MAGA is a Daycare for Adult Children

In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults, mapped those profiles against their political affiliations and views of Donald Trump, and published what he found in the Journal of Research in Personality.

The results did not reveal what most people expected. The common assumption is that Trump supporters lack empathy, that something is missing, that there is a deficit or a gap where the ability to recognize and respond to suffering should be. That assumption is wrong, and what Neumann actually found is considerably worse.

Trump supporters are not blind to your pain. They can see it perfectly well. They enjoy it.

The Three Dimensions of Empathy

Understanding what Neumann’s data shows requires understanding that empathy is not a single capacity. It is at least three distinct psychological processes, each operating through different neural pathways, each measurable independently, and each telling a different story about how a person relates to the suffering of others.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand what another person is feeling. It is a perceptual skill, closer to reading comprehension than to emotional experience. A person with high cognitive empathy can look at someone’s face and know they are in pain. They can read body language, vocal tone, and social cues with accuracy. Cognitive empathy does not require caring about what you perceive. It only requires perceiving it.

Psychopaths typically score high on cognitive empathy. They are excellent at reading people. That is often what makes them effective manipulators. They can see exactly what you are feeling. They simply do not care.

Affective empathy is the capacity to feel what another person feels. It is the process by which observing someone else’s pain produces a corresponding emotional response in your own nervous system. When you see someone stub their toe and you wince, that is affective empathy. When a child cries and your chest tightens, that is affective empathy. It is automatic, involuntary, and operates below the level of conscious decision-making.

Affective empathy is what makes cruelty feel wrong. It is the internal alarm that fires when you witness suffering, the signal that tells your brain that what is happening to that person matters. Without it, the suffering of others is neutral information, the way a stock ticker is neutral to someone with no money in the market.

Dissonant empathy is the third dimension, and it is the one that changes everything. Dissonant empathy is not the absence of a response to another person’s pain. It is the presence of the wrong response. A person with high dissonant empathy sees suffering and experiences pleasure. The signal fires, but it fires in the wrong direction. Where affective empathy produces discomfort at the sight of someone in pain, dissonant empathy produces satisfaction.

This is not sadism in the clinical sense, though the overlap is significant. Dissonant empathy describes a specific empathic inversion: the neural architecture for responding to others’ emotional states is intact and functional, but the valence is reversed. Pain in others registers as reward in the observer.

What Neumann Found

Neumann and his co-author Darlene Ngo surveyed over 9,000 American adults across two national samples, one collected before the pandemic and one during it. They measured a comprehensive battery of personality traits, empathy dimensions, and political attitudes, including favorability toward Donald Trump.

Three findings emerged that, taken together, paint a portrait of a political base that is psychologically distinct from the general population in ways that go far beyond policy disagreement.

First, Trump supporters scored the same as everyone else on cognitive empathy. They can read the room. They can see what you are feeling. They understand facial expressions, social cues, and emotional states at the same level as moderates and liberals. There is no perceptual deficit.

Second, Trump supporters scored significantly lower on affective empathy. They are measurably less likely to feel distress when observing another person’s suffering. The internal alarm that makes cruelty feel wrong fires less strongly in this population than in the general public.

Third, and most critically, Trump supporters scored significantly higher on dissonant empathy. They are measurably more likely to experience pleasure or satisfaction when observing another person in pain.

These three findings together produce a profile that is qualitatively different from what most critics of MAGA assume they are dealing with. The common framing is that Trump supporters “lack empathy,” as though there is a hole where empathy should be. Neumann’s data suggests the picture is more disturbing. They do not lack the ability to perceive suffering. That ability is fully intact. What is different is what happens after the perception registers. In most people, perceiving suffering produces discomfort. In this population, perceiving suffering produces satisfaction.

They are not missing your pain. They are consuming it.

The Emotional Regulation Problem

This finding connects to a body of research on emotional self-regulation that has been developing independently of political psychology for decades. Healthy emotional development produces an adult who can generate positive internal states, feelings of purpose, satisfaction, pride, and contentment, from internal resources. They do not need external inputs to feel good about themselves. They have a functional internal emotional economy.

Developmental psychology has long established that this capacity is built in childhood through consistent, responsive caregiving. The child learns to regulate their own emotions because they first experienced having their emotions regulated by someone else. The caregiver mirrors the child’s feelings, validates them, and models how to manage them. Over time, the child internalizes this process and becomes capable of doing it independently.

When this process is disrupted, whether through neglect, abuse, emotional invalidation, or chaotic household environments, the result is an adult who cannot self-regulate. They cannot generate positive emotional states on their own. They become dependent on external sources for emotional regulation, whether through substances, chaotic relationships, or the emotional reactions of other people.

This is the connection that Neumann’s data illuminates without explicitly stating. A population that scores high on dissonant empathy is a population that is using other people’s pain as an emotional regulation tool. The suffering of others produces a feeling in them, a feeling of power, superiority, and satisfaction, that they cannot produce on their own. Without that external input, they are emotionally empty.

