Parents call toddlers tyrants, and for good reason. They rule by appetite and tantrum, and their subjects—us—live in permanent negotiation with irrational power. My youngest has long since graduated from diapers, but when I saw Donald Trump’s AI-generated video of himself in a fighter jet dumping excrement on peaceful American protesters, I was instantly transported back to the glory days before my children had learned the basic courtesies of self-restraint.
It’s one thing when a two-year-old can’t keep it in the nappy. It’s quite another when the supposed leader of the free world seemingly can’t either. Unsurprisingly, major media outlets rushed to tidy up the mess—suggesting, with touching optimism, that the jet might have been dumping “sludge”. Really? The scatological reference was lost on no one. This was Trump’s psyche rendered in CGI: the omnipotent toddler taking revenge on a world that dares tell him “no”.
Freud can help us here—unfashionable, I know, but occasionally still right on the nose. Civilisation, he wrote, begins with sphincter control. The toilet-training of the infant—that painful initiation into restraint, delay and self-command—is our first rehearsal for living among others. It is the moment when impulse meets limit, when instinct encounters law. From this bodily discipline, Freud argued, morality, reason, and empathy are born.
Trump’s defecating fighter jet is an emblem of a man—and a movement—in revolt against all that. If civilisation is the transformation of brute impulse into the symbolic order of law, then Trumpism conjures its opposite: a fantasy of excretion without consequence, of the unfiltered id released from every restraint. The ruler soars above the rest of us, annihilating boundaries between public and private, dignity and disgrace.
Those who get hung-up at the toilet-training stage, Freud wrote, develop an “anal character”. While some become the familiar “retentive” type that hoards and controls; others become the “expulsive” type who rebels and defiles. Obsessed with filth and the thrill of domination, the expulsive personality takes joy in using their own unchecked eruptions to degrade others. It’s hardly a stretch to see Trump’s compulsive need to “say what others are too afraid to say”, his verbal emissions and digital ejaculations, as following this pattern. Here is a man who dominates not by persuasion, but by discharge.
Freud warned that civilisation’s demand for discipline and self-restraint breeds profound resentment. Like many autocrats before him, Trump has turned that resentment into a politics of regression—or excretion, if you will. More than merely presenting his pollution of the public sphere as proof of virility, he invites his followers to regress alongside him. His crudity and shamelessness become their liberation, their catharsis, their revenge.
The promise of a return to lost innocence—so central to the authoritarian imagination—is this same regression by another name. It’s the fantasy of going back to a time when… well, you fill in the blanks: boys could be boys, black people and women knew their place, and “we” could still get away with shit. The authoritarian thus promises a return to the pre-civilised self: before shame and self-control, before the tedious renunciations that are required to play nice.
Yet regression doesn’t abolish authority—it rediscovers it in cruder form. Fantasies of extreme disorder conceal a hunger for absolute control. It is no coincidence that a world reduced to tantrum and filth cries out for a stern parent to impose order. Trump plays both roles—inviting chaos, while styling himself as the only figure macho enough to tame it. The permanent mess he foments—moral, political, psychological—keeps all-powerful Donny indispensable. Indeed, Trump released another AI-created video in response to the “No Kings” protests. This one showed his presidency stretching infinitely into the future and ended with the words: “Trump 4 Eva”.
Freud warned that when the sublimation of instinct fails, what follows is not freedom but ruin. The id, once unleashed, does not build; it soils. And a more disorderly, id-driven world is not only shittier but also often bloodier—for when other-regarding self-restraint, the very pillar of civilisation, gives way, all bodily substances flow more freely.
Freud’s bleak insight was that there is no stable solution to the conflict between instinct and civilisation. That’s why the work of sublimation is hard and unending. Trumpism celebrates its undoing. It glorifies the infantile, the impulsive, the unmediated. It asks us to join in a national regression—to believe that restraint is hypocrisy, that decency is weakness, that to grow up is to sell out. And so the meme that aimed only to tease and enrage comes to echo Freud’s dark diagnosis, reminding us that the return of the repressed, at scale, brings nothing but wreckage.
