The author examines the appearances and formation processes of destructive populist developments in the Western world from a psychoanalytical perspective, using the example of Donald Trump, a prime example of a destructive populist. She draws on the concepts of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, Herbert Rosenfeld and Otto Kernberg, which build on each other, and drafts the basic features of a psychoanalytic explanatory model of destructive populist social processes. She illustrates the phenomenon of the »destructive populist fit« between Trump and his followers by means of an analysis of Donald Trump's well-documented election campaign in 2016, supplemented by his actions during the COVID 19 crisis in 2020. For a psychoanalytical understanding of this dynamic, she applies Bion's model of containing in conjunction with Herbert Rosenfeld's destructive narcissism and develops the concept of »perverted containing«: in the course of regression to a paranoid-schizoid level, aggressively destructive and omnipotent affects are idealised and the container function of democratic society is increasingly decomposed, distorted and finally twisted. Betaelements are not detoxified and digested but, on the contrary, are fueled. This dynamic implies permanent escalation through ever new destructive-exciting acts in order to maintain the symbiotic-destructive fit in the mode of destructive narcissism.