Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

That’s making the rounds all over right wing social media. I’m not kidding.

With the news that ISIS is taking responsibility for the terrorist attack in Moscow (and the US intelligence agencies have confirmed it) the right is experiencing some serious confusion. This is because Trump has said repeatedly that he defeated ISIS and recently has been saying that he did it in four weeks. The truth is that the US did manage to kill al-Baghdadi and ISIS was forced to give up territory in Iraq and Syria but Trump didn’t really have much to do with that. ISIS is still operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan ad has been active against Russia for a while.

Nonetheless, Trump’s lie is his one big claim to war leader fame and he’s milked it enough that his cult followers believed that he’s defeated them with his bare hands of something. They’re bewildered and creaked out so this is what they’ve come up with to soothe their damaged their psyches.

Brynn Tannehill, author of , “American Fascism: How the GOP is Subverting Democracy” wrote this twitter thread which I think is a nice succinct recitation of what awaits in a second Trump term:

Someone sent me this yesterday:

The basic premise is that the guardrails of US democracy are so strong that Trump couldn’t turn the US into a dictatorship even if he had 2 more terms.

This is hopelessly naïve. Let’s break it down.

First, a history lesson. The Weimar Republic lasted precisely 51 days between moustache-guy being named Chancellor and the Enabling Acts. Masha Gessen warned in 2016 in “Rules for Surviving Autocracy” “Your institutions will not save you.”

“The system is too strong” is silly. The Philippine constitution was a near exact copy of the US constitution after WWII. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972 using many of the same rationales used by MAGA (leftist plots, need for an autocrat)  

The article blows off several crucial elements in the danger. First (and already discussed briefly) is the vulnerability of the system to subversion. Trump / MAGA / Heritage plan to replace most senior Federal employees with True Believers(tm) via schedule F.  

President Trump has the constitutional right to replace any military leadership he wants with Mike Flynn and Jerry Boykin clones: Christian Nationalists who would happily purify the nation with fire, believing they are the sword of Jesus. 

Trump would also have the absolute right to invoke the Insurrection Act, which most legal scholars say isn’t challengeable at SCOTUS. Combine that with replacement of all the senior leaders (civil and military) at the DoD with True Believers… Yeah, you’re catching on.  

As has been noted, mass round ups of immigrants will require mass mobilization of the military, and invocation of the Insurrection Act. There’s also a high probability Trump will use the military to put down protests against his administration.

I also haven’t even touched on the DoJ, FBI, and other agencies being weaponized against his political enemies and the public. Which he absolutely intends to do, and will likely succeed at using regular appointments and Schedule F.  washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/…

Next, you have intent. This article presumes that the Trump administration would try to do everything 100% legally.

Oh my sweet summer child. This is the man claiming that the President can literally use SEAL Team 6 to kill his enemies as long as the Senate doesn’t convict. 

The Christian Nationalist organizations behind Project 2025 have been broadcasting for years that their plan is to seize power for generations and remake the country. They believe abortion is worse than the Holocaust and slavery combined, and that this is their last chance. 

They think that because the US is secularizing, particularly Gen Z, they must seize power quickly and totally. They are terrified of losing everything in 2028. Trump wants to die in office to avoid legal repercussions and to enrich his family.  

Thus, both are highly motivated to move quickly and definitively to end American democracy by any means necessary in order to ensure that they, or their guys, stay in power permanently. And this means moving quickly and decisively to break the system, not work within it. 

This POLITICO article suggests a number of institutions that will save us: Media, The Judiciary, and local authorities such as Cities, Mayors, Governors.

In reality, none of those is a major impediment in the eyes of a Trump administration.  

First, I’ll lead with the obvious: with true believer military leaders and the Insurrection Act, you can basically take anyone into custody to sideline them. Which includes the Media, the Judiciary, and Local Authorities.

The belief that the media will save us is laughable. The one that has consistently sugar coated what Trump is doing? That figured out that printing genocidal rhetoric about immigrants and trans people is profitable, so they do? The media that is actively dying? 

And, assuming that they don’t kiss the ring, and that Trump doesn’t cow them by using the DoJ to harass organizations or sue them out of existence or shut them down with the Insurrection Act, let’s assume that the media survives and publishes anti-Trump stuff. What then?  

It only affects Trump if he’s voted out of office or removed via popular revolution. And, this being a coup by fascists, they already have a plan for. There is ZERO intent to have free and fair elections after 2024. 

