In This Article

• What did the 2025 study reveal about Trump supporters and dark traits?
• How does malevolent behavior tie into authoritarian leadership?
• Why is benevolent behavior disappearing from public life?
• How do cultural and economic systems reward malevolence?
• What can be done to rebuild a more benevolent society?

The Science Behind The Trump Supporter

In July 2025, the Journal of Research in Personality published a study that confirmed what many of us already suspected but were afraid to say out loud: Trump supporters scored significantly higher in malevolent traits—narcissism, callousness, and manipulativeness—than the general population. These aren’t just edgy personality quirks. These are the foundational blocks of moral erosion. They also scored lower on traits like humanism, empathy, and belief in the inherent dignity of others. This is not a distant threat, but a pressing issue that demands our attention and action.

This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about what Trump represents—the permission structure for bad behavior. What was once considered shameful is now a strategic advantage. Voters didn’t just forgive the cruelty; they started to crave it. The insult became the applause line. The lie became the badge of loyalty. The dark triad became a key component of leadership résumés. This societal shift has profound implications for our collective morality and the health of our institutions.

Personality Traits That Eat Civilizations

If you want to understand the psychological rot behind Trump supporters, look no further than what psychologists call “The Dark Triad.” Sounds like a comic book villain group, right? Sadly, it’s worse—it’s real. And it’s everywhere. The Dark Triad refers to three personality traits that, when combined, tend to produce leaders, influencers, and CEOs who rise fast and leave destruction in their wake: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. For instance, a leader high in narcissism might make decisions based on their own ego rather than the well-being of their team. A Machiavellian leader might manipulate others to achieve their goals, and a psychopathic leader might show a lack of empathy towards their employees' struggles.

Narcissism is the grandstanding peacock in the mirror—an inflated sense of self, an endless thirst for admiration, and a chronic allergy to criticism. Machiavellianism is the strategist without a soul—manipulative, deceptive, and obsessed with control. And psychopathy? That’s the absence of empathy, the inability to feel remorse, and the willingness to harm others without a flicker of guilt. Any one of these traits is bad news.

But together, they form a toxic cocktail that poisons institutions, cultures, and relationships alike. And in a system that rewards self-promotion, theatrical cruelty, and shameless ambition, these traits aren’t filtered out—they’re fast-tracked to the top.

What makes the Dark Triad so dangerous is that it's often mistaken for strength. Narcissists come off as confident. Machiavellians look strategic. Psychopaths seem unflappable under pressure. But beneath that façade lies the moral equivalent of black mold—hard to spot at first, but corrosive over time. These aren’t just individual quirks.

They’re system-shaping forces. They rise to power, rewrite the rules in their own image, and normalize the behaviors that would’ve once gotten someone exiled from the village. In today's world, they get elected, promoted, and retweeted. And as they climb, they drag the collective conscience down with them.

The Rise of Malevolent Leadership

Authoritarianism doesn’t need tanks or gulags anymore. It just needs a camera, a social media account, and a moral compass shattered beyond repair. Leaders like Trump didn’t invent malevolent behavior—they just stopped apologizing for it. And in doing so, they told millions of people, “You too can be cruel, callous, and indifferent. Not only will you get away with it—you’ll be celebrated.”

Psychologist Bob Altemeyer’s work on Right-Wing Authoritarianism makes this painfully clear: people with authoritarian leanings aren’t just submissive to power—they’re aggressive toward whoever their leader tells them to hate. Right-Wing Authoritarianism is a psychological profile that describes individuals who are highly obedient to authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and hold traditional values. It’s not a personality bug. It’s a weaponized feature. And once malevolence gets modeled from the top, the decay spreads like rot through floorboards.

Culture’s Silent Surrender

Remember when empathy was aspirational? Now it’s mocked. Remember when public service was about the common good? Now it’s branded and gamified. Our culture has replaced the moral compass with a selfie stick, and the results speak for themselves. Streaming platforms celebrate sociopathy. Reality TV rewards narcissism. News cycles are built around who insulted whom rather than who helped whom.

And if you think the economy is exempt, think again. Late-stage capitalism rewards extraction, not care. Wall Street celebrates quarterly profits squeezed from layoffs, not communities rebuilt. Kindness doesn't scale in a system optimized for clicks and conversions. In fact, it's a liability. Try putting "empathetic" on a corporate résumé and see how far it gets you in an algorithmic hiring queue.

How People Justify Cruelty

Albert Bandura, the father of social cognitive theory, referred to it as “moral disengagement.” It’s the psychological sleight of hand that allows people to commit or condone cruelty while still believing they’re decent. In simpler terms, it's the process of convincing oneself that a cruel action is actually justified or even noble. The trick lies in narrative. You don’t punch a child—you "discipline a future adult." You don’t bomb a village—you "liberate it from tyranny." Wrap it in a flag, drape it in righteousness, and suddenly the indefensible becomes not only defensible, but noble.

Bandura demonstrated how people revise their moral codes in real-time, filtering brutality through a lens of necessity, loyalty, or a divine mission. In a digital age, this process happens faster and louder than ever. Cruelty is no longer hidden; it’s broadcast, liked, retweeted, and monetized. One act of dehumanization becomes a trend. One callous joke becomes a template. We’re not just disengaging morally—we’re outsourcing it to algorithms.

Social dominance theory sharpens the picture. Developed by Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, the theory explains how hierarchies maintain themselves through manufactured myths—stories that justify why some deserve to rule and others to suffer. In this framework, cruelty isn’t a glitch in the system; it’s part of the operating manual.

