to this.

The Feds proposed that if the Trumps signed a consent decree by which they agreed to integrate their sixteen thousand units, then there would be no fines and no admission of guilt.  But Cohn's legal strategy was always attack, attack, attack.  So he persuaded Trump to countersue the Department of Justice on the grounds of defamation, seeking $100,000 in damages.  Cohn and Trump held a press conference at the New Hilton to announce their suit.  They got a lot of newspaper headlines.  A federal judge dismissed the suit as frivolous, telling Cohn that he was "wasting time and paper."  But that was the point: Cohn's favorite tactic was to file totally bogus lawsuits that would delay the legal process and wear down his opponents.

Cohn dragged out the legal proceedings for twenty-one months.  He charged that FBI agents were coercing witnesses with "gestapo-like interrogation," and they were acting like "stormtroopers."  When the judge reprimanded him for making charges that were "utterly without foundation," Cohn retracted his statement.

Then he filed a contempt motion to have a young prosecutor--Donna Goldstein--removed from the case because she had been calling prospective witnesses in the middle of the night and threatening them with jail time if they didn't testify against Trump.  It was an absurd claim with no evidence to support it, but Goldstein was scared because such a charge could end her legal career.  U.S. District Judge Edward Neaher was forced to halt the main case and hold a hearing on the contempt motion.  A prosecutor spent two hours proving that the charges were baseless.  Cohen was silent throughout.  The judge then spoke to Cohn: "Mr. Cohn, I think it would be in the best interest of everyone if you would just withdraw your motion."  Cohn replied: "Well, I think the girl [Goldstein] has learned her lesson and I'm sure she won't do it again."

Eventually, in June 1975, Trump settled by signing the same consent decree that he could have signed in 1973.  He agreed to advertise his rentals in Black owned newspapers and list vacancies with the Urban League.  In effect, Trump had agreed to adopt an affirmative action program.

Trump and Cohn held a press conference and declared victory.  Trump has often claimed that this was his first great victory in the courts with Cohn as his lawyer.  As Bird and Goldmark have observed: "Trump learned from Cohn that the court of public opinion is far more important than the court of law" (265).

Three years later, the Feds filled another suit claiming that the Trumps were still discriminating against Blacks.  Cohn told reporters that the charges were without "the slightest merit."  But Cohn and Trump signed a new consent decree without admitting wrongdoing.

Bird and Goldmark conclude: "Roy had taught him that the pyrotechnics of publicity were more important than the law. What counted was controlling the images in any narrative" (266).  They quote from Sam Roberts, a New York Times reporter who covered city politics in the 1970s: "Roy was a master of situational morality.  He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. counterattack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat."

In all of this, I see four character traits shared by Cohen and Trump: power-seeking, no ideology, narcissism, and nihilism.

1. Power-seeking.  Like Cohn, Trump has sought power--or at least the appearance of power--and it's power for its own sake, not power as a means to any end.  There are only two kinds of people in the world--winners and losers.  The winners are those who are powerful.  The losers are those who are not.  

As I have pointed out in a previous post, Trump's ambition cannot be satisfied by the limited powers granted to the President in the American Constitution.  As he told Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan when they interviewed him on March 16 of this year, it is not even enough for him to be the most powerful president who has ever lived, because he must be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," which is what "a historian" had told him he was.  Haberman and Swan later found out that this "historian" was not a professional historian but the long-time caddie for the golfer Gary Player.

But notice that the mere appearance of power is enough for Trump.  For that, all he needs is the testimony of a golf caddie to his world-historical power.

2. No ideology.  Cohn was assumed to be a McCarthyite anti-communist Republican conservative.  Trump has been assumed to be a populist Republican conservative and an "America First" isolationist.  But in fact neither man was devoted to a coherent ideology.  Although Cohn was an informal adviser to both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he became a powerful member of the Democratic Party machine in New York.  Harvard law school professor Alan Dershowitz knew both Cohn and Trump in the 1980s, and he has said that neither Cohn nor Trump were ideological.  "Roy Cohn didn't really have any ideology, even anti-communist ideology.  He was somebody who rewarded loyalty and punished disloyalty," Dershowitz observed.  He saw that while both Cohn and Trump "wanted to win," they were "among the two least ideological people I knew."

Both Cohn and Trump pretended to have a populist ideology.  But as Bird and Goldmark note, this was a purely opportunistic stance by which they "used their personal resentments to tap into raw populist emotions that have long festered in American society" (382).  This pretense of populist ideology was only an instrument in the pursuit of power for its own sake.  Consequently, their ideology could be set aside if they thought some other position would better serve their pursuit of power.

For example, in all three of Trump's presidential campaigns, one of the preeminent themes was an "America First" foreign policy of isolationism and "no more foreign wars," particularly in the Middle East.  But then many of his most fervent MAGA supporters (such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson) were shocked when he launched his war against Iran.  They thought Trump was committed to an ideology of "American First" foreign policy.  

When Trump was asked by Haberman and Swan how helping Israel fight Iran could be consistent with his theme of "America First," he answered: "Well, considering that I'm the one that developed 'America First,' and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that" (194).  In other words, "America First" means whatever Trump says it means, and his followers will have to accept that.  

Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah of Iran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Trump was 32 years old, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States; and Trump throughout those years has complained that America has been humiliated by the failure of every President to defeat Iran.  

