Trump the Orange: In Search of the Warrior Gene
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
Recent advances in behavioural genetics compel us to ask one of the great questions of our time: Does President Donald Trump possess the so-called “warrior gene”, or is he merely very loud?
The “warrior gene”, more formally a low-activity variant of the MAOA gene, has enjoyed a long and dubious afterlife in popular culture. It is said to correlate with aggression, impulsivity, risk-taking, and a fondness for dominance displays, particularly when combined with childhood adversity. It does not, contrary to some headlines, turn one into a Viking berserker. Nor does it explain Truth Social. Still, the idea provides a useful entry point for examining Trump’s self-presentation as a man forged for combat rather than, say, branding.
Trump himself has done much of the work. “I am your warrior,” he declared in 2016. “I am your retribution.” This is not the language of a cautious constitutionalist. It is the language of someone who has recently discovered a thesaurus entry for martial and is enjoying it immensely.
One place to begin this inquiry is with his mother. Mary Anne MacLeod was born in 1912 in Tong, on the Isle of Lewis, the youngest of ten children in a Gaelic-speaking household. The Outer Hebrides are not known for political moderation. They are wet, windy, historically Norse-raided, and genetically entangled with Vikings who arrived, stayed, and occasionally forgot to leave. If ever there were a landscape capable of producing a durable grievance, this is it.
The Viking presence in the Hebrides is well established, and from there it is only a short speculative hop to Greenland, settled around 985 AD by Norse colonists under Erik the Red. These settlers farmed, traded walrus ivory, built stone churches, and persisted for centuries until climate change, economic disruption, and conflict with Inuit populations brought things to a quiet end. The last recorded Norse event in Greenland was a wedding in 1408. After that, nothing.
This matters because Trump, a man who has repeatedly suggested buying (or taking) Greenland, appears to have experienced this episode of medieval history not as a cautionary tale but as an unfinished real-estate transaction. One imagines him gazing at a map and thinking: we were so close.
If the maternal line offers Viking romance, the paternal line supplies Teutonic discipline. Trump’s grandfather was born in Kallstadt, in what was then the Kingdom of Bavaria, a region whose military traditions stretch from early Germanic tribes through Napoleonic orderliness to the Prussian-adjacent love of uniforms. Bavarian soldiers were not berserkers. They marched, saluted, and obeyed.
Any such discipline, however, appears not to have survived Ellis Island. If it did, it was promptly mugged in Queens.
Behaviourally, Trump has offered ample material for those inclined to genetic speculation. He has flipped off autoworkers, insulted reporters (“Quiet, piggy”), threatened foreign governments, sanctioned covert operations to kidnap rival leaders, withdrawn from international agreements, and renamed geographic features with the confidence of a man editing a hotel brochure. At one point, the White House defended a middle-finger gesture as an “appropriate response”, suggesting that even the gene for embarrassment may be recessive.
And yet, genetics stubbornly refuses to cooperate with the story being told.
The MAOA variant does not cause violence. It does not cause authoritarianism. It does not cause capital letters. Even the studies most often cited by warrior-gene enthusiasts emphasise that extreme violence remains rare, and typically appears only under specific environmental conditions such as severe provocation or early trauma. Most carriers never commit violent acts at all.
More recent work complicates the picture further. Research reported in New Scientist suggested that individuals with MAOA-L may not be more aggressive so much as more focused on their own interests under pressure, better, in certain contexts, at comparing options and acting strategically. What looks like impulsivity can, in some situations, be heightened attention.
This distinction, however, rarely survives contact with popular culture.
What gives the “warrior gene” its enduring appeal is not explanatory power but cultural usefulness. Within hyper-masculine narratives, the gene is rebranded as a biological endorsement of dominance. Aggression becomes strength. Reactivity becomes courage. Risk-taking becomes proof of superiority. Complexity is flattened into destiny.
The term itself does much of the damage. “Warrior gene” is not a neutral description but a story heavy with romance and inevitability. It invites the fantasy that some men are born to lead, to fight, to conquer, and that restraint, empathy, or accountability are therefore unnatural impositions. Environmental factors quietly fall away. Responsibility is outsourced to biology.
In this telling, behaviour does not need explanation; it needs applause.
Seen in this light, the warrior gene is less about violence than permission. Permission to confuse volume with authority. Permission to treat intimidation as leadership. Permission to mistake spectacle for resolve.
This is where Trump fits so neatly.
He is not a warrior in any traditional sense. He has no interest in sacrifice, endurance, or silence. He is not stoic. He does not suffer gladly. He does not, as the Vikings once did, disappear quietly into history. He is, instead, a performer who has discovered that martial language sells. “Warrior” sounds better than “influencer”. “Retribution” polls better than “ratings”. Conflict, after all, is the most reliable form of attention, and attention is the one resource Trump has always understood instinctively.
If there is a gene at work here, it is not MAOA but something closer to an applause receptor. It responds not to threat but to crowds. It is activated not by danger but by cameras. It thrives in environments where grievance is rewarded and loudness mistaken for strength.
