Donald Trump is the lightning rod for America's Libido
And not in a sexy way
People like to explain political movements in economic or ideological terms. Trump’s rise, for instance, gets framed as a reaction to economic precarity, globalization, or political correctness. There’s some truth to that, but it doesn’t quite get at why people feel so strongly about him.
Because that’s the real question. Trump isn’t just supported, he’s desired. His followers don’t just believe in him. They enjoy him; and that enjoyment isn’t rational, it’s visceral.
That’s why the usual contradictions don’t matter. His policies don’t really help his base. His personal history goes against their supposed values. He contradicts himself constantly. None of it sticks. Because the appeal isn’t about logic, it’s about libidinal energy.
Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of libidinal economy helps explain this. Politics isn’t just about policy or rational interests. It’s about desire, about energy flows, about emotional investments that don’t always make sense. Trump is a perfect example. He doesn’t offer people a coherent vision, he offers them a feeling. Excitement. Rage. Catharsis. A sense of breaking the rules, of transgression.
That’s why his rallies feel more like Wrestlemania or Lollapalooza than a political event. His words matter less than the charge in the room. The spectacle is the point. His base gets a thrill from his unpredictability, even when it actively works against them. It’s the same kind of energy that drives movements built on spectacle—where being part of it matters more than the outcome.
This ties into the Lacanian idea of jouissance. The word in French means “enjoyment,” or “pleasure.” But as Lacan described it, isn’t just pleasure, but an excessive kind of enjoyment, sometimes even painful or self-destructive. Trump’s appeal isn’t just that he fights the establishment. It’s that he lets his followers enjoy the fight. The chaos, the rule-breaking, the endless outrage cycle, is intoxicating.
And that’s the thing: politics isn’t just about governance. It’s about affect. People don’t always vote based on their best interests. They vote for what feels right. What excites them. What scratches an itch. Trump understands this in a way that traditional politicians don’t. He knows how to hook people, how to make them feel something deep in their gut.
This isn’t new. History is full of political figures who succeeded not because of their policies but because they knew how to channel energy, how to become a focal point for people’s frustrations and fantasies. Mussolini didn’t rise to power just because he had a coherent economic or military strategy. He rose because he tapped into the anger of an Italian public that felt humiliated after World War I. He took their wounded national pride, and turned it into a spectacle—bold speeches, dramatic gestures, a vision of restored greatness. He didn’t govern through policy so much as through performance.
Hitler followed a similar path. The Treaty of Versailles had left Germany economically broken and psychologically wounded. More than a set of political solutions, Hitler offered Germans a narrative—one where they were victims of betrayal, where their suffering had been orchestrated by internal enemies, and where he, personally, was the force of reckoning that would set things right. His speeches were less about governance and more about catharsis. He didn’t just tell people what they wanted to hear—he let them feel what they wanted to feel: righteous anger, defiance, the intoxicating promise of revenge.
These figures weren’t thinkers or administrators in the traditional sense. They weren’t great reformers. What they did was absorb and reflect the emotions of their time. They took resentment, humiliation, and fear and turned them into movement. They gave people something to be part of, something that made suffering feel meaningful.
This is what Trump taps into. Not in the same way or on the same scale, but through the same basic mechanics. The logic of his movement isn’t about governing effectively—it’s about channeling frustration into spectacle. People don’t follow him because he has clear plans for their future. They follow him because he lets them enjoy their anger, their defiance, their sense of belonging in a battle against enemies—real or imagined.
If you’re trying to understand Trump—or any figure like him—you have to look beyond demographic changes and economic breakdowns. You have to ask: What are people getting out of this? Because it’s not just about winning or losing. Sometimes, people don’t just want progress, security, or justice.
Sometimes, they just want to feel something.
The Democratic Party has spent years misreading the moment, believing that voters—especially Trump’s base—want stability or security when what they actually want is momentum. Trumpism doesn’t function like traditional politics; it’s not about securing long-term benefits for his supporters. It’s about giving them a continuous sense of motion, of shaking things up, of striking back at an ever-changing list of enemies.