When society frames compassion as weakness and equates strength with domination, it sets the moral compass in reverse. Think about it: we praise "strong leaders" for being ruthless, yet we mock empathetic ones as soft or naive. Standing up for the vulnerable is cast as "woke." Showing mercy becomes political suicide. The very traits that bind a society together—empathy, solidarity, restraint—get rebranded as threats to order, rather than its foundation.

That’s how malevolence becomes a virtue. It’s not just tolerated; it’s weaponized. It’s folded into national identity, political strategy, and corporate branding. Cruelty gets rewarded with clout, airtime, and sometimes votes. The schoolyard bully grows up to become a pundit. The CEO who lays off thousands becomes a business hero.

The politician who mocks the suffering of others becomes a folk legend among the disaffected. And the rest of us? We scroll past, numb to the sting. That’s the final stage of moral disengagement—not just doing harm, but learning to feel nothing while watching it unfold. 

When Trump Gave the Green Light

There’s a moment in every decaying society when the unspoken becomes spoken, when what once hid behind polite smiles and euphemisms marches boldly into the town square. For America, that moment came not with policy, but with posture. Donald Trump didn’t invent narcissism, callousness, or deceit. What he did was far more consequential: he made them acceptable. Even admirable.

Before Trump, people who held racist, sexist, or authoritarian views still felt some pressure to cloak them in civility. There were consequences—social, professional, even electoral—for being openly cruel. But Trump shattered that thin veneer. He mocked the disabled, degraded women, vilified immigrants, and called for political violence—and then he got applauded for it. Worse, he got elected. And that told millions of people exactly what they’d been waiting to hear: you can be your worst self now. It’s okay. You’ve got cover from the top.

This is what psychologists refer to as a “permission structure.” When a figure of authority behaves in a norm-violating way and incurs no consequences—or better yet, receives rewards—it signals to followers that such behaviors are now permissible. Bob Altemeyer’s research into authoritarianism shows that once the leader defines cruelty as necessary or noble, followers not only accept it—they amplify it. Trump didn’t just open the floodgates; he installed a megaphone on every one of them.

That’s how malevolent behavior goes viral. It gets modeled, legitimized, and then embedded into everyday life. What was once whispered becomes a rallying cry. Suddenly, cruelty is seen as strength, lying is “strategy,” and empathy is for losers. That’s not just a political problem—it’s a moral inversion. And it’s central to understanding how the American mind got junkified.

Why It Matters Now

Here’s the real danger: when benevolence disappears, systems don’t just grow colder—they fall apart. A society built on suspicion, selfishness, and spectacle cannot sustain itself. Families fragment when empathy vanishes from the dinner table. Communities crumble when neighborliness is replaced by gated suspicion. Democracies rot when compromise is seen as betrayal and leadership is measured by cruelty. And economies? They become cannibalistic—devouring labor, dignity, and even the future just to feed next quarter’s profits. When malevolence becomes the default operating system, nothing sacred survives—not trust, not truth, not even the idea of a common good. The result isn’t strength. It’s collapsed with a confident grin.

In a healthy society, we teach our children the values of mutual aid, shared sacrifice, and respect for human dignity—not because they’re politically expedient, but because they’re the bedrock of civilization. But today, those very values are being rebranded as liabilities. Cooperation is “weak.” Altruism is “naïve.” Even kindness is suspect—as if decency is some kind of ideological infection. In a world where cruelty is confused with clarity, and domination with leadership, we're not just watching the junkification of our systems. We're participating in it. We’ve redefined virtues as vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities as excuses for violence.

That inversion—moral, psychological, and cultural—is the final tipping point. Once a society internalizes malevolence as usual, the unraveling becomes self-perpetuating. People stop believing in institutions because the institutions no longer reflect their better selves. Cynicism becomes wisdom. Apathy becomes armor. And hope? Hope gets laughed out of the room. That’s why this matters now—not someday, not hypothetically, but right now. Because every day we delay a return to benevolence, we move one step closer to a world where the junk is all that’s left—and where no one remembers how to rebuild from anything else.

Reclaiming the Benevolent Future

So what’s the alternative? It’s not some utopian kumbaya fantasy. It’s basic human decency—scaled, organized, and relentlessly defended. It’s calling out cruelty even when it’s popular. It’s designing systems—economic, political, technological—that reward care, not conquest. It’s remembering that the soul of a nation is not built by those who dominate others, but by those who dare to give a damn.

We can’t algorithm our way out of this. We can’t consume our way out of it either. The only way forward is a return to the moral roots that kept society intact before the grifters and sadists took the wheel. And that means realigning ourselves—not just politically, but psychologically—toward benevolence, not malevolence.

This isn’t sentimentality. It’s a strategy. Because the truth is, no civilization lasts long when cruelty becomes a public virtue. And no soul survives intact when it’s rewarded for treating others as expendable. The junkification of everything isn’t inevitable. But reversing it means asking an ancient question with new urgency: What kind of people do we want to be?

inevitable. But reversing it means asking a very old question with new urgency: What kind of people do we want to be?

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Attribute the author Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com. Link back to the article This article originally appeared on InnerSelf.com

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Article Recap

The 2025 study in the *Journal of Research in Personality* confirms that rising malevolent traits—narcissism, manipulation, cruelty—are not only becoming normalized, they’re being politically rewarded. This shift from benevolent behavior to malevolent dominance explains the junkification of politics, culture, and the economy. To reverse the decay, we must reclaim empathy, human dignity, and the moral courage to make decency matter again.

#benevolentBehavior #malevolentTraits #junkification #authoritarianPsychology #culturalDecay #socialpsychology #empathyCrisis #narcissism #callousness #personalityShift #InnerSelfcom