Psychiatrist on Trump Fantasy of Bombing Protestors with Feces
“We would not put a literal toddler in charge of the nation; why would we a functional one?”
Shortly after this month’s No Kings protests – which involved an estimated 7 million people, making it the largest one-day protest in American history – President Trump released an AI-generated video on Truth Social, depicting himself zooming over crowds in a fighter jet, wearing a crown, and drenching peaceful protesters in liquid excrement.
This was rich material for Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatrist, expert on psychopathology and editor of the best-selling 2017 book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” and subsequent editions (and now, “The Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 50 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew,” published in May 2025.) She analyzed his video in her October 20 Substack column. “Commentators remark (if they do at all) that it is ‘shocking’, ‘insane’, and ‘infantile,’” she wrote. But, she continues, “this is not simply child’s play or an ostentatious display.”
In early Freudian analysis, feces are “associated with the ‘anal stage,’ in which the zone of fixation is the anus, and the focus of development is “control, autonomy, and self-exertion,” Lee notes. In the psychosexual stages of development described by Freud, the anal stage takes place in years one to three, in which toddlers are fascinated with their own feces. Since they come from the toddler’s own body, Lee writes, feces are an early symbol of power – whether as a “gift” to their parents or a punishment: “Expelling waste can symbolize violence and aggression toward others through a wish to dirty or degrade them. ‘Anal-expulsive’ personalities thus tend to be aggressive, defiant, and antisocial.”
Such fixations are completely normal “at the appropriate stage of development,” she writes, but when they’re present later in life, it suggests someone is ‘stuck’ in that stage for reasons that might include abuse, neglect or other misfortunes. In that case, such fixations “can indicate pathology.…(and a) buildup of rage, which now seeks expression with revenge.”
“And as reality fails – as it always does – to meet the infantile fantasies of unlimited control, total dominance, and utter destruction of the world that has failed him, the buildup of fury only grows,” Lee wrote. “This is why ‘dictators’ who are most commonly wounded at the anal stage are so effective at mobilizing those who are similarly developmentally wounded, and equally effective at similarly wounding the world, in vengeance for what they did not receive in childhood.”
She concludes: “The better we understand what we are facing, the more swiftly we will be able to find solutions. We would not put a literal toddler in charge of the nation; why would we a functional one?”
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