This election season, many people who wouldn’t be natural allies of centrist Democrats under normal circumstances are pulling out all the stops to rally their particular audience to vote against Trump’s re-election, via voting for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump are organizing their fellow disaffected Republicans. Former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden put out a message that is likely to influence the national defense and intelligence communities toward Biden. And leftist groups such as Vote Trump Out are swaying their fellow progressives who can’t stand centrist Democrats—and who are leaning toward voting for a third party or not voting at all—to vote against Trump by voting for Biden.
When such a wildly diverse group of organizers, across the right and left, comes together for a common goal, we’re clearly in an unprecedented all-hands-on-deck moment. Everyone’s doing their part.
But up until recently, there’s one group of potential Biden voters who have not been the subject of voter outreach: kinky, submissive male Trump supporters with humiliation fetishes.
Now, thanks to a Las Vegas-based professional dominatrix named Empress Delfina, this once-overlooked voting bloc is covered—and may be voting Biden. By force.
She calls it “Trump Conversion Therapy.” Her ad for this service reaches out to these potential Biden voters as follows: “Here’s your chance to get berated for being the degenerate Trump supporter you are. I reverse the brainwash you’ve succumbed to that made you into a Simple Stupid Drone. By using lethal mind fucking language and making you repeat dumbass chants like your Bullshitter in Chief made you do to warp you into submission, I transfer your ownership to me for my personal gain and entertainment. Embrace that you need to be saved from being a Trump-bot. Call now to begin your Trump Conversion Therapy.”
At $1.99 a minute, business is booming.
I came across Empress Delfina’s ad on her Twitter, and knew I had to interview her. Here’s what she’s up to in the final days of the 2020 election.
How did you get the idea to do “Trump Conversion Therapy?”
I was already doing webcam and film work with humiliation fetishes. Ever since Trump got elected, I saw I was arguing with his supporters on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I found my accounts getting banned for certain language. There was just so much rage on both sides, and I found myself in the comments humiliating the Trump supporters and just mocking their stupidity. I mocked how they’re not capable of independent and critical thinking. The fact that they can be sold anything. How easily they were manipulated and sold a bill of goods.
I saw an article about Mike Pence talking about supporting programs targeted at gay people to get them to “change their sexual behavior”—which was widely interpreted as a dog-whistle for conversion therapy. So I tweeted out to the Trump supporters I was arguing with, “Hey, if you think gay conversion therapy works, let’s try Trump conversion therapy.” Of course, the Trump supporters went ballistic over that. But they’re already on a pro Domme’s page—so I wasn’t too surprised when a few of them slid into my DMs saying they were interested in it. I was already doing small penis humiliation with a lot of these guys, so jumping to political humiliation wasn’t that much of a stretch.
Do you think some of those Trump guys on your social media might have been getting off on their humiliation fetish already? Without paying you, they just wanted to get a free smackdown by a pro Domme in that way?
Correct. At one moment, I realized, “Wait a minute, I think this guy’s getting off on it.” Because here I am, a hot girl humiliating him, and he’s getting the attention for free. That’s when I decided, “I should get paid for this shit.” And also try to get them to vote for a different leader, a Democrat. So that’s when I put my ad for Trump Conversion Therapy up.
So what happens in a Trump Conversion Therapy session?
Maybe half the guys just want to argue. They’re not open to getting converted at all. They just call to start berating my liberal politics. And I’m like, “Hey, if you want to pay me $1.99 a minute to argue with me, go right ahead. You’re not getting anywhere with me, and I’m happy to profit off your stupidity—just like your leader did.”
But the other half—the half I care about—is actually open to being persuaded. Many of them see what Trump has become, what he’s done, and regret their vote. So I tell them, “I can help you. You’ve been brainwashed. I can deprogram you.” I studied cults in college, and when I saw Trump and his rallies, I thought, “This is just what cult leaders do.” So his followers need to be deprogrammed, just as if they’d been in a cult—because they have.
How do you deprogram them?