Benjamin Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to meet Trump at the White House at the beginning of his second term, and he shrewdly began working on Trump's psychology of power-seeking to persuade him that he could be the first president powerful enough to defeat Iran in cooperation with Israel.  Haberman and Swan report that Trump ignored the warnings of his military and intelligence advisors that Netanyahu's plan for "regime change" in Iran was wildly unrealistic and that going to war with Iran would be a foreign policy blunder of massive proportions.  Trump could not listen to them because Netanyahu had seduced him with the prospect of displaying his power to the whole world by defeating Iran in war.

3. Narcissism.  I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism.  Cohn showed the same narcissistic personality.  And for both the prominent sign of their narcissism was shamelessness.  Cohn's cousin David Marcus has observed that both men didn't care what other people thought about their behavior.  "Roy would just make light of the fact that people in the family just didn't care about him.  He did not care.  That's the odd thing."  Marcus thought Trump was the same way, but there was a difference.  Trump showed "a narcissism combined with insecurity.  But in Roy it was a total security in who he was--except for the fact that he didn't want people knowing in public he was gay."  Mary Trump--Trump's niece, the daughter of his older brother who died young--has made a similar assessment of Trump as a psychopathic narcissist with the insecurity of a little boy who fears the abusive scorn of his father.

4. Nihilism.  Narcissism is intertwined with nihilism because if one believes the nihilist claim that truth and morality are not real, if they are just fictions of one's own mind, then the narcissist can create his own truth and his own morality.  Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay for The Apprentice, has Cohn telling the young Trump that "there is no right and wrong.  There is no morality.  There is no Truth with a capital T.  It's a construct.  It's a fiction.  It's man made.  You create your own reality."  Cohn once told an interviewer: "Certain rules are made to be broken.  They're designed to screw the little guy.  I decided long ago to make my own rules, to act according to my own choices, my own judgments, and my own conscience."

Compare this with what Trump recently said in an interview with the New York Times.  He was asked if there were any limits on his global powers.  He answered: "Yeah, there is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It's the only thing that can stop me."  Notice the emphasis by both Cohn and Trump: my own rules, my own judgments, my own conscience, my own morality, my own mind.  That's narcissistic nihilism.

For Cohn and Trump, their narcissistic nihilism is even expressed in the way they talk, in certain telling phrases.  Roger Stone noticed that Cohn would always say, "If you wanna know the truth," or "I can tell you," or "to be absolutely frank," and then you would know he was going to lie to you.  Listen to Trump when he's speaking casually to reporters or to audiences at his rallies, and you'll hear the same phrases.  Trump's phrases are all Roy Cohn's phrases, and they are always introducing a big lie.

So that's how Roy Cohn created Donald Trump and his narcissistic nihilistic politics.

The day after Trump was first elected president in November of 2016, Roger Stone called him to congratulate him.  At the end of their conversation, Trump said, "Wouldn't Roy love to see this moment?  Boy, do we miss him."

Trump Is a Narcissistic Political Imposter Driving America to Geopolitical Defeat and National Bankruptcy

I have written about the evolution of human progress through the Liberal Enlightenment.  But I have also written about how Donald Trump's grandiose narcissism could threaten the two pillars of the Liberal Enlightenment--liberal constitutionalism and liberal internationalism.  Now, in the new book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan--Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump--we have an insider's account of the first year and a half of Trump's second term that shows how Trump's quest for absolute power over the whole world has exploded the liberal norms of constitutionalism and internationalism.  

But Haberman and Swan's analysis of Trump and his presidency falls short in many ways.  For example, they rightly stress the importance for Trump of his claim to be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," but they mistakenly suggest that he is right about this.  They don't see how Trump's disastrous war against Iran shows that he is not as powerful as he claims to be.  They don't see that America's military defeat in Iran is part of a general decline in America's global power caused by Trump that could allow China to become the new geopolitical superpower.  

Haberman and Swan also ignore Trump's massive increases in deficit spending that are driving the U.S. to a colossal debt crisis, which is another example of Trump's political incompetence. 

Haberman and Swan don't recognize that Trump is a narcissistic political imposter who has failed as a political leader just as he has failed as a businessman.  Trump is a con man, and his claim that he has always been a "winner" in both business and politics is all part of the con.  Haberman should be able to recognize this because her previous book on Trump was entitled Confidence Man!

Mary Trump (Trump's niece) is better than Haberman and Swan in explaining Trump's psychological profile as a narcissistic psychopath produced by his father's abusive parenting.

MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN!

Haberman and Swan write about a conversation between Trump and Tucker Carlson.  Carlson warned him not to go to war with Iran.  Trump answered: "We're not doing that."  Carlson responded: "Good, because the only thing that can blow up your administration is if you get into a war with Iran. Your voters don't want any more wars. . . This is a trap set by your enemies.  These people fucking hate you.  And once you get in, it's very hard to get out of it.  And that'll wreck your presidency.  That'll wreck everything.  You won't be able to do anything."  Trump then said: "I don't think there's ever been an American President as powerful as I am."  Carlson replied, "Certainly not since FDR. Really, the only thing that could wreck it is war with Iran" (74-75).

Notice the subtle point in this exchange.  Carlson was warning Trump that going to war with Iran would expose the limits of his power because he would lose the support of his voters, and he would not be able to win the war.  Trump refused to accept this suggestion that his power was limited by saying that no President had ever been as powerful as he was.  Carlson answered by saying sure you're at least as powerful as FDR, but even so, you're not powerful enough to successfully fight a war with Iran without destroying your presidency.