Democrats keep assuming that Trump’s voters will eventually realize he’s not delivering for them materially. That his tax cuts didn’t help the working class. That his trade policies didn’t bring back manufacturing. That he’s openly corrupt, lining his own pockets while pretending to fight for the common man. That his deportation policies will mean that eventually one day ICE will come for them or their loved ones. But his supporters already know this, at least on some level. And they don’t care. What matters is that he feels like he’s fighting, like he’s causing pain to the people they’ve been told are responsible for their problems—whether it’s DEI consultants, immigrants, China, or the amorphous blob of “the left.” They’re not looking for a better life in the conventional sense; they’re looking for a more satisfying fight.
The Democratic Party cannot seem to engage with this emotional economy, partly because their own base is fractured by identity-driven coalition politics. Different factions within the party are focused on different kinds of justice—racial justice, gender justice, economic justice—but these don’t always unify into a single, shared grievance. The result is a party that sounds more like a committee meeting than a movement. There’s no singular target for its anger, no simple, visceral enemy that can hold the whole coalition together.
In a more rational world, the obvious enemy would be the billionaire class. Decades of wage stagnation, corporate consolidation, and financial speculation have made life more precarious for nearly everyone outside the top 1%. A coherent populist movement would direct America’s rage toward the ultra-wealthy—the people who actually hold power, who actually rig the system. But Democrats can’t make that case with full force, because their campaigns rely on money from those very billionaires. They try to play both sides, offering just enough economic rhetoric to appeal to working people while making sure their donor base stays comfortable.
The problem wasn’t just that Democrats misunderstood the emotional pull of Trump. It’s that the ticket they put forward, Harris-Walz, embodied the exact opposite. Where Trump radiates a libidinous chaos, grievance, and an unfiltered will to power, the Democratic strategy seemed to be built around sexless competence, stability, and managerial calm. The assumption was that people were exhausted by Trump’s noise, by the instability he brings, and that what they wanted was a return to order.
But this misreads the moment entirely. People are exhausted, yes—but exhaustion doesn’t always lead to a desire for stability. Sometimes it leads to a desire to burn it all down, or at least to be entertained while everything crumbles. The Democrats’ play for rationality missed the deeper truth: people don’t just want to be governed well, they want to feel something. They want politics to hit them in the gut, in the loins. Trump’s nonsense about “they’re eating the dogs” might be totally detached from reality and meaningless as a basis for policy (truly, I think he stands for nothing but his own aggrandizement), but it delivers an image, a feeling. It makes people laugh or recoil or rage. Meanwhile, Harris and Walz, for all their competence, came across as bloodless, sexless, the kind of people who would draft a carefully worded statement about the importance of democracy while their enemies burn down the house around them.
And the problem runs deeper than just one election cycle. Gerontocracy had already sucked the life out of the Democratic Party by 2024. Biden, whatever his strengths, had come to symbolize a party run by the old, for the old. But he was just the most visible symptom of a deeper problem. Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful figures in the party, was 84 and still wielding influence. Dianne Feinstein, rather than retiring, had died in office at 90, her final years marked by visible cognitive decline and increasing detachment from the demands of her position. The Democratic Party had become, quite literally, a party of the elderly—out of touch, slow-moving, and incapable of matching the raw, feral energy of Trump.
Harris-Walz was meant to signal a generational shift, but it fell into the same trap: If both Trump and Harris were at a party, and you had to bet on which one would get laid by the end of the night only the most virginal wonks would put money on Harris. She might be better for the country, but Trump—bloated, ridiculous, unhinged—has the libido of a man who wants to fuck, who needs to fuck, and that feeling is infectious to people who are tired of feeling impotent. And Dems wonder why young men are turning Republican…
The closest the Democrats came to anything resembling potency in the election cycle was, oddly enough, Tim Walz calling Trump and his cabal “weird.” It wasn’t much, but it worked in a way that most focus-grouped Democratic messaging didn’t. It tapped into a well of visceral frustration that a lot of regular Americans—people exhausted by the relentless absurdity of the MAGA movement—already felt. There was something satisfying about having a major political figure just flatly state what most people already knew: that the whole Trump circus, from the gold-plated gaudy aesthetics to the rage-baiting frenetic rants, is fundamentally bizarre.
