Show Notes
In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults, mapped those profiles against their political affiliations and views of Donald Trump, and published what he found in the Journal of Research in Personality. The results did not reveal what most people expected. The common assumption is that Trump supporters lack empathy, that something is missing, that there is a deficit or a gap where the ability to recognize and respond to suffering should be. That assumption is wrong, and what Neumann actually found is considerably worse. Trump supporters are not blind to your pain. They can see it perfectly well. They enjoy it.
The Three Dimensions of Empathy Understanding what Neumann’s data shows requires understanding that empathy is not a single capacity. It is at least three distinct psychological processes, each operating through different neural pathways, each measurable independently, and each telling a different story about how a person relates to the suffering of others. Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand what another person is feeling. It is a perceptual skill, closer to reading comprehension than to emotional experience. A person with high cognitive empathy can look at someone’s face and know they are in pain. They can read body language, vocal tone, and social cues with accuracy. Cognitive empathy does not require caring about what you perceive. It only requires perceiving it. Psychopaths typically score high on cognitive empathy. They are excellent at reading people. That is often what makes them effective manipulators. They can see exactly what you are feeling. They simply do not care. Affective empathy is the capacity to feel what another person feels. It is the process by which observing someone else’s pain produces a corresponding emotional response in your own nervous system. When you see someone stub their toe and you wince, that is affective empathy. When a child cries and your chest tightens, that is affective empathy. It is automatic, involuntary, and operates below the level of conscious decision-making. Affective empathy is what makes cruelty feel wrong. It is the internal alarm that fires when you witness suffering, the signal that tells your brain that what is happening to that person matters. Without it, the suffering of others is neutral information, the way a stock ticker is neutral to someone with no money in the market. Dissonant empathy is the third dimension, and it is the one that changes everything. Dissonant empathy is not the absence of a response to another person’s pain. It is the presence of the wrong response. A person with high dissonant empathy sees suffering and experiences pleasure. The signal fires, but it fires in the wrong direction. Where affective empathy produces discomfort at the sight of someone in pain, dissonant empathy produces satisfaction. This is not sadism in the clinical sense, though the overlap is significant. Dissonant empathy describes a specific empathic inversion: the neural architecture for responding to others’ emotional states is intact and functional, but the valence is reversed. Pain in others registers as reward in the observer.
What Neumann Found Neumann and his co-author Darlene Ngo surveyed over 9,000 American adults across two national samples, one collected before the pandemic and one during it. They measured a comprehensive battery of personality traits, empathy dimensions, and political attitudes, including favorability toward Donald Trump. Three findings emerged that, taken together, paint a portrait of a political base that is psychologically distinct from the general population in ways that go far beyond policy disagreement. First, Trump supporters scored the same as everyone else on cognitive empathy. They can read the room. They can see what you are feeling. They understand facial expressions, social cues, an
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There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.