And if protests spread, they can always simply ride them out like Lukashenko did in Belarus. Or, if they’re serious enough to threaten the regime, they’ll already have the military leadership in place to shoot or arrest them all, Tiananmen-style

Stalin is quoted as saying “The Pope? How many divisions as he got?” implying that the Pope had no means to enforce anything. So too with SCOTUS.  

If leaders at the DoJ, FBI, DoD, etc… are loyal to Trump and the MAGA movement first, SCOTUS basically loses their ability to enforce ANYTHING. Which is why the top priority of Project 2025 is to find loyalist replacements for the top 54,000 people in government. 

This doesn’t explore the interesting hardball ways Trump can get courts to issue rulings he likes even without packing them (eg targeting justices or their kids with DoJ and IRS investigations. Or targeting their kids and grandkids. Or taking them into protective custody) 

When you sum it all up, Trump has at least three or four completely viable ways to sideline the judiciary that basically cannot be countered. (military arrest, ignoring their rulings, using the government against them and their families). 

The POLITICO article might argue back that the GOP wouldn’t DARE! This goes too far. To which I reply: this movement is led by religious fanatics who believe they are on a divine mission, and that anything they do is excused by saving all those souls and babies. 

You might as well expect the Iranian Mullahs or the Taliban in Afghanistan to suddenly decide that democracy and human rights have an intrinsic value greater than their vision for a Godly country. Democracy has no value, and the ends justify the means. 

Which brings me to the Governors, Cities, and Mayors argument. Again, none of these are insurmountable. Indeed, they’re relatively easy to circumvent if you think like a dictator who has the entire might of the government behind them, no morals, and are on a mission from God  

If state and local officials refuse to comply, simply declare them to be in rebellion or secession, scoop ’em up with law enforcement or the military, and replace them with loyalists who will run things “until the Insurrection is over”. 

What about protests and resistance in cities? It is my contention that Trump, and the people behind him, believe they can kill or imprison their way out of popular unrest. They’re planning on building internment camps capable of processing 11 million immigrants.  

There’s going to be plenty of room for political opponents, should they need it. But they believe they won’t because most of the time, protests fizzle out and come to nothing if ignored long enough. How much did the protests of 2020 actually achieve? 

Most protests can safely be ignored because they are ultimately powerless to replace the leaders backed by the military and law enforcement. It is only when those two turn on dictators that the regime falls (Ceaușescu in Romania). 

This is why the top priority of Project 2025 is to fill every significant position in government with fanatiker. So that when they are executing orders to crush opposition, everyone says, yes. 

So, if the protests in cities (by some miracle) don’t fizzle out, and do become a real threat to the regime, when the order to liquidate them Tiananmen-style comes everyone with a gun working for the government says “yes”. This is what Trump is preparing for. 

I have even argued that his depraved little heart wants this outcome in order to show the world he’s boss, he’s a tough guy, and must be taken seriously. He’s a bully and a thug at heart, and he threatens his way out of everything. 

In the end, the POLITICO article is wrong for a lot of reasons. The institutional and traditional guardrails can be easily circumvented using multiple means. The GOP already has plans to facilitate all the guardrails, and the intent is clearly there. 

The specific guardrails described in the article are not special: each can be bypassed very quickly and easily by a movement that has no use for democracy, religious goals that require ending democracy, and a non-negotiable goal to seize power permanently. 

It’s like a murder of a country or a democracy: we see that they have the motive (Christian Nationalist vision for the US requires that democracy die), the means (replacing everyone + Insurrection Act + ignoring the courts), & the opportunity (amoral Trump as President) 

We have intent, and boy howdy have they telegraphed this one. Between Project 2025, Claremont, and Trump’s statements about how he will use the DoJ and DoD clearly show that he’s comfortable using these tools to achieve his goal of creating an effective dictatorship.  

Last, we have the belief that they will get away with it. Competitive Autocracies rarely, if ever, fall. They are extremely stable. History tells us that if they seize power, it is unlikely anything can take it away. 

They believe the left is pacifistic enough that rebellion won’t be likely. They also know that the left values democratic processes enough that they can be convinced to keep participating in rigged / unfair elections they cannot win. (see: Hungary) 

This is why I tell you again: should Trump win, everything I have at hand tells me that the US’s plunge into Russian or Hungarian-style despotism will be more rapid than you can possibly image, because Heritage and the right already have planned it all out. 

