Trump is using existential fear to win elections

A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election | Opinion
Story by Bobby Azarian, Raw Story • 3h • 5 min read
04/08/24

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Then-President-elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Then-President-elect Donald Trump arrives on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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The 2024 election is heating up, and Donald Trump is back to using his number one political strategy to grab Americans’ attention and galvanize his base: fear.

And why wouldn’t he? It worked for him in the past, and a social psychology concept called terror management theory suggests it will work for him again.


Trump is in the news this week for making two inflammatory statements designed to stoke existential fear, and the rhetoric is of the type that peer-reviewed research indicates has a psychological effect on the minds of voters.

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On Tuesday, in a campaign speech in Grand Rapids, Mich., Trump said, “If we don’t win on November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist.” In no way holding back on the heavy fearmongering, Trump continued, “This could be the last election we ever have. I actually mean that. That’s where our country is going.”

In the same speech, he addressed immigration in a way that could conceivably cause dangerous paranoia among the public, claiming that countries were sending “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists — the worst they have.”

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To dial up the doomsday rhetoric even further, he is repeatedly using the word “bloodbath” to describe the state of affairs that will ensue due to the border crisis should President Joe Biden win a second term. A website, BidenBloodBath.com was even launched by the Republican National Committee, which The New York Times says the Trump campaign now effectively controls.

“A vote for Biden is a vote for an invasion,” the site says in large red letters.

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A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election | Opinion
A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election | Opinion
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Source: Republican National Committee

We must become cognizant of the psychological tactic that Trump is using here, because science suggests it is potentially powerful and plays to our subconscious fear. Terror management theory studies the effects of mortality salience.) — which refers to thoughts of death or existential threat becoming more pronounced or salient in one’s mind.


The theory maintains that when we are made to feel fearful for our lives, we cling more strongly to things that make us feel safe, such as our ideologies and leaders vowing to protect us from the danger.

This suggests that Trump’s fear mongering tactics push Republican voters toward the extreme end of the right wing, while bolstering their support for Trump — no matter that Trump himself faces 88 felony counts across four criminal cases involving all manner of alleged misdeeds.

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I believe the ex-president, who also last year warned of “death and destruction” if charged with a crime, is knowingly using this tactic. He does so despite the obvious downside for our nation as a whole — increased political polarization, social division and potential violence or terrorism. It is one thing to speak passionately about the broken immigration system, which the right and the left at some level agree is a problem that must be addressed, but it is another thing altogether to try and send people into a state of panic and rage for one’s self-serving political ambitions.


A study conducted in 2004, titled “American Roulette: The Effect of Reminders of Death on Support for George W. Bush in the Presidential Election,” demonstrated that the effects of mortality salience could have a measurable effect on presidential election outcomes.

It is worth mentioning that this experiment took place not long after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, so this event was in the minds of voters, at least at a subconscious level. Additionally, George W. Bush had made fighting terrorism the central theme of his campaign, and he raised the nation’s terror alert level while warning that the country would be in danger should Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry be elected.

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A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election | Opinion
A neuroscientist explains how Trump is using existential fear to win the election | Opinion
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U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to Marines on the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 2004 at Camp Pendleton, Calif. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

To test the hypothesis that making mortality salient would shift voters toward Bush over Kerry, 184 students were broken into two groups: a control condition which received a neutral writing exercise, and an experimental condition that entailed exercises designed to make participants think about death.

The results found that the control group supported Kerry on average, while those in the mortality salience condition favored Bush.

A 2017 study by the same group titled, “You’re Hired! Mortality Salience Increases Americans’ Support for Donald Trump,” set out to directly test whether existential fear increased support for the then-president. The study design was similar to the previous study, and the results found that those participants who were primed to think about death showed a subtle yet statistically significant shift toward Trump and away from 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The study also found that asking people to think about immigrants moving into their neighborhood increased the accessibility of death-related thoughts. This suggests that Trump's immigrant-focused fear mongering specifically triggers existential anxiety.

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From these results, it is clear that fear mongering during an election year can have real effects on a nation’s voter base. With the kind of fiery and panic-inducing rhetoric Trump is strategically using at his rally speeches, we can imagine that the psychological consequences are greater than simple writing exercises designed to conjure up threats about death.

So, what can we do about it?

The authors of these studies, Sheldon Solomon and Tom Pyszcynski, have this advice:

“The best antidote to this problem may be to monitor and take pains to resist any efforts by candidates to capitalize on fear-mongering … As a culture, we should also work to teach our children and encourage our citizens to vote with their ‘heads’ rather than their ‘hearts,’ as research has demonstrated that mortality salience effects are attenuated when people are asked to think rationally.”

The proverbial clock is ticking.

Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of the book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. He is also a blogger for Psychology Today and the creator of the Substack Road to Omega. Follow him on X and Instagram @BobbyAzarian.

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