Trump, the NRA and Violence: How Power Psychology is at Play

Last weekend, I found myself trying to logic my way through decisions that wouldn't compute. Violence that seemed excessive. Stated religious values contradicting actions. Organizations responding mildly to things that should trigger outrage. I kept hitting the same wall: none of it made sense on the surface.

Then I realized something. I work in the space of branding and marketing, teaching people how the brain makes decisions. I talk constantly about how fear, apprehension, and dopamine affect the 95% of decision-making that happens subconsciously. When two and two don't equal four, it's because there are variables operating in that subconscious space we can't see, and right now, one of those variables is power.

This article examines one lens: the psychology of power and how power pursuit affects human decision-making. This is not comprehensive. When we're talking about human behavior as complex as power, politics, violence, and decision-making involving millions of people, it's nearly impossible to write a standalone piece that addresses all moving parts. What I can offer is an exploration of the psychological mechanisms at work. These mechanisms are well-documented, research-backed, and help explain why behaviors that seem contradictory have internal consistency when power accumulation is the organizing principle.

Observable Reality: The Data

The current U.S. landscape provides clear examples. Since January 20, 2025, there have been at least 30 shootings by immigration agents, resulting in 8 deaths (Wikipedia, 2026). The Trump administration has publicly declared all 16 DHS shootings since July "justified" before investigations were completed (Washington Post, 2026). Gun rights organizations (typically aligned with the administration) criticized officials for suggesting it's legally justified to shoot lawful gun carriers who approach law enforcement, calling the stance "dangerous and wrong" after the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen legally carrying a firearm (The Hill, 2026; ABC News, 2026).

Evangelical Christians, who show 72% approval of the administration (Pew Research Center, 2025), remain divided over immigration policies that multiple denominational leaders argue contradict biblical mandates to care for "the stranger" (NPR, 2025; NBC News, 2025). Progressive Christian leaders cite Matthew 2 (the story of Jesus as a refugee) while some evangelical supporters justify "collateral damage" of non-criminal immigrants being deported (Religion News Service, 2025).

In 2025 alone, the administration signed 225 executive orders (Federal Register, 2025). The "Unitary Executive Theory" was invoked to centralize control. All executive power vests in the President, all agencies under direct supervision (White House, 2025). Agency heads were fired without cause, violating Congressional removal protections. Schedule F was reinstated, removing civil service protections for policy-making positions. 317,000 federal employees departed, 75,000 through deferred resignation offers (MeriTalk, 2025).

These aren't random contradictions. When power accumulation is the goal, decisions that seem to violate stated principles have internal logic. The question becomes what happens in the brain when power becomes the organizing principle.

The Neuroscience of Power: Dopamine and Reward Systems

Power activates the same reward circuitry as addictive substances. Dopamine (the neurotransmitter involved in motivation, reward, and "wanting") is released in the nucleus accumbens when individuals experience increased social status or control over resources (Volkow, Wise, & Baler, 2017). Research shows that dopamine D2 receptors increase among dominant macaques in social groups, but not when housed individually (Morgan et al., 2002, as cited in Koski, Xie, & Olson, 2015). Power pursuit literally changes brain chemistry.

Like substance addiction, power follows a predictable neurological cycle. During initial reward phases, dopamine surges create powerful reinforcement, making the experience highly rewarding (Penn LPS Online, n.d.). Over time, the brain adapts by reducing natural dopamine production and receptor sensitivity. This means individuals become increasingly reliant on external stimuli (in this case, accumulating more power) to feel satisfaction. The reinforcement loop strengthens while the baseline diminishes (Volkow, Fowler, Wang, Baler, & Telang, 2009).

Dopamine doesn't just signal "reward." It signals salience, or importance. Some dopamine neurons encode motivational value (excited by rewards, inhibited by aversive events), while others encode motivational salience (excited by both rewarding and aversive events) (Bromberg-Martin, Matsumoto, & Hikosaka, 2010). This means power-seeking activates brain systems for orienting, cognitive processing, and motivational drive regardless of whether the path to power involves positive or negative actions. The brain treats power accumulation as inherently important, worthy of attention and pursuit.

95% of decision-making occurs in the subconscious brain. Information hits the limbic system before it moves to the prefrontal cortex. Emotional decisions precede logical justification. When power pursuit is operating in that subconscious 95%, the conscious mind constructs narratives to justify decisions already made. This is why people can't always articulate the true "why" behind their decisions without deep self-awareness and reflection. The real driver is subconscious, neurologically reinforced, and incredibly powerful.