It’s all there. People can choose to believe that the orange clown won’t do anything crazy and that the people that have managed to turn the Republican Party into a cult and pack the courts with extremists and toadies won’t actually manage to accomplish what they openly say they are going to do. That would be a mistake.

For all the bellyaching we all do about everything it seems like this should be something we should be more proud of.

It was sooo bad

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols has a book called The Death Of Expertise which he’s updated with a new chapter on the pandemic. He’s interviewed in the magazine:

Isabel: You argue that one mistake scientists made was to take on the role of elected officials. Can you talk me through that shift?

Tom: If you look back at those White House press briefings, where you had people such as Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci standing there uncomfortably while Donald Trump ranted about bleach and lights, you can see where they and other experts felt the need to clarify useful policies in a way that ordinary people could follow, especially because elected leaders—and not just Trump—were making a mess of things. Early in the pandemic, for example, I was impressed by then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who seemed like a steady and capable hand on the tiller. But Cuomo—as we now know and as I discuss in the book—was desperately trying to cover up his own lethal mistakes.

The scientists, people we’d mostly never heard of at the state and federal levels, stepped forward to issue guidance. But that’s not their job, and, frankly, talking to the public isn’t their main skill set. People, understandably, don’t want to take orders from appointed officials. When it came time to close public places—and, even more important, to reopen them, including schools—scientists got dragged into a huge fight that was more about politics than science. They got tagged as political figures rather than dispassionate experts.

You can blame a lot of that on Trump and the GOP making pandemic measures into political issues. But the way medical professionals supported the George Floyd protests was a big mistake and a completely self-inflicted wound on the cause of expertise.

Isabel: How so?

Tom: As I say in the Atlantic excerpt, a vocal part of the medical community said: These protests are so important that they should be allowed to happen despite all of our advice warning against such gatherings.

To say this while people couldn’t go to church, get married, or bury their dead inflamed a lot of people, including me. (My brother died in a VA long-term-care facility at the start of the pandemic that was later at the center of a scandal about the mishandling of COVID measures, and we couldn’t lay him to rest for weeks.) Many doctors, who had argued that their advice was apolitical, made a nakedly political decision. Fauci, wisely, tried to stay neutral, but by late summer, the damage was done.

I don’t think we can say definitively whether the protests increased COVID cases, but the bigger problem is that the argument is a no-win trap for experts: If the doctors were concerned that the protests could spread the disease, then they shouldn’t have signed on to the protests. But if the protests were acceptable with the appropriate precautions, then the doctors and the public-health officials should have allowed gatherings for everyone willing to use the same measures.

Isabel: I was really struck by the quote you include from a member of the COVID Crisis Group: “Trump was a comorbidity.” Is there a world in which COVID didn’t get quite so politicized?

Tom: I think, given decades of narcissism, political polarization, and general distrust in government, a pandemic was always going to be politicized. But in my view, Trump’s personal influence and his mobilization of an entire political party around the demonization of expertise cost lives. It’s still a remarkable thing, and it astounds me that anyone would think of putting him back in any position of responsibility anywhere.

Isabel: Why is listening to experts the task of a responsible American citizen?

Tom: It’s not our task to obey experts without question, but, yes, listening is a requirement of being a citizen in a democracy. In the end, political leaders should, and do, have the last word and make the call on most things, including war and peace. But we are not a rabble. We don’t just all shout in the public square and then demand that the loudest voices carry the day. Experts give all of us, including our elected leaders, information we need to make decisions.

We can choose to ignore that advice. Experts can tell us about risks, and we can choose to take those risks. But if we simply block our ears and insist that we know better than everyone else because our gut, or some TV personality, or some politician, told us that we’re smarter than the experts, that’s on us.

I too winced at at the doctors and scientists on TV making that clearly political commentary about the protests at the time, not because I was especially terrified of the spread of the virus through that means but because it was obvious it was a political not a scientific decision and would, therefore, further politicize all the scientific advice going forward. It was dissonant and weird but then everything was during that period.

But nobody politicized the scientific community that Trump and his henchmen. I don’t know if the professions will ever fully recover from it.

Too good not to share

Elaine Benes’ dancing (Seinfeld: “The Little Kicks“) was “like a full body dry heave set to music.” Her “little kicks” and the rest lost Elaine the respect of her office staff. For reasons that remain a mystery, Donald Trump’s “dancing” and cringey flag-fondling never seem to induce similar shock and revulsion among MAGA cult members.

