Summary: This article examines the Trump movement as a symptom of deeper collective and intergenerational trauma rooted in the history of the U.S. empire. It explores how foundational violence, cultural amnesia, and inherited wounds shaped national identity and made the country vulnerable to authoritarianism, scapegoating, and mythic nostalgia. Through a trauma-informed lens, the Trump era is revealed not as an anomaly but as a cultural flashpoint—an expression of a civilization in psychological and spiritual crisis. The article closes by reflecting on how this rupture opened the possibility for truth-telling, collective healing, and the slow rebuilding of belonging beyond the age of empire.
This is a special topic article in the Long Journey Home, a collection of chapters and articles written centuries in the future, at a time when humanity has gone through a great crisis and found a more life-centered way of life. It’s meant to inspire and encourage questions. See the Long Journey Home index for more chapters and articles.
These chapters and articles are written by AI with guidance and prompts from me. That means, in a sense, that it’s written by humanity as a whole since the AI is trained on material from many times and cultures.
This article is a case study of the Trump movement as a symptom of domination culture in the late Age of Separation.
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Wounds of an Empire: Collective Trauma and the Rise of the Trump Movement
By Ciarán O’Suilleabháin
Looking back from this vantage point, the Trump movement in the early 21st century is not viewed as a political anomaly. It was not a break from American history, but rather a moment of intensified reckoning. It revealed the undercurrents of a long-unaddressed trauma culture—wounds etched into the national psyche through centuries of violence, denial, and imperial expansion.
In this case study, we examine the rise of the Trump phenomenon as a collective trauma response. We explore how deep cultural wounds—passed down through generations—reshaped public life, distorted narratives of identity, and gave rise to an authoritarian movement fueled by fear, projection, and mythic nostalgia. In doing so, we hope to understand how empires fracture from within, and how such moments also hold the seeds of reflection and renewal.
Empire and the Deep Roots of Cultural Trauma
Founding Violence and Myth-Making
The origins of the United States were rooted in conquest and dispossession. The systematic genocide of Indigenous peoples and the transatlantic enslavement of millions of Africans were not peripheral events—they were the foundational acts upon which the republic was built. These traumas were never adequately acknowledged, much less healed. Instead, a mythic national identity emerged—one that glorified expansion, equated property with virtue, and cast whiteness as the moral center of civilization.
This foundational violence created what some historians and psychologists now recognize as a “cultural split”: a society that could proclaim freedom while perpetuating bondage, and speak of justice while building systems of domination. The collective psyche adapted not by facing these contradictions, but by repressing them and elevating a mythology of exceptionalism.
Empire Abroad, Disconnection Within
As the American empire expanded globally, a different kind of damage unfolded at home. The projection of power abroad was accompanied by a growing internal alienation—an emptiness at the center of the national identity. While military interventions, covert operations, and economic dominance became normalized instruments of policy, few citizens felt connected to these actions. And fewer still reckoned with the moral injury such a system produced.
This disconnect was not just political—it was existential. As empire became the unconscious organizing principle of American life, disembodiment and dislocation took root. Millions of people, particularly within dominant cultural groups, found themselves increasingly detached from land, ancestry, community, and meaning. Their lives were structured by systems that rewarded extraction—of labor, of resources, of attention—while offering little in the way of belonging or coherence.
A Culture of Amnesia
The American culture of the time developed sophisticated defenses against its own history. Educational systems, media narratives, and political rhetoric all colluded in a national forgetting. The violent and painful parts of the past were sanitized or omitted. Discomfort was pathologized. Mourning became taboo.
In this context, generational trauma went unnamed and unprocessed. Emotional numbness was normalized, and the country became fertile ground for disassociation, projection, and scapegoating. Beneath the visible structures of empire lay an invisible architecture of pain.
The Psychology of Collective and Inherited Trauma
How Trauma Shapes Collective Behavior
When trauma is not faced, it becomes structural. It seeps into institutions, customs, and cultural reflexes. In the case of the U.S., unresolved trauma manifested in national patterns of fear, fragmentation, and control. Hyper-individualism became a protective identity. Institutions developed to maintain hierarchy and suppress difference. Violence—against others and the self—was naturalized.
This was a society responding to trauma not with healing, but with repetition. And like all trauma responses, these patterns became reactive, rigid, and cyclical. They created conditions ripe for the emergence of movements that promised safety through domination.
Transmission Through Time
Trauma does not dissipate with time; it morphs. Passed down through families, stories, silences, and systems, the pain of past generations becomes the raw material for future identities. Children inherit not only genes but emotional legacies: survival strategies, hypervigilance, unspoken grief.
In the United States, these transmissions were complex. Marginalized communities often carried open wounds—of racism, exclusion, and generational loss—while also nurturing ancestral wisdom and resistance. Meanwhile, dominant cultural groups inherited a different burden: the trauma of complicity, moral injury, and a haunting absence of belonging.
