We are more than ever before living in the reality of parasocial interactions and relationships, and a politics based on influencing others through a series of short-form attention-grabbing bombardments that create an impression rather than convince. That’s the name of today’s game, whether it comes to selling someone on the idea of buying a particular jar of sauce, or selling them state force or a genocide. And that’s where personality politics comes into play—and why it’s important to understand it, and resist its force.
Personality politics pushes the mechanics of individual moral reflection and political reasoning to the backseat, and instead encourages people to orient and align with certain positions and beliefs primarily guided by another sentiment: how one feels about particular personalities, or the perceived virtuousness (or lack thereof) of other people.
In this way, it’s similar to identity politics, where people partly or fully align with certain moral positions and political beliefs primarily because of an aspect of their identity (e.g., gender, sexuality, religion, etc.). They become more comfortable with—or convinced of—certain conclusions and worldviews because it feels correct to match a certain aspect (or aspects) of their identity with them. On the flipside, personality politics makes people feel comfortable with certain conclusions and worldviews because they feel their personality is more of a “match” with other certain personalities.
In other words, personality politics is a tempting—yet dangerous—mental shortcut. It tells us that when we view someone else as a good (or bad) person with good (or bad) qualities, we should, in small or large part, be attracted to (or repelled by) certain beliefs and conclusions, and adopt (or reject) those beliefs and conclusions yourself—notwithstanding individual reasoning and thinking.
Small and Large-Scale Personality Politics
The effects of personality politics can be seen on both small and large scales. Large-scale results can be driven by a series of small-scale happenings, or driven by a larger-scale personality or event associated with that personality.
As for the small-scale adding up to larger outcomes, consider the following illustration: gun rights and gun ownership—everything from whether it’s “right” for an individual to have guns, through to if/how the state should allow or disallow it entirely or settle on policies that merely regulate it. People often orient their own thinking on this issue and align with certain conclusions based on personalities at play in different scenarios they’ve experienced.
For example, it’s not hard to see why a series of angry and off-putting uncles from out of town who won’t shut up about guns at Thanksgiving would put their 20-ish year-old, relatively privileged, and recently college-graduated nieces and nephews off from the idea of guns entirely. These people likely feel a galaxy apart from identifying with anything close to a pro-gun political stance already, and a universe away from even considering ownership themselves.
Further, those nieces and nephews might begin to stereotype outward, based on their uncle, about what types of personalities gun owners are. From there, it’s not hard to see how much of one’s feelings about guns can come down to being driven by a simple gut feeling of whether one likes, or dislikes, certain personalities—and in this case, views themselves as never wanting to be like, or associate with, those personalities.
That’s the small scale. On the other hand, large-scale personality politics typically orbits around relatively high-profile public intellectuals, politicians, academics, writers, and so on. People’s ongoing positive (or negative) perceptions of a certain high-profile personality can function to enforce and further entrench certain beliefs and opinions over time. Conversely, an event or discovery that majorly changes perception of a certain personality can upend certain beliefs or even cause re-alignment of them.
Misunderstanding the Donald Trump Effect
Donald Trump is almost a picture-perfect illustration of how a strong personality can drive people to certain moral and political conclusions, and not the other way around—a subtle but important distinction of cause and effect.
The lens of personality politics reveals why Donald Trump doesn’t lose as many of his core fans and followers as one would expect as he continues to display ongoing misbehaviors, gaffes, gauche behaviors, and so on—let alone administrative incompetence.
So many will change their minds or adjust their feelings about a particular topic, due to consistent liking of Donald Trump himself. And, this is where those who continue to be exasperated about the lack of mass exodus from Trump fandom and his maintenance of a core group of loyal followers often miss. They try to explain it all away with comforting self-aggrandizing feel-goods about how all his followers are stupid in general or uneducated about a particular issue (note that the inverse implication is the person saying this must be very smart and right all the time!). The reality is that a lot of what’s happening is people re-orienting or re-aligning themselves on certain principles or issues because they simply like Donald Trump’s personality—in other words, personality politics.
Take just one category of examples—the very least of what we could discuss here, but it directly addresses character: Trump’s private and public track record of lewd and crude behavior. Whether it was a leaked taped in 2016 that featured Trump casually talking about using star power to commit sexual harassment and assault and get away with it, or telling a woman journalist “quiet piggy” in 2025, the last 10 years are not short of examples where Trump repudiates the kind of gentlemanly behaviour or “family values” allegedly sought by social conservatives and other factions of the Republican camp. Yet, he maintains a core fanbase and set of followers. Why?
People against Trump and his followers say facts don’t matter to his fanbase and continue to bash their integrity or character, trying to frame them as simply outright hypocrites that will excuse Trump’s behavior. To be clear, that is certainly the case in many instances. However, another large part of it is how followers don’t excuse Trump, but instead change their mind on an issue, scandal, or incident because of the power of Trump’s personality.
Many Trump followers maintain a very strong attachment to the man himself, and still view him in a way that they can relate to and like. In fact, while so many see Trump as as a brash, crude, incompetent man, others truly see him as a plain-speaking, non-Washington elite, and even friendly guy trying to use government power to make America Great Again. Yes, he talks down to people, but crucially he is often talking down elites and the media but usually not the average person as—plus, he can be funny.
Indeed, if you listen to what a lot of Trump supporters say, it’s personality-driven. Again, they aren’t excusing Trump’s bad decisions or behaviour, or simply ignoring the bad in favor of whatever good they perceive. In fact, their liking of Trump’s personality and strong identification with him leads them to manoeuvre the rest of their belief system around his behavior—the personality drives their conclusions. The beliefs of Trump’s followers continue to re-align in a way where the behavior is not that bad, or perhaps not even bad at all to begin with.