I had one Southern man call me and tell he was regretting his Trump vote. I asked him if he’d been to Trump rallies, and he said he had. So I asked him, “Which chant did you used to like the most at the rallies?” They like to chant—that’s part of the whole programming. With cults, do you notice that? All the chanting. Same thing with religion—chanting helps with the brainwash.
He used to chant, “Lock her up! Lock her up!” So I said, “Let’s make up a new one for you. Now you need to chant, “I’m Putin’s bitch!” So he starts screaming, “I’m Putin’s bitch!” And then I start having him sing it—so he’s singing, “I’m Putin’s bitch!” He has to sing it because music helps with the brainwash. I call it deprogramming, but in a way, I’m kind of brainwashing them myself. I started to notice that these Trump supporters were very easily influenced—they’re the kind of people who are susceptible to a cult. You can manipulate them. You can sell them anything, just like Trump did to get their votes. I’m pretty much using the same tactics that Trump used to manipulate them, except I’m manipulating and re-programming them to go the other way.
Does this run afoul of election laws—as with Tana Mongeau, who was offering free nudes for a Biden vote?
I’m doing an unusual type of political persuasion, for sure, but I’m not offering anything of value to these men if they do vote for Biden—in fact, they’re the ones paying me. “Forcing” in a BDSM context is a form of consensual, fantasy role play. As in all BDSM, my clients have safe words, and if they don’t want to do something, they don’t have to. Or they can just hang up the phone, and stop paying me.
It’s not coercion in any legal sense. I’m not going to punish them in any real way, and they know that. I’m just making sure they know that I think they’re fucking groveling, boot-licking worthless loser tools who couldn’t get their shit together to leave their pathetic cult, if they vote Trump. And they usually like to please me.
How did you come to study cults?
I was raised Catholic, so I was kind of beaten over the head with a Bible as a kid. I was punished for my independent thinking when I was a child. So when I learned about cults later on, I realized I was kind of raised in a cult—that’s what religion is. It gave me this instinct toward not falling for what people tell me. The common denominator for people who get pulled into cults, including the Trump cult, is that they need to submit their critical thinking to someone else and live for someone else. They don’t find the worth within themselves to live for themselves. They’re willing to give up their independent mind, their free will. So, I profit off of that. I profit off their weakness. But I also try to do right and help them—and help the world by changing their minds. I say, “Look, you can overcome this. I can help you. I can help you make it right.”
But because these Trump-bots, as I call them, can’t think for themselves, sometimes it goes from them worshipping Trump, to them worshipping me the same way they worship him. It becomes this obsession for them. And that gets a little creepy, and I have to scale back on my work with them.
Do some of these guys feel guilty about their votes? And if so, what do they feel guilty about?
Yes. It depends on the headline of the week. For example, when the images of children locked up in cages were coming out, those images affected them. A lot of them were calling and saying, “What am I doing? Why are things so messed up? I don’t understand it.” Once they’ve opened up a bit, and they start to see the errors of their ways, as their Domme, I order them to vote the entire Democratic ticket. I did it for the midterms, and I’m doing it now. I’m telling them, “Vote with your pussy.”
What do you mean when you tell these Trump guys “vote with your pussy?”
The guys who call me are either totally submissive, or have a submissive side, which is not something they get a lot of support or validation for in their culture of machismo. My theory is that a lot of Trump supporters are secretly submissive, but feel ashamed about it and must therefore keep it a secret. With Trump, they have an excuse to be subservient, hand over their brain to the leader, and outsource their thinking and control to him. They hide their submission publicly by acting macho. But in the end, they’re still on their knees, sucking Trump’s dick. So I make them suck a dildo, or put it in their butts, pretending it’s Trump. As they do it, I make them yell, “I love getting railed by Trump!”
I point out these contradictions to them, and they start to get it. I put them in touch with their inner feminine, which they have no access to in their culture. I see it like all the homophobes on the right who are secretly gay. Many of these outwardly-macho Trump guys have a secret inner feminine side, but they don’t know how to deal with it. They don’t have an outlet for it. I give them that outlet.
