{"id":107259,"date":"2020-11-07T20:01:39","date_gmt":"2020-11-07T17:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-psychological-toll-of-the-trump-era\/"},"modified":"2020-11-07T20:01:39","modified_gmt":"2020-11-07T17:01:39","slug":"the-psychological-toll-of-the-trump-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-psychological-toll-of-the-trump-era\/","title":{"rendered":"#The psychological toll of the Trump era"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The psychological toll of the Trump era<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n If what you wanted was a resounding Election Night repudiation of Donald Trump and Trumpism as compensation for the last four years of never-ending chaos and malice, this week was one extended sad trombone. But if what you wanted was simply for the bad man to go away, the eccentric and constipated American electoral system delivered, eventually.<\/p>\n

Joe Biden was declared the winner on Saturday morning after\u00a0Pennsylvania was called for him by the Associated Press, securing him the 270 Electoral College votes required to become the next U.S. president.<\/p>\n

It has been a long, punishing 10 or 12 years since that centaur<\/a>-on-an-elevator ride back in 2015.\u00a0It\u2019s difficult now to even conjure up the sense memory of a time when the news<\/a> cycle would contain just one tragedy or scandal in a week, as opposed to a constant wind tunnel of malfeasance that basically erased itself as it went along.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really just exhausted the citizens,\u201d says Kimberly Rose Clark, founding partner of Bellwether Citizen Response, a New Hampshire-based consultancy that uses behavioural, cognitive and emotional research to shape political and advocacy campaigns.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThey don\u2019t see them anymore, they don\u2019t feel them anymore, they don\u2019t have the capacity to<\/em> feel anymore and think rationally about what\u2019s being exchanged in terms of policy and communications.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Politics is always all-consuming for partisans who care a lot, or for people directly affected by the policies that result, but the sheer velocity and volume of the Trump era has trapp<\/a>ed tens of millions of unwilling audience members far beyond the borders of the United States. To be a citizen of the world over the last four years has been to show up at an adult dinner party and end up stuck at the table with a spoiled, defective child who refuses go to bed and keeps screeching \u201cLook at me!\u201d at ever-increasing volumes as his emotional state unravels.<\/p>\n

On Election Day itself, it was a British journalist quoting an American speaking to a British news network that perfectly captured it. \u201cA swing voter in Michigan told the BBC he chose Biden this time because \u2018He seems like the kind of guy where you don\u2019t have to listen to him talk every day,’\u201d Laurie Penny tweeted<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019ve been thinking about that for hours. \u2018Biden 2020: look, at least you can take your eye off him for five minutes.’\u201d<\/p>\n

A few days earlier, Biden\u2019s campaign had released a striking new ad<\/a>. It was\u00a0spare and slow, black and white, the images all unmistakable shorthand for this combustible moment: medics in full-body PPE bearing a shrouded body on a stretcher, a sheriff at the door of an anxious-looking family, a vast sea of Black Lives Matter marchers.<\/p>\n

The soundtrack\u00a0was Biden reciting a passage from the Seamus Heaney poem \u201cDoubletake,\u201d which he quoted throughout the race:<\/p>\n

History says, don\u2019t hope<\/em>
On this side of the grave.<\/em>
But then, once in a lifetime<\/em>
The longed-for tidal wave<\/em>
Of justice can rise up,<\/em>
And hope and history rhyme<\/em><\/p>\n

Then came the tonal shift: \u201cHope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge.\u201d We\u00a0saw Biden affixing something to the shirt of a small Black boy, Biden seated in a crowd with his head bowed, a crowd of protesters with their fists thrown up in rage toward Trump Tower.\u00a0The \u201crevenge\u201d here was not the American electorate\u2019s, but Trump\u2019s; what will we all be when we are no longer compelled to be dress-up dolls in someone else\u2019s vengeance fantasy?<\/p>\n