This is also an excellent example of how personality politics serves as a key cornerstone for and a launchpad for a robust cult of personality.
Ultimately, the accusation that Trump’s fanbase is ignorant, wilfully or not, is too simple. In an odd, self-defeating way, it even lets much of Trump’s base off the hook too easily. What many of them are in fact doing is allowing an attachment to a personality to re-align and re-orient their beliefs and conclusions about many subjects and the realities of the world.
Whether they’re doing a disservice to the issues at hand, or to themselves as well, is a different matter.
The Noam Chomsky Example
I left this example to the end because it is not only a good one and serves as a fine conclusion, but also because it has some personal implications that are interesting for me to reflect on.
Toward the end of 2025, more photos of Jeffrey Epstein and the company he kept over the years were released. A part of this series were photos of Noam Chomsky on a private plane with Epstein, and Chomsky with Steve Bannon looking friendly and relaxed. Chomsky wife’s—Valeria—has since released a statement, framing these events as an unfortunate series of manipulation. Without litigating what this could prove, disprove, or imply—an issue for another essay—I will say that it is a terrible look for many reasons at the very least, and leave it at that for now.
More important to the issue of personality politics was so much of the social media fallout I observed. Several people in various private and public Facebook groups expressed massive lament and accused Chomsky of being a fraud and hypocrite, while others mentioned something akin to how their worldview has been turned upside down and someone they very much looked up to as a hero had fallen. More than a few people mentioned something along the lines of having would have to “re-assess” all the thinking they had done on many subjects, especially where they were intellectually influenced by Chomsky.
It’s probably the last part that’s the worst thing to see anyone say. If so much of your worldview is wrapped up around someone else’s personality, then what kind of personal worldview is that?
I have no problem admitting that Noam Chomsky has been a major influence on me—in areas I have learned from him and agreed with him, but also in work I’ve done to deconstruct where I disagree with him or think he is unhelpful or wrong. To further open myself to some vulnerability here while making the point stronger, I will also say that my initial exposure to, and interaction with, his work was many years ago—well over a decade now—at a particularly odd time of my life, both politically and personally. That meant turning toward these new topics and points of view was both visceral and intellectual for me.
However, it turned out that my goal was to sort through political, social, economic, and philosophical questions for myself—not to be “right” or to re-align myself and worldview with a particular person because I started to enjoy their personality, found admirable qualities about it, and found myself listening keenly to what they had to say.
In fact, it was Chomsky himself continually paying lip service to the importance of building an “intellectual self-defence” against elements of personality politics and propaganda—and saying that everyone who speaks on political issues has some axe to grind, and is not the keeper of the secrets of objective reality—that drove home the point for me that you shouldn’t believe and take for granted what anyone says about one thing or another, including him. You should absorb the information, give it honest reflection and attention, and then go figure it out for yourself with a serious form of critical self-reflection.
So, it was an odd experience for me when a few folks in certain circles I knew asked me how I felt about the Chomsky photos that surfaced. The tone and approach came with the heavy voyeuristic implication that perhaps this would—or even should—affect me in some heavy emotional way or cause at least some intellectual trouble for me.
I’m happy to say it didn’t affect me beyond being abstractly disappointed in the man.
I had a brief moment where I almost thought it should affect me more, but then I remembered that it doesn’t because I actively try to remain conscious of a key thought process of intellectual self-defence against personality politics:
I don’t know this person. I’ve never spoken to them, gotten to know them, understood what makes them tick. Furthermore, I don’t have a real connection with them. They’ve never done anything for me, and I’ve never done anything for them. I don’t know who they are, and they essentially don’t mean anything to my life—beyond some ideas they have presented that have been intellectual food for me. Any serious personal attachment to this person—beyond a very arms-length, abstract-observer type admiration or inspiration—due to the perceived virtuousness of their personality and underlying character to the point of ultimately steering my moral and political beliefs would be very weird—not to mention detrimental to my thinking.
Let’s go further still. Let’s say I did know this person—even as a close friend or family member. Even in such a case, if I built my own belief systems independently and in a way that revolves around my own thinking and worldview and notanchored to their personality, then some sort of emotional reaction or disappointment related to their personality would be appropriate, but they wouldn’t be a thread that gets yanked that unravels my thinking.
Which brings us to the worst part of personality politics—or politics based on personality—if you let it get to you and aren’t careful. It diverts and poisons your own thinking and parsing through difficult questions and creates a weird form of vicarious intellectualism that ties your grasp on reality and positions on key issues to the perceived credibility, intelligence, and moral high ground someone else has allegedly accumulated—or lack thereof. Worse yet, it can shut down curiosity and prevent you from genuinely exploring or tackling certain issues and trying to understand reality for yourself.
The bitter pill everyone needs to swallow is that it is impossible to outsource our moral positions and political beliefs. And, handing them off to a stranger—no matter their perceived virtuousness or whether they’re a “good” person in other areas—is in many cases worse than avoiding an issue and choosing to remain entirely ignorant. Personality politics denies the responsibility you have in developing your own stances and convictions.
If you’ve ever unknowingly put yourself in a position where you feel the need to rush and jettison—or heavily modify—some or all of your beliefs and conclusions based on the perceived or completely-true character quality of anyone else, don’t beat yourself up too hard. Nobody is perfect. However, if you are aware that personality politics can trap you, or has trapped you, but choose to ignore it—or worse, lean into it—then you’re insulting the very idea of respect for your own individual and personal reasoning, and in some ways stamping your own thoughts as invalid. In this way, it says a lot more about you than anyone else, and demonstrates the every alluring power of personality politics.