Power Erodes Empathy and Perspective-Taking

Research consistently shows that power reduces empathy. Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, and Gruenfeld (2006) demonstrated across five studies that high-power individuals anchor too heavily on their own perspectives and show diminished ability to comprehend how others see, think, and feel. In one experiment, participants primed with high power were three times more likely to draw the letter "E" on their forehead in a self-oriented direction (the way they would view it) rather than other-oriented (the way someone facing them would view it) (Galinsky et al., 2006). High-power participants were also less accurate at determining others' emotional expressions, suggesting power creates an impediment to experiencing empathy.

Perhaps the most dramatic (and controversial) demonstration of power's corrupting effects came from Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Twenty-four college students were randomly assigned to be "guards" or "prisoners" in a simulated prison environment in Stanford's psychology building basement. The guards, given uniforms and authority, began exhibiting increasingly cruel behavior toward prisoners, stripping them, depriving them of sleep, and subjecting them to psychological abuse. The prisoners showed such severe emotional distress that Zimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days instead of the planned two weeks (Zimbardo, Haney, & Banks, 1973). While the study has faced significant methodological criticisms in recent years (including evidence that guards were coached on how to behave and concerns about demand characteristics), it remains a stark illustration of how quickly assigned power can transform behavior (Le Texier, 2019). The experiment's core observation aligns with more rigorous neuroscience research showing systematic changes in how power affects the brain.

Neuroscience confirms these effects at the brain level. Hogeveen, Inzlicht, and Obhi (2014) used transcranial magnetic stimulation to measure brain activity in regions associated with resonance and empathy while participants watched videos of hand movements. People primed to feel powerful showed dampened activity in empathy-related brain regions compared to those primed to feel powerless. Power literally reduces the brain's capacity to resonate with others' experiences (Association for Psychological Science, n.d.). Mirror neurons (which provide the sense of connection with another person's experience) show decreased activity in high-power individuals (Progressive Impact, 2013).

Power reduces the perception that you need other people. High-powered individuals attend less to their surroundings and those around them; they are more narrowly focused on the task at hand (Guinote, 2007, as cited in Psychology Today, 2019). Van Kleef and colleagues (2008) found that people in power are "simply not that interested in those below them." They view themselves as different and above others. An automatic psychological state emerges as power increases. The powerful are "more inspired by themselves than by others" (van Kleef et al., 2015, as cited in Psychology Today, 2019).

Perspective-taking diminishes. Moral reasoning shifts. When you combine reduced empathy with the dopamine-driven reinforcement of power accumulation, you create a psychological state where the suffering of others registers less while the importance of maintaining or expanding power registers more. The longer someone has held power, the more pronounced these effects become (Kellogg Insight, 2019). What happens neurologically is documented and observable. The brain adapts to power, and those adaptations systematically reduce the capacity to see from others' vantage points.

Status-Seeking, Dominance, and Moral Reasoning

Humans pursue status through two primary strategies: dominance and prestige (Cheng, Tracy, & Anderson, 2014). Dominance involves coercion, intimidation, and force. Individuals achieve status by exploiting control over costs and benefits to extract deference from others, often through aggression or threats (Zeng, Cheng, & Henrich, 2022). Prestige, in contrast, involves demonstrating valued skills or knowledge that others respect and want to learn from. Both lead to social influence, but they activate different psychological mechanisms and produce different social outcomes.

Dominant individuals accrue social influence through their capacity to inflict costs or withhold benefits; others yield not out of respect, but out of fear (Zeng et al., 2022). Research shows dominant individuals evoke fear and subordination in others, are perceived as high in agency but low in communion, and are not particularly well-liked (Cheng et al., 2013, as cited in Cheng et al., 2014). Dominance-based hierarchies create social anxiety and increase preference for conspicuous consumption. Visible displays of status become necessary to maintain position (Wikipedia, 2026). When power is pursued through dominance rather than prestige, the psychological profile includes reduced concern for others' wellbeing combined with heightened sensitivity to threats to one's status.

Moral reasoning requires moral sensitivity (recognizing ethical dilemmas), moral judgment (reasoning about what ought to be done), moral motivation (commitment to moral action), and moral character (persistence despite difficulty) (Rest, 1994). Power disrupts these processes. When perspective-taking is reduced, moral sensitivity decreases. The powerful are less able to recognize how their actions affect others. When empathy is dampened, the emotional component of moral reasoning weakens. Research on moral decision-making shows that emotional intuition and deliberate reasoning work together; disrupting either system compromises moral judgment (Cambridge Core, 2023).

The prefrontal cortex (responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and evaluating consequences) shows altered activity when power dynamics are involved (Penn LPS Online, n.d.). The decision has often already been made subconsciously, driven by dopamine-fueled reward systems and diminished empathy. The conscious mind then constructs moral justifications after the fact. This is why you see stated religious values coexisting with contradictory actions, or organizations remaining silent when their core principles are violated. The moral reasoning is retrofitted to serve the goal that's already been set: maintain or expand power.