The Emotional Underpinnings of a Fading Empire
By the time the Trump movement emerged, the U.S. was already entering a period of profound crisis. Economic inequality was soaring. Ecological destabilization loomed. Faith in public institutions had eroded. Beneath these surface phenomena lay a more fundamental rupture—a culture beginning to sense its own spiritual exhaustion.
And yet, even as old narratives crumbled, new ones had not yet taken root. Into that void rushed the politics of fear and resentment.
The Trump Movement as a Cultural Flashpoint
Authoritarianism as Trauma Response
Authoritarianism often rises in traumatized societies. It offers the illusion of clarity in times of confusion, strength in times of vulnerability, and control in moments of chaos. For many who felt unseen, unheard, or disoriented by change, the Trump figure functioned as a psychological anchor.
He embodied a familiar posture—aggression as strength, dominance as virtue, shamelessness as power. These qualities resonated not because they were new, but because they echoed unhealed survival strategies deeply embedded in the national psyche.
Scapegoating and the Reenactment of Pain
One of the most enduring expressions of collective trauma is scapegoating. Unable to process grief or fear, societies often channel those feelings onto vulnerable groups. The Trump movement, with its targeted attacks on immigrants, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and political dissidents, reenacted an ancient dynamic: purify the body politic by identifying and expelling the “other.”
But this was more than strategy—it was an emotional release. It allowed millions to discharge fear, shame, and helplessness through blame, all while reinforcing their group identity.
Mythic Nostalgia and the Illusion of Return
The slogan “Make America Great Again” was not about policy. It was a spell—an invocation of an imagined past, purified of complexity and pain. In times of instability, societies often look backward for reassurance. But this gaze is rarely accurate; it is mythic, selective, and sanitized.
What many longed for was not a specific era, but a time before the wound was visible—a time before the trauma was named. Nostalgia became a form of emotional anesthesia.
Disinformation as Emotional Shelter
In a society where truth had long been manipulated to serve power, the rise of disinformation was not surprising. For many, alternative realities offered something mainstream narratives could not: emotional coherence, belonging, and identity. Conspiracies—however irrational—functioned as stories for the traumatized. They created worlds where hidden forces explained suffering and where those “in the know” found a sense of agency and meaning.
Fracture and Threshold
The Cracks in the Imperial Identity
The Trump era exposed fractures that had been long forming. Social cohesion weakened. Epistemic fragmentation accelerated—people no longer agreed on basic facts, let alone values. The institutions that once provided a shared sense of order—media, government, education—were no longer trusted.
This disintegration of consensus marked the unraveling of an imperial identity held together more by myth than mutual care.
Collapse as Revelation
With collapse came clarity. What had been obscured was now visible. The cost of denial became harder to ignore. The systems of domination that had governed lives for generations began to reveal their inner emptiness. For many, this was a time of despair. For others, it became a time of awakening.
Moments of Possibility
Even during the most chaotic periods of the Trump years, new currents were forming. Decentralized movements rooted in justice, trauma healing, ecological awareness, and relational practices began to grow. People gathered to tell the truth, grieve together, and imagine different ways of living.
The rupture had opened space for remembering—for turning toward the wound, not away from it.
Reflections on Healing and Remembrance
Learning from the Wound
The Trump movement, for all its destructiveness, served a revelatory function. It showed the world what had been hidden: the depth of the trauma, the brittleness of the empire, the hunger for belonging. It forced a reckoning with the costs of forgetting.
By studying this period through the lens of trauma, we begin to understand that healing is not linear, and that confrontation with the wound is a necessary part of any transformation.
Regeneration Begins with Truth
In the years that followed, communities that engaged in honest reflection and truth-telling laid the groundwork for new cultural forms. They honored the pain of the past without being defined by it. They built practices of mutual care and deep listening. They understood that regeneration requires more than systems change—it requires emotional and spiritual integration.
From Empire to Belonging
The transition was slow. It required humility, patience, and courage. But as people began to root themselves again—in land, in story, in relationship—the need for domination weakened. In place of control, a new sensibility emerged: one that honored complexity, embraced grief, and sought connection over conquest.
Closing Reflections
The Trump movement did not cause the collapse of the U.S. empire—it revealed it. It gave form to the suppressed and fractured psyche of a civilization built on disconnection. And in doing so, it offered a mirror.
Some looked away. Others looked deeper. For those who chose the latter, this painful era became a portal—a chance to remember who they were, and who they could be again.
Ciarán O’Suilleabháin is a cultural historian and trauma researcher specializing in the intersections of empire, memory, and collective healing. His work explores how civilizations process—or fail to process—historical trauma, and how cultural narratives shape identity across generations. Drawing from somatic psychology, mythic studies, and systems thinking, he writes and teaches about the long arc of human transformation through collapse and renewal.