Perhaps Donald Trump can in his post-presidency become an advocate for people with ADD. Forming coherent sentences and staying on any topic other than himself for more than a minute or so is a challenge for him. His Tuesday tweet about Republicans’ death wish might have had more bite if he had been capable of developing the thought.
Trying to understand Trumpism is like asking a hoarder why she/he hoards. What are these for? Why are they here? Where did they come from? The questions assume there are rational answers when rationality has nothing to do with it. With Trump, his behavior is about more than psychological damage from his upbringing. It is about how his brain is wired.
For his followers, Trumpism is about how they feel. UC Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild tells The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson that Trumpism “exists beyond the logic of policy“:
“If there’s one thing I think the mainstream press still gets wrong about Trump, it’s that they are comfortable talking about economics and personality, but they don’t give a primacy to feelings,” Hochschild told me. “To understand the future of the Republican Party, we have to act like political psychiatrists.”
Hochschild wrote in her 2016 book, “Strangers in Their Own Land” that there is a “deep story” playing out with a large faction of Americans:
The deep story went like this: You are an older white man without a college degree standing in the middle of a line with hundreds of millions of Americans. The queue leads up a hill, toward a haven just over the ridge, which is the American dream. Behind you in line, you can see a train of woeful souls—many poor, mostly nonwhite, born in America and abroad, young and old. “It’s scary to look back,” Hochschild writes. “There are so many behind you, and in principle you wish them well. Still, you’ve waited a long time.” Now you’re stuck in line, because the economy isn’t working. And worse than stuck, you’re stigmatized; liberals in the media say every traditional thing you believe is racist and sexist. And what’s this? People are cutting in line in front of you! Something is wrong. The old line wasn’t perfect, but at least it was a promise. There is order in the fact of a line. And if that order is coming apart, then so is America.
Hochschild tested this allegory with her Republican sources and heard that it struck a chord. Yes, they said, this captures how I feel. In the past few years, she’s kept in touch with several of her connections from the Deep South and keenly tracked their philosophical evolution. She’s watched the locus of their anxiety move from budgets (“They never talk about deficits anymore,” she told me) to the entrenched and “swampy” political class. She also witnessed the Trumpification of everything. “There used to be a Tea Party,” she said. “Now it’s all Trumpism.”
The logic of policy has nothing to do with it. Trump is a kind of dancing orange dinosaur who has captured the imaginations of his base. He gave shape to their feelings. He gave voice to them. Hochschild explains, “From his first rallies, Trump’s basic message has always been ‘I love you, and you love me, and we all hate the same people.’”
With the year now ending and Trump’s reign too weeks from now, Trump’s base could experience his political demise as a relationship with him broken up by Joe Biden. Or if Trump never leaves the scene, perhaps his exit will be an extended three days in the tomb after which they look for him to rise again. Either way, they will experience personal loss atop hating people they feel threaten their place in line. At some point it may even dawn on them that the American Dream on the other side of the ridge disappeared long ago. They have been waiting for nothing. They will want someone to blame.
If they have lost family members or jobs to Covid-19, their losses will be even more concrete. The losses of this year extend to people outside the Trump cult, to the 80 million-plus who voted for Biden, and to their families. This has been the worst year most of us have experienced. The lag in Covid vaccine distribution means 2020 won’t really be over until church choirs can sign again safely without masks.
We are all going to need psychiatrists in 2021, and not just political ones.
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