It has long been known that Donald Trump is a sexual predator. His name appears over 1,000 times in the Epstein files. He has boasted about his sexual predation on tape and was judged, in court, to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Stormy Daniels also described a sexual assault, as have a number of other women, including his first wife. But there is something far more arousing to Donald Trump than sex. The thing that really lights his fire is violence.
Violence is Trump’s true pornography. All other pornography pales in comparison.
Recall that he once started his own football league where the rules were few and the violence extreme. He loves the faux violence of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) franchise but loves even more the real violence of cage fighting. In fact, he loves it so much that he has scheduled a July 4 cage fight on his brand-new concrete patio at the White House this year; watching two brutes trying to kill each other in a cage is his way of celebrating our nation’s founding. Only one detail remains shrouded in mystery: Will the combatants be dressed as Minutemen or Redcoats?
The Spectator-in-Chief sat transfixed in front of his presidential television on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, enraptured for hours by the sight of madmen beating the brains out of the Capitol Police and—cliff hanger—waiting to see if they really would kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.
Trump wanted permission, during his first administration, to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs and proposed that same intervention for migrants as they tried to cross the border. When that didn’t fly, he proposed filling the Rio Grande river with alligators to rip them to pieces. He appears fascinated, in general, with the idea of large reptiles with big teeth killing defenseless, desperate people; so fascinated, in fact, that he has been happy to send law-abiding immigrants to a hellhole in the Florida Everglades which he has hastened to name “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Trump’s favorite movies include “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” “Goodfellas,” “Bloodsport,” and “Silence of the Lambs,” in which his favorite character is not the female detective, Clarice Starling, but the sociopath Hannibal Lechter—referred to during Trump’s 2024 campaign as “The late, great Hannibal Lechter.”
In each of those movies, criminality and violence are the major themes. The other of his favorite movies, “Gone with the Wind,” is a celebration of everything that rocks his world: Scarlet O’Hara is raped at least twice; union and confederate soldiers are blown to smithereens on the battlefield; and all the Black people are slaves. This undoubtedly makes “Gone with the Wind” Donald Trump’s cinematic wet dream, a true Trump trifecta of unvarnished brutality.
He enjoys bombing foreign countries and assassinating their leaders. He aligns himself with the most murderous villains on the planet. He compares himself to mob bosses. He blithely bombs sovereign nations so that he can steal their resources. He is indifferent to the suffering of pregnant women who are bleeding to death in parking lots.
He allowed Caribbean fishermen to be killed by drones without providing evidence of wrongdoing, and now he has set Venezuela on fire, extracted its president and first lady to a prison in New York City, and declared martial law based on an ever-evolving set of lame alibis.
So, violence does more for Donald Trump than the new issue of Playboy. Given a choice between a night of adulterous sex with a woman to whom he is not married or the opportunity to cause irreparable harm to others in spectacular fashion, my money would be on the chance to inflict harm. He certainly has no qualms about the sexual violence visited on Epstein’s victims. He certainly has no qualms about inflicting untold suffering on brown people and their children. He certainly has no qualms about bombing people in fishing boats and marching into other people’s countries to seize power.
Trump is aided and abetted by those other notable violence addicts: Pete Hegseth (whose new standing army will be filled with amoral, amped-up sociopaths “who don’t belong in polite society”) and Kristi Noem (who films immigrants being beaten to a pulp by masked agents and then airs the images on television and the internet).
Because Trump is now unbound—thanks to the servitude of his hand-picked toadies on the Supreme Court, the equally slavish congressional Republicans, and a thoroughly corrupt cabinet—we can expect the violence not only to continue, but to accelerate.
Next up in Trump’s titillating cavalcade of violence:
Cuba.
Columbia.
Greenland.
Minneapolis.
