How Trump Gets on Our Nerves

SUMMARY

• Almost half of Americans now consider members of the political party that they oppose to be ‘evil’.
• But refusal to recognise opponents as being capable, let alone worthy, of debate violates the normative promise of democracy.
• Interviews with ordinary people explore the mood effects of Trumpism – including anxiety and depression – that cannot be captured by quantitative data.
• In interviews, people spoke of a sense of permanent unease, as well as anger, anxiety, and disorientation. Many mourned for an old political reality.

Donald Trump's political enemies commonly assert that the President is not just authoritarian, erratic and nefarious, but psychologically unhinged, while Trump's supporters have invented a mental health condition which they refer to as Trump derangement syndrome (TDS), claiming that it induces ‘paranoia’ amongst Trump's liberal critics, preventing them from acknowledging any positive actions emanating from his administration.

It is one thing to feel offended by a political opponent, but refusal to recognise opponents as being capable, let alone worthy, of debate violates the normative promise of democracy. It is hardly surprising that average American citizens are feeling disorientated and anxious. Almost half of them now consider members of the political party that they oppose to be ‘evil’.

This is not just an American phenomenon. A YouGov poll of UK citizens conducted shortly after Trump’s victory discovered that the three main concerns expressed by British people who were worried about Trump's return to the White House were that he is a criminal, a misogynist and a mentally unstable person.

Trump's combination of erratic behaviour and complete unaccountability thrown many people into a subjective state of anxiety without efficacy. The lines between where worldly troubles end and personal depression begins become blurred.

My interest in this article is in understanding the mood effects of Trumpism by seeking qualitative insights into deep feelings that cannot be captured by quantitative data.

What do such people really mean when they say that news about Trump is impinging upon their mental well-being? And what are the consequences for democracy?

How has Trump’s election affected people’s mental health?

I conducted sixteen in-depth, semi-structured interviews with participants in a weekly art group; working and retired journalists aged between 35 and 70; and chefs and kitchen staff aged between 25 and 40 working in an upmarket city restaurant. All of these people felt that the constant flood of Trump-related news was unsettling their mental well-being.

In all of the interviews people spoke of a sense of permanent unease. Trump was pervading the social atmosphere. As a 55-year-old art group member put it: ‘It's in the back of your mind all the time’. At the same time, several people spoke of feeling strangely fascinated by Trump's flagrant behaviour: ‘You're sort of fascinated by the man. So, you know, you laugh and you joke… or you're just panicking’. Some even spoke of feeling shame, as if their very presence as remote observers made them somehow complicit.

A chef in his early 40s told me, ‘I just feel like I don't have any control over what's happening at the minute’. A 30-year-old member of a restaurant's kitchen staff had been telling me that she took no interest in politics and dismissed Trump as an irrelevant clown, but then she suddenly paused and, almost on the verge of tears, said, ‘I just feel completely helpless’.

A number of the people I spoke to felt personally triggered when they saw Trump behaving in an abusive manner towards people like Volodymyr Zelensky. A 55-year-old member of the art group spoke movingly: “I was in a bad relationship. I was married to somebody who used to physically abuse me. And it was that bullying, that unreasonable bullying, that I was witnessing.”

People do not simply appraise political situations through the lens of abstract ideology, but relate to them through their own subjective filters, commonly placing themselves in vicarious roles within political narratives.

It seemed to me that most of my interviewees were expressing forms of political anxiety, but nearly all of them insisted that they were angry rather than anxious. ‘I don't feel scared, I feel angry’, an art group member in her mid-40s told me.

According to affective intelligence theory, while anxiety (feeling afraid, uneasy or worried) tends to be a response to sources of danger that are ambiguous and unattributable, leaving people unsure of who or what to blame, aversion (anger, contempt, disgust or outrage) constitutes a response to a perceived assault upon one's core values and moral identity, typically by a known source. Anxious people are inclined to actively seek information, whereas angry are mainly attracted to information that confirms their aversive feelings, avoiding messages that contradict their beliefs.

Most of my interviewees told me that they purposely avoided exposure to news about Trump. A sous chef in her early 40s told me, ‘I control my intake of particular news items.’ Others gave careful thought to strategies of withdrawal from Trump-related news.

In the absence of fresh information, their negatives feelings hardened. Further probing was required, however, to gain an understanding of what lay behind and beneath this anger. But what did this offensive political image symbolise? Why did it matter to these people?

Does Trump spell the end of democracy?

In the immediate aftermath of the UK's Brexit referendum, the psychotherapist Susie Orbach wrote with profound insight about the psychological challenge many people were facing in adapting to the altered political landscape:

“The question of living with what is a new reality is not straightforward. Mourning what one didn’t realise one quite had, or even knowing that one did, involves a process of forgetting and then remembering”.

People become comfortable with familiar political realities within which they shape their identities and form their expectations.

Beyond the specific nature of his political values, Trump is upturning deeply embedded assumptions about how to promote, contest and implement political values. Sometimes referred to as a rules-based order, liberal democracy has long depended upon adherence to norms that Trump and his political enablers seem to have discarded with impunity.

Behind the anger was a profound sense of disorientation. An art group member in her late 50s elaborated: ‘I just think at the moment we seem to be all be going down a black hole together.’ Another said: ‘We can't run the world like this, with people like him, because the rules of how you run your life depend on the old-fashioned morals. We agree that this is okay. We agree that's not okay. I mean, that's how we run our lives. And that's how you run the world.’

My interviewees were in mourning for lost political practices, values and assumptions. What Orbach describes as ‘shock and shock again as a gradual realignment inside occurs’ entails formidable effort to generate new narratives capable of giving meaning to what feels like a wholly unfamiliar political reality.

Trapped within a meaning vacuum in which rival storytellers not only claim to possess definitive accounts of political reality, but assert that rival versions are delusional, political stress becomes the default responsive mode.

Responding angrily to this situation serves as a substitute for agency. People vacate the central scene of politics. The long-term consequences, both for citizens’ mental well-being and social cohesion, should not be under-estimated.

Digested Read produced by Anya Pearson.