Kanye, Elon, Trump, and the Psyche of the American Right
The id, ego, and superego of the MAGA movement.
In October 2022, apparently in possession of Apollo’s gift of prophecy, the official Twitter/X account of the House Judiciary Committee GOP released a tweet reading simply: "Kanye. Elon. Trump." No context, no explanation, just the names of the three men who ostensibly constitute the pantheon – the bizarro Mount Rushmore – of modern MAGA conservatism. As weeks passed and Kanye West, who changed his name to Ye, waded ever deeper into antisemitic conspiracy-mongering and explicit praise for Adolf Hitler, the committee quietly deleted the tweet. They should not have. The last few weeks, in particular, have shown it was no mere shitpost; it was a diagnosis. The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee (accidentally or not) identified the very Freudian structure of the American Right.
The father of psychoanalysis tells us the human mind consists of three distinct, functionally interlocking components: id, ego, and superego.