Then there was Walz again, describing Elon Musk hopping around at a Trump rally as “jumping around like a dipshit.” It wasn’t soaring rhetoric, but it was effective. It had the blunt force of schoolyard mockery, the kind of thing Trump himself might say if the roles were reversed. In its own way, it mirrored Trump’s crude but effective bullying style, cutting through the usual politeness of Democratic messaging.
The problem was that these moments were few and far between, and crucially, they were still only reactions to Trump and his orbit. They didn’t generate any real momentum of their own—they just acknowledged, however mockingly, the gravitational pull of Trump’s libidinal force. Even at their most biting, Democrats were still orbiting around him, reinforcing his central position as the defining figure of American politics.
Since the election (unless the entire media ecosystem is somehow deceiving me — unlikely, given my political leanings) that dynamic hasn’t changed. The Democrats still haven’t figured out how to muster any libido from the grievance or frustration of either their base or the broader American public. There’s been no meaningful, visceral confrontation with Trump’s libido. The only moment that even came close was the image of Gavin Newsom confronting Trump on the tarmac during a presidential visit to California. Trump had been ignoring Newsom’s calls during a national disaster, and Newsom used the opportunity to get in Trump’s face. But even that moment, striking as it was, was fleeting. It didn’t turn into a broader shift in strategy. It was a rare flash of emotion in a party that still seems committed to governing like a group of school principals trying to reason with a mob of kids who just want to see a fight.
And this is the real issue: the Democrats don’t understand the importance of aesthetic performance in channeling libidinal energy. Politics isn’t just about policy—it’s about spectacle, image, and the feeling that something is happening. Trump understands this instinctively. After surviving an assassination attempt he pumped his fist in the air, and turned the moment into a cinematic scene of defiance. Whether people loved him or hated him, they felt something. Compare that to the Democrats insane kneeling in kente cloth back after the George Floyd protests in 2020—a moment that was meant to be symbolic but landed as hollow and performative, the political equivalent of a boardroom diversity training seminar.
Despite the brutal loss in 2024, the Democratic Party still refuses to absorb the lesson. Rather than seeking out younger, hungrier leadership that could actually inspire people, they continue to sideline figures who carry the kind of passion and energy that could challenge Trump’s appeal. Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 35, one of the few figures in the party who actually commands attention when she speaks. She is sharp, confrontational, and, crucially, libidinous in the way all great politicians are—she doesn’t just present policies; she sells them. People either love her or hate her, but they feel something.
Her libido, her sexuality, her desire to make you feel something is perfectly displayed in her unapologetic use of red lipstick. Maligned by the right and the subject of think-piece after think-piece about self expression on the left, AOC’s lipstick is a display of exactly the kind of libido the Democratic party can’t seem to discover anywhere else. Red lipstick has long been associated with sexuality, rebellion, and power; it signals intensity, attraction, and a refusal to be ignored. In politics, where women are often pressured to soften their image to appear more palatable, Ocasio-Cortez’s unapologetic embrace of a bold un-ignorable sexual self-presentation is exactly the kind of life force the Democratic Party is desperately lacking.
And yet, when the time came to appoint new leadership to key positions, the party passed her over for the Oversight Committee, ensuring that another dynamic, young figure would be kept at arm’s length. The message was clear: the party would rather lose quietly than fight loudly.
The reality couldn’t be clearer: The left, burdened by coalition politics and beholden to billionaire donors, has no idea how to channel this energy. And so they keep losing to someone who does.
This is how they lose. The right offers its voters catharsis, a constant rush of aggression and retribution. The left offers a balancing act, a carefully managed coalition where nobody’s anger is allowed to be too disruptive. One side channels libidinal energy. The other side manages it. And people who feel impotent in the face of overwhelming challenges don’t want careful management; they want release.
So long as the left refuses to acknowledge the role of emotion, spectacle, and raw grievance in contemporary politics, it will keep showing up to a gunfight with a rulebook. And it will keep losing to people who understand that, in politics today, feeling right is more powerful than being right.