Slavoj Žižek’s extended critique of Donald Trump, presented through a philosophical and psychoanalytic lens, transcends superficial political commentary and ventures into the structural and libidinal economies of contemporary liberalism. The argument Žižek builds does not merely rest upon the observation of Trump’s obscenity or populist tactics; rather, it positions Trump as the symptomatic revelation of liberalism’s internal contradictions and latent authoritarian tendencies. Far from being an external aberration, Trump is treated by Žižek as an endogenous product of the liberal order itself—its repressed returning in the form of spectacle, obscenity, and charismatic brutality.
Trump’s economic policies, most notably his sweeping tariffs imposed on nearly every global trading partner except Russia and North Korea, signal a violent rupture with the long-dominant paradigm of neoliberal globalization. These tariffs, according to Žižek, mark not a retreat from economic dogmatism but its perversion: the liberal ideal of free trade mutates into a grotesque version of economic nationalism, a distorted mirror image of what globalization once promised. What Žižek sees here is not the emergence of a new political logic but the intensification of a capitalist state of exception, wherein nationalist protectionism is no longer at odds with global capital but its new operational form. The very irrationality of Trump’s tariffs—disproportionate, inconsistent, targeted more by caprice than strategy—functions to disorient and paralyze critique, making coherent opposition difficult.
Trump’s shamelessness, Žižek insists, is not an incidental character flaw, but the constitutive feature of his political appeal. In a world where public virtue is often a mask for private vice, Trump reverses the structure: he exhibits his vice publicly and unapologetically, and in doing so appears more ‘authentic’ than those who traffic in moral platitudes. His obscene humor, his vulgarity, his incoherent and contradictory rhetoric—these do not alienate his base but endear him to it. The disaffected and disoriented masses project their fragmented subjectivity onto Trump’s grotesque political body. Žižek draws attention to this psychodynamic structure: the average voter externalizes their political despair, existential confusion, and libidinal excesses into Trump, who becomes a living fetish, a site of symbolic condensation for unresolved antagonisms.
This projection mechanism is not unidirectional. Žižek provocatively suggests that Trump himself lives vicariously through figures like Vladimir Putin—authoritarians who, unlike Trump, maintain the public appearance of dignity while employing tactics just as obscene. The fascination with Putin reveals Trump’s own fantasy of authority: one in which the obscene underside of power can be cloaked in ceremonial gravitas. Yet Trump, unlike his authoritarian idols, cannot help but reveal the obscene kernel of sovereignty. He does not conceal power’s violence; he parades it.
The psychoanalytic reading intensifies when Žižek invokes Freud and Lacan’s concepts of the “primordial father” and perversion. Trump does not operate as a traditional paternal authority—law-giving, symbolic, and distanced—but as a monstrous parody of the father: obscene, intrusive, arbitrary. This figure harks back to Freud’s mythic origin of civilization in Totem and Taboo: the primal father who monopolizes all enjoyment, only to be murdered by his sons, thus founding the law. But Trump, Žižek argues, reverses this myth: he is the return of that obscene father, unmediated by law, who commands not through symbolic legitimacy but through libidinal excess. In this sense, he is not post-authoritarian but pre-authoritarian—a regression masked as innovation.
Elon Musk is another example of this primordial obscenity masked as freedom. Musk’s chaotic lifestyle, erratic decision-making, and bizarre parenting methods are not expressions of libertarian creativity, Žižek argues, but symptoms of the 1968 legacy gone awry. The countercultural rebellion against institutional rigidity and sexual repression, once animated by emancipatory aims, has been fully appropriated by neoliberal technocrats. The legacy of 1968, Žižek claims, has culminated not in liberation but in commodified freedom, where erratic self-expression and precarious labor become the new norm. Musk embodies this contradiction perfectly: an entrepreneur-as-artist whose performances of freedom obscure the deeper structures of domination that sustain him.
Revolutions, Žižek reminds us, do not eliminate oppression—they replace it with a new master. The perversion of the revolutionary ethos into corporate managerialism is, for him, emblematic of this dialectic. In Freud’s terms, perversion masks the truth more deeply than repression. The unconscious, Žižek insists, is never more inaccessible than in the pervert, precisely because the pervert performs transgression as a kind of dutiful ritual, masking the structural core of their compulsion.