Somebody a year or so ago saw the similarities and mapped in Trump as Elaine’s dance partner. I just saw it. DON’T LOOK if you have a sensitive stomach. As the man says below, nicely done!

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Don’t go counting chickens

Yes, yes, nobody wants to front Donald “91 Counts” Trump half a billion to cover his bond in the New York fraud trial judgment while he appeals (as he always does). Trump attorneys “have asked appellate judges to reduce, delay or waive the bond requirement.” But what will New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) do to collect when he can’t cough up the cash by tommorrow (Monday)? Well?

“Nothing happens immediately,” The Washington Post advises:

The appeals court generally issues rulings on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so there is very little chance it will act by Monday on Trump’s request to waive the bond requirement. If it doesn’t, and if Trump doesn’t post a bond by then, legal experts say there is nothing preventing James from calling on the New York City sheriffs or on city marshals to begin seizing his assets.

But there are reasons for her to wait. Legal experts say Trump has a chance of getting some type of relief from the appeals court. If James begins moving on his assets before the court rules, she may have to backtrack afterward. She also may consider the optics of moving quickly. As Nikos Passas, a Northeastern University criminology professor, put it: “She doesn’t want to be accused of being overly aggressive and unfair.”

Whatever she does, Trump will nasally whine about the unfairness “like nobody’s ever seen” of it all.

James has said she intends to take Trump’s assets if he fails to pay. “If he does not have funds to pay off the judgment, then we will seek judgment enforcement mechanisms in court, and we will ask the judge to seize his assets,” she told ABC News last month. In the interview, James mentioned Trump’s 40 Wall Street office building by name.

Experts say James would probably start with New York properties, partly because the LLCs that own two of them — 40 Wall Street and his Seven Springs estate in Westchester County — are defendants in the fraud case. James’s office already filed Engoron’s judgment with a court in Westchester County, a first step toward seizing the Seven Springs property, as CNN first reported.

The Post offers more details, of course, including how his Friday Truth Social boast that he has “almost five hundred million dollars in cash” undercuts his complaints that the court owes him some relief as he scrounges to arrange payment by Monday.

Each time the former reality show star presented himself to the court for arrest and processing, security concerns and undeserved deference meant the public was denied a proper perp walk. That would be one reality show many of us would like to watch. Cameras following as James formally seize Trump’s assets would be less cinematic and not pay-per-view worthy.

Trump may receive a trial date for his criminal hush-money case on Monday as well. The trial could begin “as soon as next month,” The New York Times reports:

The twin threats — on the same day, in the same town — crystallize two of Mr. Trump’s greatest and longest-held fears: a criminal conviction and a public perception that he does not have as much cash as he claims.

For decades, Mr. Trump employed a broad array of tactics to keep those fears at bay, learning from his well-connected father and his own ruthless lawyer and fixer, Roy M. Cohn. After fending off local and federal investigations, not to mention financial ruin, Mr. Trump came to believe that any problems could be solved by personal connections — and a whole lot of money.

“If Trump uses one thing to score the game, it has always been money,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former casino executive who worked for Mr. Trump in the early 1990s and wrote a tell-all book about him. “If he has more money than someone, he is winning and the other person is losing. And if someone has more money than Trump, he has the fear that someone will say he is losing to that person.”

Mr. Trump himself has also described the shame of becoming a criminal defendant four times over. Even as his advisers used the indictments to great effect in fund-raising and galvanizing his Republican base, the former president has conceded that the charges pained him.

Tell it to the minority groups he’s smeared, and to the subcontractors he’s cheated, and to the adversaries whose lives were upended by threats from his MAGA followers.

Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess fill out column inches summarizing Trump’s already familiar history of using wealth and personal connections to avoid accountability. Through a “public relations strategy” and “a mix of bare-knuckle tactics — attacking prosecutors as ‘corrupt’ and guilty of the same conduct of which he was suspected — and arm-twisting charm,” plus endless legal delaying tactics, Trump has to this point in life remained out of jail.

Don’t go counting chickens. What’s worked for him in the past may yet work for Trump now. “Equal justice” is a pipe dream. Trump’s life is proof that anyone accused in this country gets just as much due process as they can afford.

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No, Truth Social isn’t going to save him

If you were shaking your fist at the sky damning the fates that Trump is going to get a big cash injection from his lame social media platform, not to worry:

Donald Trump is on the verge of gaining what could be a massive windfall from his social media company. But it will likely come too late to save him from the financial peril he’s facing now.