In-Group/Out-Group Dynamics and Power

When power becomes the organizing principle, in-group/out-group psychology intensifies. Simple group categorization (seeing others as either "us" or "them") is sufficient to cement bias toward the outgroup (Tajfel & Turner, 1979, as cited in PNAS Nexus, 2024). Social Identity Theory explains how individuals derive identity from group membership, and to maintain positive self-image, they enhance the status of their ingroup while derogating outgroups (Psychological Studies, 2024). When power is at stake, this tendency amplifies.

Current research on affective polarization shows that Americans don't just disagree on policy. They hold growing emotional animosity toward opposing political groups. Cross-party antipathy now exceeds ingroup love (PNAS Nexus, 2025). Fundamental psychological processes drive this. Ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation become separate, self-reinforcing mechanisms. When power pursuit is layered on top of these dynamics, the result is that helping ingroup members becomes prioritized over avoiding harm to outgroup members (PNAS Nexus, 2024).

Group polarization (where group decisions become more extreme than initial individual inclinations) accelerates when people surround themselves with like-minded others (Wikipedia, 2026). When groups discuss issues that activate emotions, mere thinking about the issue (without even encountering new evidence) produces polarization effects. Settings where people repeat and validate each other's statements increase the effect (Wikipedia, 2026). Add power pursuit to this mix, and you get decisions that become increasingly extreme, increasingly disconnected from stated values, and increasingly justified through group consensus rather than individual moral reasoning.

The outgroup homogeneity effect means people view outgroup members as more similar to each other than they actually are, leading to stereotyping and dehumanization (Psychology Today, 2024). When combined with the empathy erosion that comes from power, this creates conditions where harm to outgroups registers less on an emotional level. The brain has already categorized these people as "them," empathy is already dampened by power, and the reward circuitry is focused on power maintenance. The psychological conditions for violence, disregard, and justification are all in place.

Bringing It Together: The 95%

This is why decisions that don't make sense on the surface have internal consistency when power is the organizing principle. The brain's reward systems are activated by status and control. Dopamine creates reinforcement loops that function like addiction. Empathy and perspective-taking systematically diminish. Moral reasoning becomes retrofitted justification rather than genuine ethical deliberation. Ingroup/out-group boundaries harden. All of this happens largely in the subconscious 95%, the space where emotional processing occurs before logical reasoning, where the limbic system processes information before the prefrontal cortex gets involved.

When someone makes a decision driven by power accumulation, they're not consciously thinking "I will now reduce my empathy and justify this action post-hoc." The neural mechanisms are operating automatically. The dopamine system is signaling importance and reward. The reduced mirror neuron activity means others' suffering registers less intensely. The ingroup/outgroup categorization is activating emotional loyalty to some and emotional distance from others. The prefrontal cortex is then constructing narratives that make the decision feel coherent with stated values, even when external observers see clear contradictions.

Each decision reinforces the next. Each exercise of power reduces empathy slightly more. Each instance of ingroup prioritization makes outgroup derogation easier. The dopamine system adapts, requiring more power to achieve the same reward. What starts as goal-directed behavior becomes compulsive. Power consolidation accelerates rather than stabilizes because the neurological mechanisms driving it create tolerance, requiring escalation to maintain the same psychological state. Addiction neuroscience and power psychology research document this pattern.

What This Means

Understanding the psychology of power doesn't excuse the behavior, but it explains the mechanism. It clarifies why contradictions that seem glaring from the outside feel internally consistent to those pursuing power. It illuminates why stated values (religious, constitutional, organizational) can coexist with actions that directly contradict those values. Power pursuit hijacks the decision-making systems, and the conscious mind rationalizes decisions the subconscious has already made.

Ethics isn't binary. It's anchored in individual cores of integrity, and no two people's cores are identical. But when power becomes the organizing principle, that core begins to erode. Not through conscious choice, but through neurological adaptation. The brain changes. Empathy diminishes. Perspective narrows. The reward circuitry recalibrates. What remains is behavior driven primarily by power accumulation, justified through whatever moral framework is available, regardless of whether that justification would hold up under the conditions of full empathy and perspective-taking.

Understanding what happens in the human brain when power pursuit takes over requires looking beyond political arguments. The question each of us has to ask (whether we're leaders making decisions for millions or individuals navigating our own spheres of influence) is this: When power and integrity conflict, which one wins? And more importantly, are we even aware when that conflict is happening, or has our brain already made the choice in the 95% we can't see?

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