In contrast to Carlson's warnings to Trump about the limits of his power, Benjamin Netanyahu flattered Trump by telling him how powerful he was as America's Commander-in-Chief, and then insisting that the most dramatic display of his power would be to join Israel in a war against Iran.

Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that overthrew the Shah of Iran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Trump was 32 years old, Iran has been a thorn in the side of the United States; and Trump throughout those years has complained that America has been humiliated by the failure of every President to defeat Iran.  Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to meet Trump at the White House at the beginning of his second term, and he immediately began working on Trump to persuade him that he could be the first president powerful enough to defeat Iran in cooperation with Israel.

When Israel first launched its 12-day war of bombing Iran on June 12, 2025, the U.S. was officially not involved.  But Netanyahu knew that once Trump saw the apparent success of Israel's campaign on Fox News, he would not be satisfied to be a mere bystander to history, and he would have to jump into the war so that he could be the center of attention.  Specifically, Netanyahu needed Trump to drop "the big one"--the thirty-thousand-pound bunker-busting bomb that only the U.S. has.  When Trump finally decided to enter the fighting for one day on June 21 ("Operation Midnight Hammer"), 14 of these bunker-busting bombs were dropped on Iran's Fordow Uranium Enrichment Plant and the Natanz Nuclear Facility.  This was the first time this bomb was used in combat.  Trump announced that Iran's nuclear program had been "totally obliterated."  

Trump also suggested that it was time for "regime change" in Iran.  On Truth Social, he wrote: "It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change.'  But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???  MIGA!!!"

When Trump was asked how helping Israel fight Iran could be consistent with his theme of "America First," he answered: "Well, considering that I'm the one that developed 'America First,' and considering that the term wasn't used until I came along, I think I'm the one that decides that" (194).  In other words, "America First" means whatever Trump says it means, and his followers will have to accept that.  

That's his ultimate power: he speaks into existence whatever he happens to want at any moment.  Haberman and Swan quote one senior administration official as saying privately that U.S. policy on any given issue is "whatever Donald Trump said last on the subject," which will then change "in twenty-four hours, or in two hours, or in one minute" (190).

Within a few months after "Operation Midnight Hammer," Netanyahu was back asking Trump to join him in a larger war against Iran.  On February 11, 2026, Netanyahu met in the Situation Room, a restricted space in the lower level of the White House, with Trump and a small group of senior advisors along with intelligence and military officials.  Netanyahu made an hour-long presentation that argued four points.  First, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, could be killed by an airstrike on his compound.  Second, Iran's military power--particularly, its ballistic missile program--could be crippled by airstrikes.  Third, an intense bombing campaign would provoke a popular rebellion to overthrow the regime.  And, finally, a new leader, such as Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran's last shah, could take power as a secular ruler who could overturn the theocratic government.

The next day, February 12, Trump had another meeting in the Situation Room.  Two senior intelligence officers briefed him on the U.S. intelligence analysis of Netanyahu's presentation.  They judged that the first two objectives--killing the Ayatollah and crippling Iran's ballistic missile program were achievable.  But the second two objectives--a popular revolution overthrowing the government and the installation of a new secular leader--were ridiculously unrealistic.

Trump suggested that for him achieving the first two objectives would be enough to justify going to war.  But Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned about two problems.  A major war against Iran would deplete stockpiles of American munitions and missile interceptors that had already been reduced by years of support for Ukraine and Israel.  This would make it difficult for the U.S. to engage in any future war--such as defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.  The second problem was that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz and impede the shipments of oil.  Trump dismissed this because he assumed that Iran would surrender and not have the power to shut the strait.

On the morning of February 28, at 2:30 a.m., Trump announced the war on Iran ("Operation Epic Fury") with a post on Truth Social, with an eight-minute video.  He expected that the war would be over in a few weeks.

Of course, we now have seen that General Caine's two warnings have come true.  Iran's closing of the Strait of Hormuz has been its greatest weapon in defeating the U.S.  And the U.S. now has a severe shortage of munitions and interceptor missiles that will take many years to replenish.

The worst consequence is that Xi Jinping now sees an opportunity to invade Taiwan and to make other moves towards establishing China as the geopolitical superpower to replace the U.S.  Now that Trump has wasted U.S. military resources in the Iran war, while also breaking up the global alliances that have supported U.S. global power over the past seventy years, the U.S. cannot check the expansion of Chinese power.

TRUMP'S ASSAULT ON LIBERAL CONSTITUTIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM

Trump's war on Iran illustrates his disregard for liberal constitutionalism because only Congress has the constitutional power to declare war, and yet not only did Trump not get a congressional declaration of war, he didn't even consult with Congress about the war, or even announce the war before a joint session of Congress.

Trump's war on Iran also illustrates his scorn for liberal internationalism because he did not seek the support of NATO, the UN, or any nation other than Israel.  Nor did he try to justify the war under international law.

A few weeks before announcing the war, Trump was interviewed by the New York Times.  He was asked if there were any limits on his powers as Commander in Chief.  He answered: "Yeah, there is one thing.  My own morality.  My own mind.  It's the only thing that can stop me.  I don't need international law."  Notice that he does not appeal to morality in general but to "my own" morality.