Trump appeared nowhere in the video, and yet the entire thing depicted the shadow he casts. The ad, much like the final days of the campaign, was less about\u00a0the specific policy failures and outright obscenities of this administration than it was about some existential sense of redemption for and relief from the psychological toll of the Trump era.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is about that human drama. From our perspective and from the vantage point of Canadians, there is a bad guy here and there is a good guy, and we want to see the bad guy lose,\u201d said Peter Loewen, a professor in the department of political science<\/a> and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u201cI don\u2019t want to get too flowery about it, but this is the most important country in the world and we are a human family in some sense\u2026and you would hope that we move toward some goals more than others.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Thomas F. Pettigrew, a professor emeritus of social<\/a> psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, spent weeks before the election being peppered with nervous emails from friends and acquaintances who knew he\u2019s a survey specialist and wanted his reassuring interpretation of the polls.\u00a0One of Pettigrew\u2019s neighbours in Santa Cruz\u2014just one person on their block is a known Trump supporter\u2014organized a get-together so he could give a short lecture on the only real questions anyone wanted to ask: is Biden going to win, and by how much?\u00a0Emails asking the same poured in from colleagues he\u2019s worked with in Germany, the Netherlands and Scotland, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a tea leaf, I guess,\u201d Pettigrew says.\u00a0\u201cI could see incredible stress.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He authored a much-cited paper<\/a> in 2017 identifying five common social psychology traits of Trump supporters; they see the world in terms of winners and losers, for one, and they are not objectively destitute, but rather have less than they expected to at this point in their lives or less than they believe \u201cless deserving\u201d people do. Pettigrew\u00a0was certain even on Monday that Biden would win, but he predicted too that everyone pinning such intense hopes for instant redemption on that outcome would be in for a bump down to earth, because Biden simply can\u2019t undo four years of corruption and destruction instantly.\u00a0\u201cI think there will be a certain amount of euphoria that\u2019s unjustified. They think the world will return to something like normal except for COVID-19,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it won\u2019t, of course, immediately.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, the election results themselves did not deliver the decisive cathartic release many people badly wanted, even\u00a0with Biden\u2019s lead in both the popular vote and electoral college tally likely to increase when ongoing vote counts in Nevada and Georgia are completed. The outcome\u2014more than 70 million votes had been counted for Trump as of Saturday morning, <\/strong>about 7 million more than the 2016 total\u2014suggested that last time around was not an accident and huge swathes of Trump voters did not want a refund on the last four years after all, or believe that someone ought to pay for the unnecessary deaths of\u00a0a quarter-million of their countrymen and that someone should be the man in charge.<\/p>\n

Or\u2014perhaps even more troublingly\u2014the results point to a political system so twisted and corrupted that many millions of people felt exactly that way, but they were muted by voter suppression, gerrymandering and brutal political manipulation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a sense that this has been un-American, in the full sense of the term,\u201d Pettigrew said of the Trump era. \u201cI think a lot of Americans feel that\u2014at least the anti-Trumpistas\u2014that this will be a kind of sign, not only to themselves but to the world, that America is coming back to what it was.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There is also the possibility that Trump\u2019s defeat will be a spark rather than a snuffer. It\u2019s an outcome the president himself overtly stoked over the last week with tweets predicting violence and fury; in the ham-fisted way of Trump, they were obviously instructions rather than warnings. News images of American cities preparing for Election Day looked like they were hunkering down before a hurricane, erecting barricades and cloaking stores and public buildings in plywood sheaths.<\/p>\n

Clark drew a deep sense of foreboding from reports of record gun and ammunition sales strip<\/a>ping store shelves in the run-up to the vote, driven by people afraid of whatever was coming next.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re not rounding any corners,\u201d said Clark.\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThings are just on the precipice now, but it doesn\u2019t take a whole lot to induce panic, and once that happens, all bets are off.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A week or so before the election, Megan Garber wrote an excellent extended meditation<\/a> in The Atlantic<\/em> on how Dwight Schrute, the malevolent buffoon of The Office,<\/em> was a harbinger of Trump in proving the lie of, \u201cHe\u2019s too incompetent to be dangerous.\u201d Garber traces Dwight\u2019s evolution from an essentially harmless and deserving punching bag to a true menace whose actions have consequences, for others and eventually for himself. That is where the catharsis of Dwight lies, she argues, because in Trump\u2019s America, shamelessness has seemed like a shield from all consequences.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis might help explain why the age of Trump has also been an age of \u2018chaos.\u2019 Press briefings, these days, are chaotic. Entire news cycles are chaotic. I recently found myself describing an omelet I\u2019d made as chaotic. The assessment is useful in part because it channels the frenzy of this moment\u2026\u201d Garber wrote. \u201c<\/span>But to describe something as chaotic is also to give up on describing it at all. It is to concede to the mess, whether the thing that is breaking is an egg or a democracy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The election results may have revealed themselves slowly, but once they did, chaos ceased to reign, or at least it started to look desperate rather than all-consuming. Trump delivered a live address from the White House on Thursday evening that was so flaccidly unhinged and ]dishonest, he barely looked committed to it. Several news networks cut away immediately because his rambling was so baseless; whether they finally found the will to do so because accusing the entire democratic system of corruption is beyond the pale, or because Trump was already looking like yesterday\u2019s man, is up for debate.<\/p>\n

During an NBC town hall last month, anchor Savannah Guthrie condemned Trump\u2019s embrace of conspiracy theories and falsehoods, telling him,\u00a0\u201cYou\u2019re the president, you\u2019re not like someone\u2019s crazy uncle,’\u201d wrote\u00a0<\/a>Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post<\/em>. \u201cOn Thursday, networks stopped treating him like the former and started treating him like the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s an incredible thought to wear like a weighted blanket for your exhausted mind. One day\u2014not right away, and frankly probably not even very soon\u2014you will go an entire day without hearing Donald Trump\u2019s voice or even his name. It is impossible right now to know if his section of the history books will be a dark little plot diversion that gets summed up in a trivia text box low on one page, or if he represents the opening of a whole new chapter.<\/p>\n

But however it ends up, today was the beginning of President Donald J. Trump becoming an artifact of the past, rather than the raving, preening, menacing, mewling centre of the entire world\u2019s present.
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n