Donald Trump's political rise and capture of the 2016 U.S. presidential race was the most talked about event in recent and remote political history. The event stunned experts and lay folk as a very different outcome was expected. Wilfred Bion (1961) proposed a theory of group processes that can be used to frame and interpret Donald Trump's rise and popularity. Basic assumption phenomena were activated in the group as it sought to defend against increasing psychotic anxieties related to work group activity and pre-existing social ontological changes. Pairing group phenomena emerged as the dominant basic assumption around which the group thematically organized itself, and the channel through which Trump was able move from peripheral to central. These phenomena revealed additional aspects of the group's functioning. The group's tendency to ‘elevate ideas,’ group members’ experience of the group as the mother's body, group failure to more effectively transform beta elements through alpha function, and group bias for introjective identification to the exclusion of projective identification combined to conflagrate the relationship between the group and the created leader. The author proposes a set of ideas which supplement Bion's thinking on groups as well as suggest the author's developing theory of group-cultural process.