Not only is Trump's power unconstrained by international law, but it is also unconstrained by constitutional law.  For example, I have written about how Trump has in effect denied the constitutional right to due process of law--the Fifth Amendment right that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

Trump has the absolute sovereignty that comes from combining the executive, legislative, and judicial powers in his hands.  Trump makes laws by signing executive decrees.  Trump executes those laws that he has made by ordering executive officials to carry them out according to his directions.  Trump judges the laws by interpreting them for himself and deciding how they apply to particular cases and refusing to obey judicial orders that go against his will.  Trump is thus carrying out the Claremont Institute's Red Caesar Plan for America.

That violates the fundamental principle of liberal constitutionalism that to avoid tyranny governmental power must be limited by a system of countervailance with separation of powers and checks and balances between the branches of government, so that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition," as James Madison said in Federalist Number 51.

"THE MOST POWERFUL MAN THAT THE PLANET HAS EVER KNOWN"?

Trump's ambition, however, cannot be satisfied by the limited powers granted to the President in the American Constitution.  As he told Haberman and Swan when they interviewed him on March 16 of this year, it is not even enough for him to be the most powerful president who has ever lived, because he must be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known," which is what "a historian" had told him he was.  Haberman and Swan later found out that this "historian" was not a professional historian but the long-time caddie for the golfer Gary Player.

Trump had attended an event honoring Player.  Player's caddie asked to speak to the audience to say something about the President.  Later, the caddie sent Trump a two-page text of his speech.  Trump gave copies of this document to Haberman and Swan, and then he began reading from it.  The opening line was "Donald Trump is, without question, the most powerful man that the planet has ever known--by a long way."  The caddie historian went down a list of history's most powerful men--Alexander the Great, Caesar, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin.  None of them had the global power of Trump.

Haberman and Swan observe:

What was revealing was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon--and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear.  He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed, between those who liberated and those who enslaved.  What mattered was that they had had huge power--and that he had more (412).

When I read this, I was reminded of my argument that Abraham Lincoln in his Lyceum Speech in 1838 had warned about the "towering genius" of people like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon who would destroy a constitutional republic like America for the sake of the glory coming from having absolute power, and he predicted that someone like this--someone like Trump--would destroy the constitutional order.

Haberman and Swan conclude their book by agreeing with John Judis's argument that Trump is one of Hegel's "world-historical individuals" like Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon.  And thus they leave their readers with the impression that Trump can rightly be compared with such great men of history, and that he might even be right to claim to be "the most powerful man that the planet has ever known."

But this ignores the fact that while the power of people like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon came from their extraordinary competence as political and military leaders, Trump's entire life has shown his incompetence leading to a record of failure.  His bragging that he has always be a "winner" who has never lost is a boastful fantasy that is all part of the con.

THE NARCISSITIC POLITICAL IMPOSTER AND HIS BANKRUPTCIES

Some years ago, I claimed that the fundamental argument in Trump's political campaign rhetoric depends on his myth of himself as the self-made multi-billionaire businessman.  This argument can be put into the form of a syllogism:

Major premise:  Because of stupid politicians, America no longer wins; and America will not win again until a successful businessman who knows how to win is elected president.

Minor premise: Donald Trump is unique in his business success and his shrewdness in knowing how to win, because he is a self-made multi-billionaire.

Conclusion:  Therefore, Americans need to elect Trump president.

Both of the premises are open to dispute.  I have challenged the minor premise by pointing to the evidence that Trump's business career shows many failures from his imprudent decisions, that he was saved from ruin by his father's life-long transfer of money to him, and so he is not the self-made billionaire that he claims to be.  He had a long string of bankruptcies that would have destroyed him were it not for the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled to him from his father.  This started early.  By age 3, the young Donald Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today's dollars as an employee of his father.  By age 8, Donald was a millionaire. 

I have also suggested that Trump's financial imprudence as a businessman has been continued in his financial imprudence as a president who has promoted reckless increases in the federal budget deficits and the national debt, which contradicts his promise in his first campaign that he would balance the federal budget and even pay down the national debt.  Once he became president, he never again mentioned that campaign promise.

Trump has added to the national debt at a faster rate than any president in American history.  Before his first term as president, the national debt was under $20 trillion.  Now the national debt is approaching $40 trillion.  The Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the budget deficit for Fiscal Year 2026 will be over $2 trillion.  Under Trump, the government has been borrowing about $6 billion per day.  Trump is driving America to national bankruptcy.

That's why I call him narcissistic political imposter.  He boasts that he, and he alone, can lead America to greatness.  But since he lacks any competence for prudent governance, he is actually leading America into decline at home and abroad.  

"THE TERRIFIED LITTLE BOY"

In her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man, Mary Trump has offered the best explanation for why her uncle is the man he is.  Donald is the product of his father's abusive parenting:

"Nothing is ever good enough.  This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.  He knows that he has never been loved" (198).

"Though Donald's fundamental nature hasn't changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he's under has changed dramatically.  It's not the stress of the job, because he isn't doing the job--unless watching TV and tweeting insults count.  It's the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing--about politics, civics, or simple human decency--that requires an enormous amount of work" (199).

"Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy.  At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his long-dead father" (202).

"Donald withdraws to his comfort zones--Twitter, Fox News--casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker.  He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own.  But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy" (210). 

"We Are Creatures of Matter Who Long to Matter": Goldstein's Mattering Map

                                                                    The Mattering Map

"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii).  SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious."  You can click on the image to enlarge it. 

