Saturday Night Live, less restricted by the rules of propriety than The New York Times, offered an unvarnished sexual explanation in a recent skit that shows the president suffering from “gay dementia.” 

This joke is, as often with SNL, both too glib and borderline offensive. The truth is Trump’s ass-talk is only occasionally sexual but more frequently involves excretion; it targets women as well as men, and is as much about asserting domination and humiliation as about expressing desire. In other words, Trump’s fixation is scatological and anal, rather than narrowly erotic. 

Consider Trump’s description of Norway as a “shithouse country” (a term of abuse Trump has used against other nations in the past). Similarly, Trump has obsessed in speeches about the dangers of low-flow toilets, lamenting in 2019 the need to flush “ten times.”

Writing in Rolling Stone, Jack Crosbie argued that Trump’s ass talk is “ripe for armchair psychoanalysis: Trump is self-conscious about his own aging body, Trump values the superficial and material above all other things, Trump sees validation from the strong and tall and beautiful as evidence that what he is doing is good and just.”

This is all very suggestive, but it’s useful to move beyond such amateur speculation and consult the work of a true expert. In thinking about Trump’s anal fixation, few works are more illuminating than Normal O. Brown’s towering study Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Brown was a distinguished classicist, and the virtue of his book lies in its provocative application of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories to social and political analysis. As such, it rivals other mid-20th-century works of daring, psychologically informed social theory by figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich. 

Surprisingly, Brown’s book has a Trump connection. It was originally published to obscurity by an academic press but found fame when it was championed by Norman Podhoretz, a New York literary critic and editor at Commentary. Podhoretz would later become one of the founding fathers of neoconservatism and, late in life, one of the most prominent pro-Trump intellectuals. In a 1999 essay in Harper’s, Christopher Hitchens noted that Podhoretz and other neoconservatives have an “obsessive” and prurient focus on anal sex. 

In a brilliant and celebrated chapter on “the excremental vision” of Jonathan Swift, Brown notes, 

according to Freudian theory the human infant passes through a stage — the anal stage — as a result of which the libido, the life energy of the body, gets concentrated in the anal zone. The infantile stage of anal eroticism takes the essential form of attaching symbolic meaning to the anal product. As a result of these symbolic equations, the anal product acquires for the child significance of being his own child or creation, which he may use either to obtain narcissistic pleasure in play, or to obtain love from another (feces as gift), or to assert independence from another (feces as property), or to commit aggression against another (feces as weapon).

The anal stage is universal, but as the infant matures, these impulses are sublimated into more socially acceptable behavior. If Trump is in fact suffering cognitive decline, it could be that sublimation is no longer possible. It’s broadly true that for Trump, subtext and text are often one: he doesn’t sublimate desire but gives it free vent, often in erratic and socially aggressive ways. 

In the writings of Swift, one sees anal aggression brilliantly sublimated into a harsh and compelling satirical vision of humanity. Brown demonstrates this is both Swift’s practice as a writer and his thematic concern. Trump, lacking Swift’s genius, turns anal aggression into mere verbal abusiveness: in the vernacular, Trump is a man who loves to shit talk.

Elsewhere in his study, Brown links the anal stage to hoarding, particularly of gold. Very slightly sublimated, hoarding gold turns into a love of the gold standard. This cluster of compulsions (narcissism, abusive language, hoarding, the fetishization of gold) can easily serve as a quite acute account of Trump’s psychology. Even if one doesn’t accept the scientific validity of Freudian categories, there is no denying that it offers a fresh and original way to think about commonly linked character traits. 

While Brown was fully aware of the sadism of the anal stage, he also entertained the utopian hope that humans might be able to deprogram themselves of their social conditioning and achieve a return to the childhood ecstasy in the polymorphous perverse. The case of Trump suggests that this program might be dangerous if applied unilaterally. If one individual reverts to the anal stage while the rest of society remains committed to sublimation, you have a recipe for tyranny: the alpha male baboon who smears his shit over everyone in order to assert dominance. In other words, Trump’s impulse to constantly talk ass is symptomatic of the fact that he is an asshole.