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Our essays reflect only their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.← Back to all essays | Author's essays The White House’ Turn Towards Psychopolitics
by Sansserifseraphim
Published: 2025-11-12 (last update: 2025-11-21)
1-10 minutes
The White House’ Turn Towards Psychopolitics
Earlier this year the Trump Administration replaced the Biden-era term Anti-government and Anti-authority Extremist with a new term: Nihilist Violent Extremist. This move by the Trump admin signals the growing use of reactionary psychopolitics, which obfuscates the political motives of left-wing opposition, mainstreams anti-trans pathology, and whitewashes fascist terror. This radicalization of psychopathology in mainstream politics reflects the unity between the anti-trans movement and contemporary fascism across the West, particularly in the US.
Nihilism and Psychopolitics
The term NVE itself is our first example of psychopolitics in the Trump administration, specifically the word ‘nihilist.’ Unlike the Biden-era term, NVE is broad, vague, and “avoids all of the rusty and problematic words of the past: subversive, dissident, insurrectionist, revolutionary, or even ‘anti-government’ (the Biden term).” (Klippenstein) Unlike the previous terms ‘nihilist’ is seemingly apolitical and individualistic. It implies that the motives for one’s actions are not political but a result of personal pathology or disposition. Which is extremely similar to the formula for political actions that was put forward by one of the “pioneers” of political psychology Harold Lasswell, and critiqued in Michael Parenti’s 1992 essay Against Psychopolitics in which Parenti describes Lasswell’s formula. “Among the foremost pioneers in political psychology looms the figure of Harold Lasswell, a political scientist by training but heavily influenced by Freudianism, and himself a lay analyst. Over sixty years ago Lasswell postulated ‘a general formula which describes the developmental history of political man,’ specifically: p → d → r = P. The private motives of the individual, p, ‘nurtured and organized in relation to the family constellation and the early self’ are displaced, d, onto public objects.
The displacement is then rationalized, r, in terms of public interests to produce political man, P.” (Parenti) Rather than Lasswell, who argued that “the most important private motive is a repressed and powerful hatred of authority, a hatred which has come to partial expression and repression in relation to the father.” The Trump admin heavily simplifies the formula, one Parenti already describes as “reductionist.” The “private motive” here is de jure nihilism, a term that will inevitably be used to describe everything from gender transition to anti-Zionism to right-wing terror and much more (it has already been used to in cases involving pedophilia and parental murder [Klippenstein]).
Parenti goes on in the essay to explain how this formulation was used in the Vietnam war to depoliticize the campus protests. “In 1969, the noted psychologist Bruno Bettelheim ascribed the student antiwar protests that were sweeping the nation’s campuses to the influence of a permissive society and to the “guilt” the students suffered because they had avoided military service. In a word, the students were not really bothered by the Vietnam war as such but by the fact that they had been able to evade their moral obligation to participate in it.” Similar arguments have been used by conservative media figures like Bill Maher and Joe Scarborough against the Pro-Palestine anti-genocide Student Intifada.
Anti-trans Pathology
One of the main goals of this psychopolitical trend in the Trump administration is to mainstream the anti-trans movement and to depoliticize (or more accurately, re-apoliticize) trans oppression. The main ideology put forward by the anti-trans movement is that sex and gender are immutable, synonymous, biologically determined, asocial and apolitical. From this point they argue that transgender people do not exist and that it is entirely a mental illness, a position that is historically mainstream in the West, especially within psychology. For example, gender identity disorder, the idea that transness (and feminine/masculine expression by (oftentimes even cis) youth of the ‘wrong’ sex more generally)2 is a disorder that can be cured, was only removed in 2013 with the DSM-V. This, along with the rise of the trans mass shooter conspiracy, has led right-wing in the US to construct a conspiracy in which trans people are violent and mentally ill manipulators. As Ken Klippenstein reports. “The Trump Administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’ in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, two national security officials tell me.” As such, their persecution is not the unjust targeting of a politically repressed minority but a matter of public safety, a social pathology that must be cured.
Whitewashing Fascist Terror
The other goal of the new NVE designation is that it obscures the political roots of fascist terror. Aside from school shootings, white supremacist, queer-phobic, misogynistic, fascist violence is the most common form of terror in the US. This fact is extremely inconvenient to that section of the right that actually holds class power. Unlike the non-state actors that make up much of the fascist movement in the U.S., stochastic terror does not help the Trump administration or the state generally. It does two damaging things for the Republican party (and anti-liberal right-wing capitalists). It links their politics with violence in the public eye and is a source of political instability. Inter right-wing violence like the Charlie Kirk shooting destabilizes the MAGA movement’s unity and the leadership it currently has over the right. The label of nihilist, as Parenti explains, helps “to treat political realities as surface phenomena, under which there lurk deeper, more compelling dynamics.” Obscuring the politics of this violence by replacing political motives with pathological ones works to maintain the unity and dominance of the MAGA movement and distracts from the violent outcomes of the administration’s politics.
The Trump administration’s goal is the depoliticization of state violence. They want the ability to pursue domestic opposition without impunity by defining what is political and what is pathological. We’ve already seen this logic come from conservative media with the anti-Zionist protests. With the growing attacks on trans people, many of whom are politically active. The intersection of anti-Zionism/anti-ICE and trans identity (or even knowing someone trans re: alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson) could become a major threat to the left.
Work Cited
Against Psychopolitics – Michael Parenti
FBI Readies New War on Trans People – Ken Klippenstein
What are “Nihilistic Violent Extremists”? – Ken Klippenstein