In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."  

We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us.  And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death.  We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives.  We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.

We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living.  Goldstein observes:

We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter.  The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter."  It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).

I have not been able to find this website.  But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org. 

Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP

In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders."  But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects."  These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter?  The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe.  The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others.  The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving.  The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.

Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category.  The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.  The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them.  Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical.  Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups. 

Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206).  The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.

Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders.  The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).

Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not.  And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.

FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER

Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects.  So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender.  For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified."  But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ.  He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him.  He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet.  Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.  Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth.  May I not forget your words.  Amen" (200-201).  From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.

Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020.  She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene.  Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen.  But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her.  She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia.  She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting.  She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump.  So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office.  She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings.  She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.

She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life.  She had found her purpose.  She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.

The thought just came into my head.  I was thinking, "What are we doing this for?  What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die?  You die, and it's over.  So, what's the point?"  I felt afraid.  Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.

Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:

Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong?  It crosses my mind.  Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out.  Because I really want to understand what the point is.  This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home.  That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).

Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter.  But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives. 

William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology.  But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression.  He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide.  In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt.  But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist."  In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard.  But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22.  He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27.  But he never practiced medicine.  And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).

Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy.  At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression.  The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology.  The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion.  The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.  

These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter.  As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power."  Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

                                   Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew

Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated.  He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.

Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group.  Later, he explained:

They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shit about me.  The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become.  Then they told me I had a destiny.  They told me I could become a warrior.  They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).

By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood.  When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader.  But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested.  So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.  

But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years.  In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates.  When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.

Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment.  He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise.  But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around.  Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew.  But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job.  Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.

One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture.  He apologized for being so "stupid."  But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid.  He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying.  Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart.  You are just smart.  Get used to it."

Those words had a powerful effect.  When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up.  That was the beginning of his transformation.  He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything.  We have to start talking.  It's human beings being human beings among human beings."

He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups.  An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team.  He has also lectured widely about his life.  And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.  

So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups.  He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.

But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish!  He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish.  Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal great-grandmother had been Jewish.  Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.

Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew.  He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name.  This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.

Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.

He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.

DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP 

                               Planned Kim Il Trump Statue at the Trump Presidential Library

Donald Trump is an example of an individualist competitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else.  That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself.  That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him.  That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.

When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first.  He said it did.  "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys.  And the second time, I run the country and the world."  A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."

Previously, I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism and the belief of his followers that he has been chosen by God.

For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.

Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln.  But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's.  Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast. 

I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled.  For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator.  He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature.  He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room.  He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:

In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.

22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."

Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves.  Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.

THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL

Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others.  And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."  

She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193).  She explains:

To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity.  You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence.  There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy.  Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).

What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does.  Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen.  As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist.  But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.  I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).

Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence.  But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.

She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:

Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance.  We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.

When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he gave me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell.  (A joke.  Frank doesn't believe in hell.)

Wait a minute, I say, grinning back.  You of all people have got to believe in redemption.

"Yeah, you're right," he says.  "Me of all people.  I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me." 

Doesn't their awkward joking about believing in redemption suggest their aching longing for religious transcendence? 

In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.

Hermann Goering's Natural Desire for Dominance: The Movie "Nuremberg"

 

                                                    The Trailer for the Movie "Nuremberg"

The movie "Nuremberg," based on Jack El-Hai's book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, is the story of how American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley studied the imprisoned Nazi leaders who were brought before the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945-1946, and how Kelley became particularly fascinated by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who had been Hitler's designated successor until he fell from Hitler's grace near the end of the war.  The movie stars Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Kelley.  All of the acting is superb, and it's a powerfully moving and intellectually stimulating movie.

The movie and the book have made me wonder how Goering would fit into the evolutionary psychology of political leadership that I have developed in this blog and in my books.  I have written about psychopaths in this blog and in Darwinian Natural Right.  And I can see that Goering and the other Nazi war leaders had some psychopathic traits.  But Goering was not a pure psychopath.  Goering was a grandiose narcissist who was driven by a natural desire for alpha-male dominance as described by Arnold Ludwig.  

Donald Trump shares those same traits, but his political situation differs from Goering's.  Goering pursued dominance in a totalitarian dictatorship that did not allow anyone to challenge Nazi Party rule.  Trump's desire for dominance has led him to establish a competitive authoritarianism in his second term, in which there is some weak countervailance to his dominance coming from the threat of electoral defeat.  If Trump were to cancel the midterm elections next year, that would turn America into a totalitarian dictatorship like Nazi Germany.

JUSTICE AT NUREMBERG

Just before the final collapse of Germany in the spring of 1945, Goering suggested that he should become the Fuhrer once Hitler was dead, which led to Hitler's order that he be killed.  Once it became clear that Germany would lose the Battle of Berlin, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.  That left Goering as the highest ranking Nazi leader left alive.  On the day before Germany's surrender on May 7, Goering sent a letter to U.S. military command offering to help the Allies form a new government for Germany with Goering himself as the new leader.  When Goering was captured by U.S. troops, he asked to meet General Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, so that he and Eisenhower could arrange for the new government of Germany.  But instead, Goering was taken to a prison camp in Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, where he joined fifty-two other high-ranking German leaders.

