Today I read Carl Jung’s essay “On the psychology of the Trickster-figure,” which was published in his book, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. My goal was to see what good it might do us to have Donald Trump as president, beyond the value he’s already given to the millions of voters who used their ballots to express their frustration with the Biden administration.

A trickster, as you probably already know, is someone who flagrantly violates all sorts of rules and expectations, because it’s in their nature or because they can get away with it or because it’s fun. As Jung puts it, “Although he is not really evil, he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness.”

In gaming alignment terms, this person is “chaotic neutral,” with an emphasis on “chaotic.” He doesn’t care about consequences (“sheer unconsciousness”) and doesn’t have much empathy (“unrelatedness”). Usually this person is mythological or fictional, like Loki or Coyote or Bugs Bunny. You and I, however, get to see one on TV pretty much every day, if we look for him.

From wacky ideas like adding Canada and Greenland to the United States to his anti-constitutional approach toward making cabinet appointments to his alarming attacks on our basic institutions, Trump is very much a Trickster.

When Trump spent that Pennsylvania rally dancing to his campaign soundtrack, many commentators saw it as evidence of his cognitive decline. That was one possibility, but it could also have been just, whatever, he felt like dancing, so he did. If the rules don’t apply to you, why not revel in it?

(Honestly, I’d rather have a leader who spends his campaign rallies goofing off than let him test his theory that he could get away with shooting someone in downtown New York City.)

For his most devoted followers, Trump’s outrageousness is a big plus. In today’s slang, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” They want him to be the powerful outsider who overthrows the system and saves them from its tyranny. And this was something I learned from Jung today – the Trickster is often expected to take on the role of “savior.” He’s not bound by the rules, so (in theory) he can cut right to the heart of problems and fix them.

However, the presidency of the world’s most powerful democracy is an odd place to find a Trickster. As Fareed Zakaria says in The Age of Revolutions, “… democracy is about rules, not outcomes.” It’s jarring, if not outright worrisome, to put the care of our most precious institution into the hands of someone who doesn’t value it – indeed, who consistently violates its basic premise, that rules matter.

And yet, Donald Trump has twice been elected President.

Part of it probably comes down to education. The more we everyday citizens know about the federal government in all its complicated nuances, the more we understand how much we actually rely on its services. I’m thinking back to the people who were vigorously anti-Obamacare but insistent on keeping their ACA coverage – not realizing that the two are identical.

For many Trump voters, though, the federal government isn’t the people who make sure we get our health insurance, our tax refunds, our disability benefits, our national parks, our safe drugs and clean air and clean water and clean food supply. Instead, it’s some vague and apparently menacing “Deep State.” Our distress at the disruption of the government is vivid and meaningful, whereas for many of them, it’s “shaking things up,” which could be worth it.

As Arthur Koestler wrote, “Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behavior,” and “the defeat of habit by originality” is “an act of liberation.” For Trump fans, the same may apply to social conventions and even laws.

Another aspect of the Trickster is that even though rules don’t apply to them, that doesn’t mean the rules are gone – it just means the Trickster is the exception. When Biden pardons his son, that’s bad. When Trump pardons the members of his family who have done things arguably worse than Hunter Biden, that’s just Trump.

And now we’re seeing others who want in on this flouting of rules, like the tech bros signing up as Trump fans. If you’re facing legal challenges, like Elon Musk, maybe the easiest way to disregard regulations is to disband or defund the agency in charge of seeing they get carried out? Trump was openly courting the angry young dudes who apparently see themselves as entitled billionaire wannabes. Hey, let’s all be bigger than the law!

On the other hand, as Jung tells us, part of the social value of having a Trickster in our midst is that “it is the best and most successful method of keeping the shadow figure conscious and subjecting it to conscious criticism.” Every time we notice Trump violating something we value, and we talk about it, our values are reinforced. If we cannot take for granted our sense of underlying order, then its eventual restoration will feel all the more hard-won.

Usually, however, the Trickster figure is someone on the margins, not the one at the center of things. Even if the majority of voters get fed up with him – assuming their news sources let them know what he’s doing – the complicating factor is that Trump has been normalizing obnoxiousness.

To the extent that Trump is a role model for American citizens, it may take a lot of work to bring back graciousness, decency, and kindness – traits that even their most severe critics would still associate with presidents like Reagan and the Bushes.

The next four years are surely going to be “interesting.”