Investors on Friday signed off on a deal to allow Trump’s new venture, which operates Truth Social, to be publicly traded on Wall Street, clearing the way for a possible multibillion-dollar payday for the former president.

But Trump’s stake will be tied up for much of the year under a so-called lock-up agreement, a normal arrangement for such deals to ensure that insiders don’t bail as soon as a company goes public and push down the stock price.

Trump could try to obtain a waiver from that rule, but even then he wouldn’t be able to sell more than a small fraction of his stake at any given time — up to 1 percent of the outstanding shares every quarter. And if he eventually does unload a large quantity of stock, the ramifications could be significant, according to investors and others watching the deal. That’s because Trump himself is the heart of the venture, they say, and any sign that his interest is waning could chill investors.

“It’s simply trading on Trump’s name,” said Kristi Marvin, founder of SPACInsider, a research firm. “People aren’t buying this because they like the fundamentals — they’re buying this because they like Trump.”

Now, the corrupt bargains between Trump and his biggest sugar daddy are another thing altogether. The fact that he is the biggest invester in Truth Social should trip some alarms but I guess nobody cares about his corruption.

This piece from Josh Kovensky about Manafort is epic. Switch over to read the whole thing. I didn’t know even half of this:

Entertain this scenario for a minute: there’s a country sitting on a geopolitical fault line between the U.S. and one of its main adversaries, Russia.

Its population is becoming increasingly pro-western; its governing and business elite largely remains beholden to Russia.  

After years of fraudulent elections, a politician with a mafia past, widely seen as a stooge for Russia, comes to power in this contested country. The rise of The Stooge is seen as a breakthrough moment for Russia, a roadblock in the path of the country toward closer ties with the West.

And yet, an American political consultant and insider in the traditionally hawkish Republican Party, who has worked with anti-communist guerillas around the world, has been quietly working his way into the inner circle of The Stooge and his backers. Once The Stooge is in power, The Consultant sets to work. Once in place, he works to whitewash The Stooge’s worst abuses and corruption, but all for a greater goal: persuading both The Stooge and a neighboring multi-state western polity that now is, in fact, the perfect time for the country in question to sign treaties cementing its move not toward Russia, but westward. 

By this point in the story, you may have a guess about which country we’re describing, and even, perhaps, who that consultant was. This is an unfamiliar way of telling one version of the story of Ukraine in the run-up to its 2014 revolution, and of Paul Manafort’s role in it as adviser to President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled after being deposed amid the tumult. It’s the version Manafort, convicted in a case stemming from the Mueller investigation and later pardoned by Trump, would like you to believe. And, it’s one that we may be hearing more of — and which has increased relevance given Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a last-ditch, violent effort to gather Ukraine’s lands into Russia’s immense embrace before it could slip away into the west. As Ukraine’s spirited defense begins to falter amid a GOP hold on U.S.-supplied ammunition, Manafort is making his return to the limelight. Per multiple stories this week, Manafort is expected to officially reenter Trump’s orbit this year as a campaign adviser, potentially taking on a fundraising role just as multiple court cases have left Trump strapped for cash. 

I’ve covered Manafort extensively for TPM and, before that, for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine. He’s a fascinating and unique figure who’s work has done more to shape the past decade and a half of American history than is commonly understood, largely via his up-close involvement in Ukrainian politics before its 2014 revolution. It’s that revolution which set Ukraine on a course westward, prompted Russian military aggression, and fatally poisoned ties between Washington and Moscow for the past decade. And while its clear Manafort was a key character in the story, the exact nature of what, exactly, he was up to, remains shrouded in questions.

From Russia’s perspective, Manafort may not seem quite so deserving of the pro-Putin branding that he’s received in the West. The covert lobbying scheme he was eventually prosecuted for was overtly aimed not at keeping Ukraine within Russia’s orbit, but at instead pressuring western officials and Ukraine’s leadership into signing an association deal with the European Union.

At the same time, and as subsequent years showed, he brought tons of baggage along with him: he lacked liquidity, and was seeking millions of dollars he said he was owed from Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska (Deripaska says that Manafort owed him money). There was also a lot from Ukraine which could damage his reputation. In the mid-2010s, as Manafort reemerged in American politics, his name was found on a supposed bribe ledger which appeared in Kyiv; his daughter’s phone was hacked, revealing embarrassing personal details. Several of his close associates in Ukraine would later be accused by western governments of being on the payroll of Russian intelligence; Manafort himself was later found to have given a close associate, allegedly a Russian spy, internal Trump campaign polling data in August 2016 which eventually made its way to Russian intelligence services. That associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, would in 2021 be labeled a “Russian agent” and sanctioned by the Treasury Department. 