In early August, Captain Douglas Kelley arrived at Mondorf.  He had worked in the medical service of the U.S. army, and his new assignment was to maintain the mental fitness of Goering and the other Nazi inmates.  Kelley wanted to find out if there was a "Nazi mind" that would account for their heinous deeds.  His great ambition was to write a book on this based on his studies of the captive Nazis, knowing that this would make him famous.  If the psychic flaws of the Nazi personality could be understood, then this might prevent the future emergence of another Nazi-like regime.

On August 8, the four Allied powers (France, Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR) agreed on a charter for an International Tribunal that would try the Nazi war leaders for war crimes.  Nothing like this had ever been done.  The U.S. took the leading role, and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson agreed to head the prosecution.  Jackson targeted Goering as the top-ranking Nazi who need to be convicted.  The International Tribunal would meet in Nuremburg, Germany.  On August 12, the Nazi prisoners were moved to a prison in Nuremberg to await their trial.  Kelley moved there with them.  

Kelley spent hundreds of hours with all of the prisoners, but he was most interested in Goering.  They developed a strange personal relationship, perhaps even a friendship, based on mutual respect.  Kelley's primary psychiatric methodology with all the prisoners was the Rorschach ink blot test.

On October 20, the Allied prosecutors delivered their indictments against the prisoners to the tribunal.  That same day, Gustave Mark Gilbert arrived at the Nuremberg prison.  He was charged with maintaining the mental welfare of the prisoners so that they would be fit to stand trial.  But Gilbert was a psychologist who had the same ambition as Kelley--he wanted to write a book that would explain the psychology of the Nazis.  He was also like Kelley in that he relied on the Rorschach ink blot test for studying the minds of the Nazi prisoners.

Goering liked to brag about his heroic achievements as a military and political leader.  He had been a flying ace in World War I.  He was once shot down. He was credited with shooting down twenty-two enemy planes.  At the end of the war, he flew the unit of planes he commanded into Germany while refusing to surrender to the Allies.  He received his country's highest military award for his exploits.

Goering told Kelley how he first heard Adolf Hitler give a speech.  In the early 1920s, he heard Hitler in Munich speech shout: "You've got to have bayonets to back up your threats."  Goering explained: "Well, that was what I wanted to hear.  He wanted to build up a party that would make Germany strong and smash the Treaty of Versailles. 'Well,' I said to myself, 'that's the party for me! Down with the Treaty of Versailles, goddammit! That's my meat!" He saw that this young, small party was open to new members who could quickly rise to leadership positions--"that meant I could soon be a big man in it."  This desire for becoming a "big man" confirmed his mother's prediction: "Hermann will either be a great man or a great criminal!" (El-Hai, 11).

That he became a great man seemed clear by the long list of titles he had in World War II, which he was happy to rattle off to Kelley: President of the Reichstag, Hitler's deputy, Prime Minister of Prussia, Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, Minister of Economics, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, director of the massive Hermann Goering Works manufacturing combine, field marshal, chairman of the Reich Council for National Defense, and Reich Forestry and Hunting Master.  Goering was most proud of the title Reichsmarschall--a rank similar to a six-star general--held only once before, two hundred years earlier, by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who was the most distinguished field marshal in the Army of the Holy Roman Empire and of the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty.

Goering insisted to Kelley that he had become the supreme leader of Germany once Hitler died:

The people flocked to us, the old soldiers swore by us--and I became head of the nation. . . . Too late you would say?  But perhaps not.  Anyway, I made it. . . . You know I shall hang.  I am ready.  But I am determined to go down in German history as a great man.  If I cannot convince the court, I shall at least convince the German people that all I did was done for the Greater German Reich.  In fifty or sixty years, there will be statues of Hermann Goering all over Germany.  Little statues, maybe, but one in every German home (El-Hai, 114).

On the morning of November 20, 1945, the tribunal convened to begin its public trial.  "Goering entered first," El-Hai writes.  "He wore his pearl-gray, brass-buttoned Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia and symbols of rank, and he appeared energized to retake the world stage" (128).  Goering had had months to plan his defense, and he expected to speak eloquently of the glories of the Nazi German Reich.

But then, on the afternoon of November 29, Goering's plans for his defense were undercut when the prosecution showed filmed footage of the concentration camps shot by British and American troops less than a year earlier.  Everyone was transfixed by the images of emaciated camp inmates, stacks of corpses, and bulldozers pushing mounds of bodies into mass graves.  At least ten minutes of the movie were given over to these films.  And even though most of us in the theatre had seen some of these images previously, to see them again was as disturbing as it was for the courtroom audience in the movie.  Even Goering coughed nervously and leaned on the railing of the dock and covered his face with his right arm.

Later, Goering said to Kelley: "It was such a good afternoon, too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian affair, and everybody was laughing with me.  And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything" (El-Hai, 136). 

By the end of December, Kelley decided that since he had not seen his wife in almost three years, it was time to go home.  When Goering learned that Kelley was leaving, he broke down and wept.  By late January of 1946, Kelley was reunited with his wife in Chattanooga.  This left Gilbert in Nuremberg to continue his psychological studies of the prisoners during the trial.  Here the movie changes the story.  In the movie, Kelley stays in Nuremberg for the whole trial.