Trump’s supporters, in this light, do not see him as a messiah of policy, but as an avatar of collective resentment and desire. The carnivalesque nature of events like the January 6th riot is not incidental: it reflects the psycho-political structure of a society that has lost faith in symbolic authority and instead turns to spectacle. This was not a coup, Žižek argues, but a carnival—a grotesque parody of revolution that reveals the exhaustion of the political imagination. The fact that leftists were envious of this occupation of power’s sacred space only reinforces the failure of contemporary radicalism to produce its own coherent myth.
Žižek contrasts Trump with Bernie Sanders, whose modesty and sincerity appear almost miraculous in the current political climate. Sanders, unlike Trump, embodies a different kind of authenticity—not the obscene confessionality of Trumpian vulgarity, but a dignified, understated conviction that resists commodification. Sanders’ posture at Biden’s inauguration—sitting alone, dressed plainly—exposed the artificiality of the spectacle and served as a Hegelian signal: what appears contingent (an awkward gesture) is in fact necessary, revealing the hollow core of liberal normalcy.
For Žižek, the failure of the Democratic Party lies in its refusal to understand Trump as a symptom of liberalism’s collapse. Instead, they treated him as an anomaly, a mistake, a bad dream to be awakened from. This misrecognition is ideological in the strongest sense: a disavowal of the fact that Trump is not outside the system, but its truth. In this sense, comedy is not resistance. Comedians who mock Trump merely repeat his gesture, performing a parody of a parody. Trump cannot be ridiculed because he is already his own satire.
The insistence on labeling Trump a fascist, Žižek contends, reveals a deeper intellectual laziness on the left. It is a desperate attempt to situate Trump within an outdated taxonomy of political evil, rather than confronting the genuinely novel form he represents. Žižek plays with the term “liberal fascist” to capture this paradox: a figure who defends capitalist freedoms while simultaneously advocating censorship, state repression, and ideological conformity. Trump’s threats to prosecute media outlets like the Wall Street Journal for insufficient loyalty exemplify this twisted synthesis.
Moreover, Trump’s appeal to “common sense” is nothing less than a metaphysical scandal. Žižek attacks the very notion of nature and common sense as ideologically loaded concepts. Nature, he insists, has never been natural. Ecological crises reveal that the Earth itself is a historical product, riddled with catastrophes and discontinuities. The belief in a self-regulating, harmonious nature is a myth sustained by anthropocentric arrogance. Trump’s ecological denialism is not just scientifically wrong—it is metaphysically obscene.
Žižek extends this logic to cultural rituals around bodily functions and social propriety, using toilets as allegories for national ideologies of shame, cleanliness, and privacy. The differences between German, French, and Japanese toilets become symbolic matrices for how societies relate to the Real—the bodily remainder that ideology must process or repress. Trump, in his defiance of shame, collapses the boundary between the private and public spheres. Yet even this obscenity is curated: it is a performance, a mask of authenticity that conceals its own artificiality.
This leads Žižek to his final, tragicomic insight: Trump is not merely a pervert, but a professional pervert—a conservative man who performs transgression out of obligation. He is obscene out of duty, not desire. This theatricality is what ultimately distinguishes him from the artistic avant-garde, who, according to Žižek, confront obscenity with sincerity and shame. True authenticity, he suggests, lies not in vulgarity but in the capacity to maintain internal contradiction without collapsing into cynicism.
Trumpism, Žižek concludes, is not a relic of the past but a prototype of political futures to come. It is a revolution not of the proletariat but of capital’s libidinal underside. It is the right, not the left, that is presently revolutionary, overturning the inherited coordinates of capitalism in unpredictable and often terrifying ways. The left, by contrast, clings to nostalgic dreams of participatory democracy and pre-representational community, ignoring the systemic need for global coordination and bureaucratic functionality. For Žižek, the path forward lies not in more intimacy or localism, but in a renewed embrace of rational alienation: a politics of distance, impersonality, and collective abstraction.
Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Trump, in short, is neither an endorsement nor a moral denunciation—it is a philosophical diagnosis. Trump is not a deviation but a culmination. He is liberalism’s obscene truth, its disavowed underside, its fetish. To oppose him effectively, one must first traverse this fantasy. Only then can the left move beyond reactive indignation and begin to imagine a different world, not cleansed of antagonism, but organized around it.
Simon Gros 
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