Gabor Maté says that Trump is a poster child for childhood trauma—that his entire worldview is filtered through a lens of fear, shaped by wounds he has never confronted. And when wounds go unhealed, they don’t just stay contained within us. They bleed onto the people around us.

Gabor Maté on Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9HzQ15LG0M

Trump is not an anomaly. He is a case study in what happens when unhealed trauma calcifies into personality. When reality itself becomes too painful to face, the mind constructs a more tolerable version—one where failure is always someone else’s fault, where vulnerability is weakness, where truth is whatever serves you best. And if you tell yourself the same lie enough times, it becomes real. Not because it is real, but because your survival depends on believing it.

Maté argues that Trump does not seem to be able to distinguish between truth and lies, not because he’s consciously deceptive, but because his trauma has wired him to reject anything that threatens his fragile self-concept. And when someone refuses to take responsibility for their wounds, those wounds become everyone else’s problem.

This is the broader issue. This is what happens when wounded people rise to power.

Trump’s trauma is no longer just his—it is America’s. His refusal to heal has become our wound. His fear, his rage, his reality distortion field—they all spill out onto the public, shaping policy, discourse, and division. He is playing out his childhood wounds on a national stage, and we are all unwilling cast members in his unresolved story.

But Maté makes another point: Politically, we are an immature country. We keep looking for parental figures to “fix” things, to right the ship. But the truth is, the cycle won’t break until we do. Until we stop trying to elect saviors and start electing mirrors—leaders who reflect the work we’ve done within ourselves, not the fears we haven’t yet faced.

If we don’t want to keep living inside the wounds of others, we have to heal our own. Because otherwise, the cycle continues. The bleeding never stops. And we’ll keep mistaking the loudest voice in the room for the strongest leader, when really, they’re just the most afraid.

Someone tell Trump that healing is sexy.