And so, in the movie, Kelley was in the audience for Goering's dramatic jousting with prosecutor Robert Jackson in March of 1946.  When Jackson presented documents signed by Goering that referred to the "final solution" to the Jewish problem as evidence that Goering knew about the extermination of Jews in Germany, Goering responded by pointing out that these documents identified the "emigration" of Jews out of Germany as the "final solution," and nothing was said explicitly about exterminating millions of Jews.  

Goering argued that neither he nor Hitler himself knew anything about the deliberate killing of Jews in the camps.  If any Nazi leader was responsible for the Holocaust, Goering insisted, it was Heinrich Himmler, who had died by suicide at the end of the war.  Although most people in the audience probably did not find this persuasive, it did show that the Nazis had not left any documentary evidence that explicitly recognized mass killing of innocent Jews as a deliberate policy.

Goering used the witness chair as a stage for a powerfully assertive speech as if he were speaking at a Nazi Party Rally.  One series of speeches lasted twelve hours over two days.  Everyone saw that Goering was enjoying himself in his passionate display of mastery.  He declared: "The only motive which guided me was my ardent love for my people, their fortunes, their freedoms, their life, and for this I call on the Almighty and the German people as my witness."

Janet Flanner of the New Yorker reported: "When the former Reichsmarschall strode from the witness stand to the prisoner's box after his last session with Mr. Jackson, he was congratulated and smiled upon by his fell-Nazis there, like a gladiator who had just won his fight" (El-Hai, 145).  Indeed, the movie suggested this by filming the scene of Russell Crowe entering the courtroom, with the camera focused on his back and the wide courtroom audience before him, which replicates a scene in Gladiator, when Crowe enters the Coliseum, knowing that he will fight to a glorious death. 

At the end of September in 1946, the judges of the Tribunal delivered their verdicts.  Of the 21 prisoners, 3 were acquitted, and 18 were found guilty.  11 (including Goering) were sentenced to death by hanging. 7 were given prison sentences.  

Goering admitted to Gilbert that his attempt to affirm the glory of the Nazi years and win the admiration of the German people had failed. "You don't have to worry about the Hitler legend any more.  When the German people learn what has been revealed at the trial, it won't be necessary to condemn him.  He has condemned himself" (El-Hai, 150).

Wanting to escape the indignity of hanging, Goering asked that he be killed by a firing squad.  But his request was denied.  

The night before he was to be hanged, Goering bit into a capsule of potassium cyanide that he had somehow hidden from the guards.  His suicide was his final act of defiance.

Remarkably, as the movie indicates in its closing intertitles, Kelley also killed himself with cyanide in 1958.  This ended his own life-long struggle with his inner demons.

NAZIS INTERPRETING INKBLOTS

Both Kelley and Gilbert thought the only way to probe into the deepest recesses of the Nazi Mind was through the Rorschach Inkblot Test, which had been developed in 1921 by Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist.  Rorschach created a set of ten inkblots that were intentionally drawn to be ambiguous.  He thought that when patients were asked to describe what they saw in these inkblot drawings, they would reveal their mental disorders and personalities, even when this was beyond the patients' conscious awareness.  So, for example, if patients responded with lots of descriptions involving color, that indicated that they were emotional and impulsive.  Or if they described people engaged in cooperative activities, that indicated that the patients found social interactions to be pleasurable and helpful.

                                                      How the Rorschach Inkblot Test Works

Although the Rorschach test was popular among psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1940s and 1950s, there is now a general agreement that this test has very limited uses, and that for most purposes it is little more than a variation of astrology and palm reading (Wood, Nezworski, and Garb, 2023).  The test has some validity for detecting disorders such as schizophrenia that involve perceptual distortion and disorganized thinking.  And some of the Rorschach test scores are related to IQ.  But the Rorschach test scores have little validity for providing a general understanding of personality.  And it is certainly not a psychological x-ray that can detect mental realities of which the patient is unaware of.

The failure of the Rorschach test in evaluating the Nazi prisoners became evident when Kelley and Gilbert could not agree in their interpretations of their inkblot tests.  Kelley saw imagination, boldness, and even genius in Goering's responses.  Gilbert saw the mediocrity of Goering's intellect and a lack of originality.  Kelley thought the Rorschach tests of the Nazis revealed that there was no mentally disordered "Nazi mind," because they were ordinary mentally healthy people, which showed that many mentally healthy people could become Nazis in the right circumstances.  By contrast, Gilbert thought the Nazis were mentally disordered in having antisocial personalities with no sympathy for the suffering of others.  Gilbert identified Goering as an "amiable psychopath" with a sadistic aggressiveness (1948).

And yet Kelley and Gilbert could agree on one facet of Goering's personality--his restless desire for dominance and power (El-Hai, 10-11, 74, 113-14, 134, 140; Gilbert, 1948, 212, 220, 225).

DOMINANCE, DEFERENCE, AND RESISTANCE TO DOMINANCE

The political psychology of Nazi politics manifests the tense interaction of three natural propensities of our evolved human nature as political animals: dominance, deference, and resistance to dominance (or counter-dominance).  Dominance is the natural propensity of a few individuals to seek the power over others that comes from superior rank in a group.  Deference is the natural propensity of many individuals to submit to those few who are dominant.  Counter-dominance is the natural propensity of many individuals to resist being dominated.