This is not a description of strong people being cruel. This is a description of emotionally dependent people who need a supply of suffering the way a child needs a parent to soothe them. They cannot feel good on their own. They need someone else to feel bad first.

The Rally as Emotional Feeding

This framework transforms how we understand Trump rallies. A rally is not a political event. It is a mass emotional feeding. Trump identifies a target. The crowd watches the target be humiliated. The crowd experiences satisfaction. The satisfaction is the product. Nothing else at the rally matters.

Watch the audience at the moments Trump is cruelest. When he mocks a disabled reporter. When he describes violence against immigrants. When he calls an opponent an ugly name. The crowd does not respond with the uncomfortable silence of people witnessing cruelty. They respond with joy. They cheer. They laugh. They lean forward in their seats.

That response is dissonant empathy operating in real time. They are perceiving pain and they are experiencing pleasure.

This is also why Trump rallies have to escalate. Dissonant empathy, like any external emotional regulation mechanism, is subject to tolerance effects. The same dose produces less satisfaction over time. The cruelty has to get louder, the targets more vulnerable, the humiliation more public, just to produce the same feeling it once did. This is why Trump’s rhetoric has consistently escalated since 2015. The audience is chasing a high that requires increasing doses.

The Dependency

Neumann’s study did not use the word “dependency,” but the data describes a dependency structure. A population that cannot generate positive emotional states without the suffering of an external target is functionally dependent on that suffering. Remove the target and the positive feeling disappears. Remove the rallies and the emotional supply dries up. Remove Trump and they lose the person who most effectively delivers the product they need.

This is why MAGA supporters respond to political opposition the way addicts respond to threats against their supply. The intensity of their reaction is not proportional to any policy disagreement. It is proportional to the threat against their primary source of emotional regulation. Telling a MAGA supporter that Trump is wrong is not experienced as a political argument. It is experienced as someone threatening to take away the only thing that makes them feel alive.

Healthy adults do not need a political leader to feel good. Healthy adults do not need someone else to suffer in order to experience satisfaction. Healthy adults can generate pride, purpose, and contentment from their own internal resources, from their relationships, their work, their contributions to their communities, their growth as human beings.

The population Neumann measured cannot do this. They are emotionally dependent on a supply of other people’s pain delivered by a man who has built his entire public persona around providing it.

What Dissonant Empathy Tells Us About the Movement

The most important implication of Neumann’s research is not what it says about individual Trump supporters. It is what it says about the movement as a system. MAGA is not organized around a policy agenda. It is organized around the reliable delivery of an emotional product. The product is the suffering of people the base has been trained to view as enemies.

Every policy that has defined the movement serves this function. Family separation at the border was not an immigration strategy. It was a delivery mechanism for suffering. Anti-trans legislation targeting children is not a protection of traditional values. It is the identification of a vulnerable target whose pain can be consumed by the base. The attack on universities, the defunding of public health, the pardoning of violent offenders who attacked the Capitol, each of these has an ostensible policy rationale, but each of them also produces visible suffering in a population the base has been trained to view as deserving of that suffering.

Strip away the policy language and what remains is a movement organized around the production and consumption of pain. That is not a political party. That is not a coalition of voters with shared interests. That is an emotional dependency system in which millions of adults need someone else to hurt in order to feel anything at all.

The research says they can see your pain just fine. It says your pain feels good to them. And it says they need it.

That is not strength. That is the most pathetic form of emotional dependency a human being can exhibit. It is the psychological equivalent of a child who cannot self-soothe, who needs someone else to regulate their emotions for them, who falls apart when the external source of comfort is removed.

The difference is that children grow out of it. These people never did. And instead of doing the work to develop the internal emotional resources that healthy adults rely on, they found a political movement that delivers the emotional product they need on demand, every rally, every broadcast, every social media post, every act of cruelty performed on a national stage by a man who has made suffering his only reliable export.

The adults in this country have been babysitting these people for a decade. And the research now shows, in peer-reviewed data published in one of the field’s most respected journals, exactly what we have been dealing with the entire time.

Sources

Craig S. Neumann and Darlene A. Ngo, “Malevolent vs. Benevolent Dispositions and Conservative Political Ideology in the Trump Era,” Journal of Research in Personality, Volume 118, October 2025

Craig S. Neumann et al., “Citizens in Democratic Countries Have More Benevolent Traits, Fewer Malevolent Traits, and Greater Well-Being,” Scientific Reports, 2025

Erin Buckels, Daniel Jones, and Delroy Paulhus, “Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism,” Psychological Science, Volume 24, Issue 11, 2013

Tania Singer and Claus Lamm, “The Social Neuroscience of Empathy,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume 1156, 2009

Jean Decety and Jason Cowell, “The Complex Relation Between Morality and Empathy,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 18, Issue 7, 2014

Allan Schore, “The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health,” Infant Mental Health Journal, Volume 22, Issues 1-2, 2001

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