During the Trump administration, as the Mueller investigation ramped up, Manafort was uniquely creative in finding ways to block law enforcement from determining what had happened. He successfully used encrypted messaging apps to delete messages, placing them beyond recovery; after being convicted on multiple fraud charges, he admitted to the unregistered lobbying campaign, before pulling a brazen move: he lied to prosecutors during the period of his supposed cooperation, preventing them from getting to the bottom of his involvement. That may have also allowed Manafort to become not a cooperator, but a kind of spy; his lawyers reportedly fed Trump’s legal team information about the Mueller investigation. 

But throughout all the murkiness and knottiness in his biography, one quality stands out: Manafort is a savvy dealmaker. Everyone has a price, everything can be traded; all that matters is a link to people in influence. It’s a rough-and-tumble mixture of business and politics which flourished in the countries left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Closely examining Manafort’s career unveils a byzantine story, a hall of mirrors which bears the hallmark of any good spy tale: its characters all master the interstitial space between one side and the other, where they can maintain the kind of fundamental ambiguity that allows them to project plausible allegiance to any actor. That’s the ambiguity which Manafort exploits for his central defense to the charge that he was working for a pro-Russian politician in Ukraine, or for a Russian oligarch. Rather, Manafort claims that he remained committed to American interests through that work, in spite of how unsavory his clients may have been. At one point, his zeal for allowing market forces to guide his political consulting landed him in Angola, working for anti-communist guerilla Jonas Savimbi. 

“There was no way I was going to, all of a sudden, change a lifetime of work against communism, the Soviet Union, and now Putin,” Manafort wrote in a 2022 memoir. 

Uh huh. Click over to read the rest of this and ask yourself how it can possibly be that this traitorous monster will be working in the US presidential election again. Oh my God.

It’s the pandemic, stupid

I’ve been writing here for a while that the reason everyone is so negative about everything because of mass PTSD from the pandemic. Here are a couple of eminent psychiatrists making the official diagnosis in The Atlantic:

America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives—a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty—is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior.

Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors can’t fully account for America’s national malaise. We believe that’s because they’re overlooking a crucial factor.

Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.

When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful—even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects. Researchers and clinicians working with combat veterans have shown how avoiding thinking or talking about an overwhelming and painful event can lead to free-floating sadness and anger, all of which can become attached to present circumstances. For example, if you met your old friend, a war veteran, at a café and accidentally knocked his coffee over, then he turned red and screamed at you, you’d understand that the mishap alone couldn’t be the reason for his outburst. No one could be that upset about spilled coffee—the real root of such rage must lie elsewhere. In this case, it might be untreated PTSD, which is characterized by a strong startle response and heightened emotional reactivity.

We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.

Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.

To come to terms with a traumatic experience, as clinicians know, you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past. It helps to have a narrative that makes sense of when, how, and why something transpired. For example, if you were mugged on a dark street and became fearful of the night, your therapist might suggest that you connect your general dread with the specifics of your assault. Then your terror would make sense and be restricted to that limited situation. Afterward, the more you ventured out in the dark, perhaps avoiding the dangerous block where you were jumped, the more you would form new, safe memories that would then serve to mitigate your anxiety.

Many people don’t regularly recall the details of the early pandemic—how walking down a crowded street inspired terror, how sirens wailed like clockwork in cities, or how one had to worry about inadvertently killing grandparents when visiting them. But the feelings that that experience ignited are still very much alive. This can make it difficult to rationally assess the state of our lives and our country.

One remedy is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present. In the early days of the pandemic, President Donald Trump mishandled the crisis and peddled misinformation about COVID. But with 2020 a traumatic blur, Trump seems to have become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent. Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if it’s done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.

They suggest that Biden should start talking about this more :

By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.

I think this is starting to happen, at least on social media, with the “are you better off than you were four years ago” stuff that’s coming up every day. I think Biden should talk about it in his speeches too. I know people don’t want to be reminded but they really should be, for political reasons alone. Donald Trump presided over the most catastrophic mass death experience of our lives and he did a terrible job.

But this article points out that we need to process this thing on its own terms and in order to do that we have to stop hiding from it. I don’t know if Joe Biden can lead us through that process but of all the political leaders out there he may be the best we have for such a task.