The desire for dominance and the grandiose narcissism of a man like Goering are easily mistaken as signs of a psychopathic personality.  But as I said in Darwinian Natural Right, pure psychopaths--people who have all the psychopathic traits identified by Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare--cannot be successful in the pursuit of dominance and power, because the behavior of pure psychopaths will always be self-defeating in that they cannot act prudently for any long-term goal.  As Cleckley said: "The psychopath shows a striking inability to follow any sort of life plan consistently, whether it be one regarded as good or evil.  He does not maintain an effort toward any far goal at all" (Arnhart, 1998, 222).  By contrast, Goering showed self-control and deliberate planning in his pursuit of dominance--in his quest to become the Big Man.

As Goering explained to Kelley and Gilbert, he and Hitler easily won the support of the German people because most people are easily persuaded to defer to the dominance of charismatic leaders.

Nazi Germany did not have a constitutional system of countervailing powers that would have allowed legal resistance to Nazi Party rule.  For example, the Nazi rulers could not be turned out of office through elections.  But Goering and Hitler did see illegal resistance--both armed and unarmed--to their dominance over Nazi Germany (Wikipedia, 2025a).  Over 800,000 Germans were arrested by the Gestapo for resistance activities.  Tens of thousands of Germans were executed by the Nazis.  And hundreds of thousands of Germans deserted from the Wehrmacht, and many defected to the Allies or to anti-Fascist resistance forces.  There were also at least 42 assassination plots to kill Hitler, and some of them came close to succeeding (Wikipedia, 2025b).  (Hitler would have benefited from reading the longest chapter in Machiavelli's Prince, which is about assassination plots as the greatest threat to the Prince who is hated by many of his people.)

All of these armed and unarmed ways of resisting the unjust dominance of rulers are expressions of what John Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the natural right of all individuals to punish those who violated the natural law of individual liberty.

Of course, ultimately the most successful resistance movement was the military resistance of the Allied forces that defeated Germany.  As Leo Strauss (2007) observed in a lecture in New York in December of 1943, what really influenced the Germans who supported Nazi rule was not the silly Nazi doctrines like Aryan racial superiority but rather the Nazi promise that Nazi arms and diplomacy would bring "the solution of all German problems by a short and decisive war," which "convinced a substantial part of the German people that large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays."  Strauss believed that "this doctrine is subject to the test of sense-experience."  First, that this was not going to be a short and decisive victory for Germany became clear as early as 1940 when the British Spitfires blunted the attack of Goering's Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain (July to October of 1940).  By December of 1943, people had seen with their own eyes that the Allies were defeating Germany on the battlefield.  And Strauss foresaw that this "re-education of Germany" would be "consummated by a meeting of British-American and of Russian tanks" in Berlin, and "by the harmonious cooperation of the Western and Eastern occupying forces in bringing to trial the war criminals."  The Nuremberg Tribunal accomplished that.

LESSONS FOR AMERICA?

Many people who see "Nuremberg" will detect a subtext in the movie that suggests questions about America: Can a Nazi-like dictatorship arise in America?  And if so, can this American dictatorship be brought to trial for its crimes?  Can an American dictatorship be overthrown by a popular resistance movement? Is Trump driven by the same desire for dictatorial dominance that drove Hitler and Goering?

That the answer to this last question is yes should be evident once we remember some of Trump's most arrogant boasts about his power--such as "As president, I can do anything I want."

We can hope, however, that unlike Goering and Hitler, Trump will always face the limits on his power that come from a constitutional system of countervailing powers, in which, as Publius said in The Federalist: "Ambition counteracts ambition."  But Trump has been setting aside that constitutional system and replacing it with a competitive authoritarianism--a hybrid regime that combines elements of democracy and authoritarianism, which has emerged around the world over the past 35 years since the end of the Cold War (Levitsky and Way, 2002, 2010, 2025).  A competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

A fully authoritarian regime (like Nazi Germany) allows little or no countervailing power.  A fully democratic regime (like the U.S. until recently) allows strong countervailance. A competitive authoritarian regime (like what Trump is establishing in his second term) allows weak countervailance.

Through various ways, the U.S. could become a fully authoritarian regime.  Trump could declare a state of national emergency that requires canceling the midterm elections next year.  Or the Supreme Court could adopt a version of the Unitary Executive Theory that means that there are no constitutional limits on the power of the President--and therefore Trump is right when he says that as President, he can do anything he wants.

If that were to happen, then we would have to hope that many Americans would join the resistance to dictatorial dominance that has started with the "No Kings" protests.  But these protestors will have to be willing to face imprisonment and violent suppression from the government.  We would also have to hope that military personnel and law enforcement officers would refuse to obey illegal orders from Trump.

It is a dark time in America.  But it could become much darker, perhaps even as dark as in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945.

 

REFERENCES

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press.

El-Hai, Jack. 2013. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Herman Goering, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and the Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WW II. New York: MJF Books.

Gilbert, G. M. 1948. "Hermann Goerig, Amiable Psychopath." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 43: 211-229.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2025. "The Path to American Authoritarianism." Foreign Affairs 104 (March/April): 36-51.

Strauss, Leo. 2007. "The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews." The Review of Politics 69: 530-38.

Wikipedia. 2025a. "German Resistance to Nazism."

Wikipedia. 2025b. "Assassination Attempts on Adolf Hitler."

Wood, James M., M. Teresa Nezworski, and Howard N. Garb. 2023. "The Rorschach Inkblot Test: We See an Unsinkable Rubber Ducky." Skeptical Inquirer 47 (6): 39-45.