People like to explain political movements in economic or ideological terms. Trump’s rise, for instance, gets framed as a reaction to economic precarity, globalization, or political correctness. There’s some truth to that, but it doesn’t quite get at why people feel so strongly about him.

Because that’s the real question. Trump isn’t just supported, he’s desired. His followers don’t just believe in him. They enjoy him; and that enjoyment isn’t rational, it’s visceral.

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That’s why the usual contradictions don’t matter. His policies don’t really help his base. His personal history goes against their supposed values. He contradicts himself constantly. None of it sticks. Because the appeal isn’t about logic, it’s about libidinal energy.

Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of libidinal economy helps explain this. Politics isn’t just about policy or rational interests. It’s about desire, about energy flows, about emotional investments that don’t always make sense. Trump is a perfect example. He doesn’t offer people a coherent vision, he offers them a feeling. Excitement. Rage. Catharsis. A sense of breaking the rules, of transgression.

That’s why his rallies feel more like Wrestlemania or Lollapalooza than a political event. His words matter less than the charge in the room. The spectacle is the point. His base gets a thrill from his unpredictability, even when it actively works against them. It’s the same kind of energy that drives movements built on spectacle—where being part of it matters more than the outcome.

This ties into the Lacanian idea of jouissance. The word in French means “enjoyment,” or “pleasure.” But as Lacan described it, isn’t just pleasure, but an excessive kind of enjoyment, sometimes even painful or self-destructive. Trump’s appeal isn’t just that he fights the establishment. It’s that he lets his followers enjoy the fight. The chaos, the rule-breaking, the endless outrage cycle, is intoxicating.

And that’s the thing: politics isn’t just about governance. It’s about affect. People don’t always vote based on their best interests. They vote for what feels right. What excites them. What scratches an itch. Trump understands this in a way that traditional politicians don’t. He knows how to hook people, how to make them feel something deep in their gut.

This isn’t new. History is full of political figures who succeeded not because of their policies but because they knew how to channel energy, how to become a focal point for people’s frustrations and fantasies. Mussolini didn’t rise to power just because he had a coherent economic or military strategy. He rose because he tapped into the anger of an Italian public that felt humiliated after World War I. He took their wounded national pride, and turned it into a spectacle—bold speeches, dramatic gestures, a vision of restored greatness. He didn’t govern through policy so much as through performance.

Hitler followed a similar path. The Treaty of Versailles had left Germany economically broken and psychologically wounded. More than a set of political solutions, Hitler offered Germans a narrative—one where they were victims of betrayal, where their suffering had been orchestrated by internal enemies, and where he, personally, was the force of reckoning that would set things right. His speeches were less about governance and more about catharsis. He didn’t just tell people what they wanted to hear—he let them feel what they wanted to feel: righteous anger, defiance, the intoxicating promise of revenge.

These figures weren’t thinkers or administrators in the traditional sense. They weren’t great reformers. What they did was absorb and reflect the emotions of their time. They took resentment, humiliation, and fear and turned them into movement. They gave people something to be part of, something that made suffering feel meaningful.

This is what Trump taps into. Not in the same way or on the same scale, but through the same basic mechanics. The logic of his movement isn’t about governing effectively—it’s about channeling frustration into spectacle. People don’t follow him because he has clear plans for their future. They follow him because he lets them enjoy their anger, their defiance, their sense of belonging in a battle against enemies—real or imagined.

If you’re trying to understand Trump—or any figure like him—you have to look beyond demographic changes and economic breakdowns. You have to ask: What are people getting out of this? Because it’s not just about winning or losing. Sometimes, people don’t just want progress, security, or justice.

Sometimes, they just want to feel something.

The Democratic Party has spent years misreading the moment, believing that voters—especially Trump’s base—want stability or security when what they actually want is momentum. Trumpism doesn’t function like traditional politics; it’s not about securing long-term benefits for his supporters. It’s about giving them a continuous sense of motion, of shaking things up, of striking back at an ever-changing list of enemies.

Democrats keep assuming that Trump’s voters will eventually realize he’s not delivering for them materially. That his tax cuts didn’t help the working class. That his trade policies didn’t bring back manufacturing. That he’s openly corrupt, lining his own pockets while pretending to fight for the common man. That his deportation policies will mean that eventually one day ICE will come for them or their loved ones. But his supporters already know this, at least on some level. And they don’t care. What matters is that he feels like he’s fighting, like he’s causing pain to the people they’ve been told are responsible for their problems—whether it’s DEI consultants, immigrants, China, or the amorphous blob of “the left.” They’re not looking for a better life in the conventional sense; they’re looking for a more satisfying fight.

The Democratic Party cannot seem to engage with this emotional economy, partly because their own base is fractured by identity-driven coalition politics. Different factions within the party are focused on different kinds of justice—racial justice, gender justice, economic justice—but these don’t always unify into a single, shared grievance. The result is a party that sounds more like a committee meeting than a movement. There’s no singular target for its anger, no simple, visceral enemy that can hold the whole coalition together.

In a more rational world, the obvious enemy would be the billionaire class. Decades of wage stagnation, corporate consolidation, and financial speculation have made life more precarious for nearly everyone outside the top 1%. A coherent populist movement would direct America’s rage toward the ultra-wealthy—the people who actually hold power, who actually rig the system. But Democrats can’t make that case with full force, because their campaigns rely on money from those very billionaires. They try to play both sides, offering just enough economic rhetoric to appeal to working people while making sure their donor base stays comfortable.

The problem wasn’t just that Democrats misunderstood the emotional pull of Trump. It’s that the ticket they put forward, Harris-Walz, embodied the exact opposite. Where Trump radiates a libidinous chaos, grievance, and an unfiltered will to power, the Democratic strategy seemed to be built around sexless competence, stability, and managerial calm. The assumption was that people were exhausted by Trump’s noise, by the instability he brings, and that what they wanted was a return to order.

But this misreads the moment entirely. People are exhausted, yes—but exhaustion doesn’t always lead to a desire for stability. Sometimes it leads to a desire to burn it all down, or at least to be entertained while everything crumbles. The Democrats’ play for rationality missed the deeper truth: people don’t just want to be governed well, they want to feel something. They want politics to hit them in the gut, in the loins. Trump’s nonsense about “they’re eating the dogs” might be totally detached from reality and meaningless as a basis for policy (truly, I think he stands for nothing but his own aggrandizement), but it delivers an image, a feeling. It makes people laugh or recoil or rage. Meanwhile, Harris and Walz, for all their competence, came across as bloodless, sexless, the kind of people who would draft a carefully worded statement about the importance of democracy while their enemies burn down the house around them.

And the problem runs deeper than just one election cycle. Gerontocracy had already sucked the life out of the Democratic Party by 2024. Biden, whatever his strengths, had come to symbolize a party run by the old, for the old. But he was just the most visible symptom of a deeper problem. Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful figures in the party, was 84 and still wielding influence. Dianne Feinstein, rather than retiring, had died in office at 90, her final years marked by visible cognitive decline and increasing detachment from the demands of her position. The Democratic Party had become, quite literally, a party of the elderly—out of touch, slow-moving, and incapable of matching the raw, feral energy of Trump.

Harris-Walz was meant to signal a generational shift, but it fell into the same trap: If both Trump and Harris were at a party, and you had to bet on which one would get laid by the end of the night only the most virginal wonks wou