The Crowd and the Candidate: Trump Through Gustave Le Bon

When Gustave Le Bon published “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” in 1895, he wasn’t writing about the current American President. But his ideas about how leaders influence masses, how slogans gradually replace arguments, and how belonging shapes belief, have found a strange second life in the age of MAGA rallies in 2026.

Le Bon’s central claim wasn’t that crowds are stupid. It was that “individuals behave differently when they merge into a collective”. People who reason carefully alone may act based on emotion, imitation, and shared values in a crowd. This can happen to anyone — professors, doctors, factory workers alike, regardless of wealth or intellectual ability.

Yes, indeed, Le Bon was an elitist and a racist. His theory reeks of 19th-century European hierarchy. But if we scrape away the prejudice, a very relative question remains for our generation.

How does collective identity change how people think, feel, and act politically?

“Make America Great Again” is a masterclass example in what Le Bon called “formulas” and “images.” It’s short, it is emotionally charged, and crucially vague. It doesn’t specify a policy. It doesn’t point at a law. It paints a picture: a nation that was great, that fell in our face, that can and would rise again.

Different people fill in the blanks differently. For some, it’s about lost of blue-collar jobs. For others, it’s about immigration, or national pride, or distrust of institutions. The agreement doesn’t come from the details. It comes from letting them FEEL like part of the same story and mission.

Le Bon understood this better than anyone else. A leader does not need to persuade every individual with a detailed argument one by one. He needs to offer a shared emotional narrative. He needs to persuade the deluded heart, more and faster than the conscious mind.

It was perhaps in his favor that, indeed, deluded hearts are persuaded easier and faster than the mind.

Trump’s rhetoric often works less like a lecture or a presentation and more like a mirror. He talks about immigration as a matter of sovereignty and survival. He blames political opponents for everything from economic anxiety to cultural change. He repeats phrases until they feel familiar, almost true. In a way, he is the master of gaslighting and manipulation.

On an entire country.

And it is precisely what Le Bon described as appealing to “the imagination” of a crowd.

They compress complicated realities into simple, emotionally meaningful conflicts. It relies on your hatred, targeting your pride and nationalism more than your innocent and independant mind.

Immigration policy involves asylum law, labor markets, border enforcement, and humanitarian obligations. A rally speech turns that into:

“Us versus them. Safety versus threat.”

That they are a threat and nothing else, and we are the definition of pristine and legitimacy, and power.

Why does this language connect with certain fears and hopes — and what does that connection do?

Perhaps the most powerful Le Bon connection is the creation of an “us” and a “them.” Trump’s speeches constantly draw lines: ordinary citizens versus elites, Americans versus outsiders, the movement versus the establishment.

Social psychologist, Stephen Reicher, studying Mussolini and Hitler, showed how leaders construct social categories that define who belongs and who threatens. But Le Bon got there first: the crowd needs an enemy as much as, and often more than it needs a hero.

Enemies draw hatred, heroes draw love.

“For love is held by a bond of obligation which, men being wicked, is broken at every occasion of their own utility…”

“For men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony.”

-The Prince, Chapter XVII

The lines shift depending on the speech. Sometimes the enemy is Biden. Sometimes it’s the media (as proven with the ban of CNN and other news channels at the white house). Sometimes it’s “the swamp.” It makes supporters feel like they’re part of something noble, something under attack, something that must be defended.

If you want to see Le Bon’s theory in action, watch a Trump rally. People don’t just receive information, they participate and “ change the world”. There are chants, repeated phrases, shared symbols, emotional reactions from neighbors. The speaker addresses them as a collective: “You are the real people. You are the ones who matter.”

Le Bon believed collective settings intensify emotion and push people toward unified action. Modern psychology offers more nuanced explanations. But the rally remains a powerful case study in how belonging, rhythm, and repetition can make politics feel less like a debate and more like a identity.

Still, we shouldn’t treat the crowd as passive. Supporters respond to messages they find meaningful. Trump adjusts his rhetoric to his audience. Leader and crowd shape each other.

A university professor can be emotionally swept up in a political movement. A person without a college degree can study policy carefully and vote independently. Education doesn’t guarantee reason. Belonging doesn’t guarantee blindness.

Under what conditions do people surrender independent judgment to collective identity — and under what conditions do they keep the ability to question their own group?

Le Bon’s framework is flawed.

It assumes crowds are irrational. It ignores policy preferences, personal experience, and independent thought. It reflects a worldview that feared mass politics as a threat to civilization almost 200 years ago.

But his central insight still echoes in our world today. Leaders can unite diverse people through emotion, image, and shared identity. They can turn a population into a “crowd”. Not by making everyone think alike, but by making them feel alike.

Trump is a vivid case out of many others. And Le Bon, for all his problems, gives us a vocabulary to examine how political belonging shapes what we believe, what we fear, and who we think we are.

Donald Trump