Do you think this dynamic is related to why so many Trump supporters seem to be obsessed with cuckolding? The last election cycle was, to my knowledge, the first time a specific BDSM fetish became common parlance in political discourse: they were always insulting liberal men as “cucks.” Do the Trump guys who call you have cuckold fantasies?
Absolutely. I’d say more than the Democratic guys who hire me. Despite the conservatives always calling them “beta cucks,” liberal guys who call me are typically more comfortable in their sexuality and their own sense of masculinity. Liberal guys don’t have as much of a reason to be so ashamed about any submissive fantasies they may have, because they don’t have as much of an obsession with toxic machismo. They don’t need to go around questioning other guys’ masculinity and trying to show off.
The conservatives are the ones always going on and on about how liberal guys are cuckolds. But to me, it’s like, “whoever smelt it dealt it.” Many of them are deeply insecure about their manliness, and that’s why they're obsessed with other men’s manliness, and worried they don’t stack up. The cuckold fantasy sessions I do with them are a safe space where they can be honest with themselves and with me and explore what they’re so ashamed and secretive about.
Who was your candidate in the primaries, and why?
Marianne Williamson. I’ve followed her work for over a decade. When I saw her throw her hat in, I was like, “Yes, let’s return to love and humanity.” When Marianne dropped out, I caucused for Bernie. Love wins over hate. I truly believe that. I truly believe in kindness. I know it sounds a little hypocritical, because of the work that I do as a Domme. I humiliate and berate men for a living—sometimes I’m even hateful to them.
People always say, “Oh, you hate men.” But that’s not true. I love men. They seek me out and pay me for this, because they don’t have anywhere else to go to explore this side of themselves. I believe in my work. I believe in educating men, showing them the right path.
How do you feel about Biden/Harris? I know a lot of sex workers feel strongly conflicted about voting for Harris, because they want to vote Trump out, but Harris was a major architect of FOSTA-SESTA, the most anti-sex-worker legislation in years.
Biden is just a seat-filler. He’s just there to transition us out of this Trump hell. Yeah, I’m not thrilled about Kamala Harris. FOSTA-SESTA was a huge step back for sex workers, and her role in that was unconscionable. But she’s what we have now on the ticket to beat Trump. Hopefully, we can get a young, sex-worker-friendly progressive to run against Biden or her in the 2024 Democratic primaries. But one thing’s for sure: I’d rather spend the next four years pushing centrist Democrats, bad as they are, toward sex-worker rights than Trump cultists in a second term.
Tell me a bit about your background.
My parents are from Puerto Rico—my father is white, born on the island, and my mother is Black, born in Brooklyn. I was born in New York. I’m a Brooklyn girl. I grew up very poor, and started stripping when I was 18 just to survive. A client encouraged me to apply to college, and helped me fill out my applications. It took me eight years to graduate, as I studied part-time while I stripped to pay for it. After college, I moved to Las Vegas to continue my stripping career. I’ve been in the skin business for 24 years now. I started camming about 10 years ago and continue to this day. I do clips, phone sex, and private Skype sessions. I’m an activist with sex workers. And also I rescue dogs.
Do you have family on the island now?
No longer after Hurricane Maria. They all had to relocate to Florida and Texas. That’s one of the big things I hate about Trump—the way he just completely ignored Puerto Rico after Maria.
I imagine a lot of these guys are racist toward Latinos, like their leader. What are the dynamics of them submitting to a Latina woman? Does that come up?
One of the guys I was deprogramming—he had loved chanting “Build the Wall!” at Trump rallies. So I made him chant that, while he was sticking a hot pepper up his ass. I made him break it in there.
Oomph, does that hurt?
He sure sounded like it hurt, as he was howling his chant. I told him that was punishment for supporting Trump. Then I ordered him to repent, and please his Latina Goddess, by voting Democrat this election. He said, “Yes, anything to please you, Goddess. I’ll mend my ways and make it up to you. Will you forgive me? I’m voting Biden.”
