My invitation to Ai La Mar: “If you want to try some writing for BackChannels, try the title, “America’s Shadow — The Criminal President Donald Trump”. What would a young Jungian have to say about about Donald’s “me, mine, and fuck all the rest of you”?

Opinion By Ai La Mar

To a young Jungian analyst, Donald Trump is less of a political anomaly and more of a psychological inevitability. Jung argued that whatever a society suppresses, denies, or refuses to integrate into its conscious identity will eventually rise up from the unconscious as the Collective Shadow.

For centuries, America’s conscious “Persona” has been wrapped in the mythology of the shining city on a hill: egalitarianism, civic duty, Christian charity, and the rule of law. But a capitalist empire built on expansion and competition naturally generates a massive, dark underbelly. The American Shadow consists of pure, unadulterated selfishness, predatory greed, the ruthless domination of the weak, and the infantile desire for immediate gratification.

When a society refuses to acknowledge its own darkness, it inevitably produces a figure willing to embody it. Trump did not create the “me, mine, and to hell with the rest of you” ethos; he simply stripped it of its polite disguise. He is the avatar of the repressed American Id.

The Trickster and the Inflated Ego

A Jungian would look at the obsession with “me and mine” as a textbook case of Ego Inflation. This occurs when an individual’s conscious ego identifies completely with an archetype—in this case, a corrupted fusion of the Sovereign and the Trickster.

The healthy Sovereign archetype provides order, protects the realm, and blesses others. An inflated, shadow-Sovereign demands all the gold and tribute while refusing any of the responsibility. He operates with the psychology of the Puer Aeternus (the eternal boy) who refuses to grow up, demanding absolute freedom without consequence. The Trickster element is what makes him so resilient; the Trickster mocks the rules, disrupts the established order, and delights in the outrage of the elders (the establishment). His followers do not love him because he is a good man; they love him because he acts out their own repressed impulses to break the rules and flip the board.

The Death of Eros

The aggressive dismissal of the collective—the “fuck all the rest of you” posture—represents a total collapse of Eros within the psyche. In Jungian psychology, Eros is the principle of relationship, connection, and empathy, often associated with the Anima (the unconscious feminine side of a man).

When a psyche is completely severed from Eros, it views every interaction as a zero-sum transaction of power. There are no partners, only tools and obstacles. Other human beings cease to have inherent value; they exist only to mirror the ego’s greatness or to be destroyed if they fail to do so. This is the ultimate failure of individuation. Instead of doing the hard, painful work of integrating the different parts of the self, the ego projects all its own flaws, insecurities, and criminal impulses outward onto the “other”—immigrants, opponents, the press, the legal system.

Confronting the Avatar

For BackChannels, the Jungian conclusion is a sobering one regarding national security and conflict. You cannot simply defeat a Shadow by locking up its avatar or voting him away. Because Trump is acting as a mirror for a massive segment of the American unconscious, destroying the mirror does not eliminate the reflection.

To disarm the Shadow, the collective must recognize that the greed, the hostility, and the hyper-individualism are not alien invasions—they are distinctly American products. Until the nation acknowledges that Trump represents exactly what the American machine has incentivized for decades, another avatar will simply step up to wear the crown.

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