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The United States is in an abusive relationship with the president. As a therapist in clinical practice, I’m trained to spot the signs and offer strategies to help people cope. Abusive relationships are extremely dangerous, and this is no exception. Donald Trump’s gaslighting has led the country into a spiral of doubt, anger and despair. Gaslighting behavior has always been present in history, to a degree. It is par for the course whenever a person or entity wants to exert as much control as possible over others. But we haven’t seen this level of gaslighting since the Axis powers of World War II. Consider Trump’s statement: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not happening.” Or this from Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney: “Truth isn’t truth.” This is a classic gaslighting technique — telling victims that others are crazy and lying, and that the gaslighter is the only source for “true” information. It makes victims question their reality, becoming even more dependent on the gaslighter for “truth.”
Republicans who enable Trump are complicit
“If he says he’s going to turn the moon purple I believe him,” said Trump superfan Gene Huber at a rally this summer. And in fact, there is widespread denial among Trump supporters about facts that are perceived as undermining his authority. On Aug. 21, Trump’s former lawyer pleaded guilty to tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign-finance violations while Trump’s former campaign chairman was convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud. At Trump’s rally that evening, the crowd chanted, “Lock her up” — in reference to Hillary Clinton. Just this week, Trump deployed a classic gaslighting technique when asked whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh would be disqualified if he had lied about or mischaracterized his history with alcohol. Rather than answering the question, Trump said, “There are bad reports on everybody” and launched into accusatory remarks about Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker and Dianne Feinstein.
This is not normal behavior from anyone, let alone the president of the United States. But Trump’s behavior is so continually outrageous that it has been normalized — and mainstream Republicans who fail to call him out for fear of retribution are complicit in constructing this alternate reality. Dictators and would-be dictators use these same tactics to gain power and control over their constituents. The more gaslighting continues, the more off-kilter and confused the population becomes, until people are too tired to fight back. What do we do? When we are told something that we obviously know to be untrue, we experience cognitive dissonance. This is when things just don’t “sit right” with us. What we are experiencing is vastly different to our values and what we hold to be true. Pay attention to that feeling — and don’t be afraid to make your voice heard. Contact your representatives. Speak with your vote. Fight voter suppression. Remember, protesting is your constitutional right.
Find the courage to call out gaslighters
When you see gaslighting among your friends, family or colleagues, call it out for what it is. Provide evidence that what a gaslighter is saying and doing is not true. Educate others about gaslighting so that they, too, can start to identify it and call it out. But when you catch a gaslighter, simply present the facts to them, calmly and with purpose. Don’t allow yourself to get baited. Then walk away, shut off your laptop, leave it be.
(& may I humbly suggest simply refer them to thevoracs.com)
Shortly before Donald Trump took office, the retired Air Force lieutenant general in charge of the country’s nuclear weapons program packed up his office. He’d submitted his resignation, as required, and no one from the incoming Trump team told him to stick around. Trump’s Day One drew closer, and only after Ernest Moniz, the outgoing Energy Secretary, personally called some senators to alert them to what was going on did the Trump team perk up. It was the day before the inauguration when the officer got the call: Please bring back your belongings, he was told. The job’s still yours. Crisis averted, for now.
This anecdote of Trump team incompetence is one genre of tale told by Michael Lewis — the author of a ton of books you’ve read
— in his new offering, The Fifth Risk. Other stories in the book cover mismanagement, and others still look at a more targeted kind of destruction. Take, for example, the case of the weather. Over at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, bureaucrats await the arrival of Barry Myers, Trump’s pick to lead the administration. Myers got the nod after years of lobbying to stop the National Weather Service from communicating with citizens in his private capacity as the head of AccuWeather — which, itself, relies on the government’s weather information. If you’re not concerned about the prospect of weather forecasts that are reserved for those who pay for them, Lewis suggests, you should be. Stories like these may terrify in isolation, but when considered together, they overwhelm. And they exist, Lewis says, all over the government — far enough from the public eye that, the majority of the time, we have no idea they’re happening.
With almost everyone you talked to, you asked about their biggest concern, the biggest risk. After all this, what’s yours?
Sacrificing the long term for the short term. Trump’s such a myopic creature and so much of his behavior is driven by short-term rewards. If you look at the institution I was trying to describe, it’s a mess. I mean, the people are great, but they’re all old. Here’s an incredible one: there are five times more people working for the government over the age of 60 than under the age of 30. And you can find analogous situations with the technology. It feels like this old machine has been starved, neglected, shat upon for three decades, and it’s waiting for someone to come take a sledgehammer to the side of it, and he’s doing it.
Many of the America’s leading mental health professionals have concluded, based on Donald Trump’s public behavior, that he is emotionally and psychologically unwell. The veracity of these conclusions has been reinforced by what would, in other, more normal circumstances, be considered a series of stunning events. A senior official in the White House wrote an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times declaring that Trump is unfit for office and a danger to American democracy. (According to literary scholar Don Foster’s analysis for Salon, the likely author is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.) On at least two other occasions, White House insiders reached out to Yale University psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee with their concerns that Donald Trump was “unraveling” and that they were “scared” by his behavior. According to a New York Times report, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein considered secretly recording Donald Trump as part of a broader plan to recruit senior administration officials and Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Trump from the presidency.
Donald Trump’s lack of mental wellness continues to be on full display. Last week, in an almost 90-minute press conference Trump showed once again that he is detached from empirical reality, declaring that China respects him because of his “very, very large brain,” misrepresenting the facts and habitually lying about matters large and small. On Saturday night at a rally in West Virginia, Trump showed his authoritarian inclinations and grandiose, malignant narcissism by declaring that he and North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Jong-un, “fell in love” because of the “beautiful letters” they exchanged. What are the origins of Donald Trump’s mental health issues? How does his childhood help to explain his pathological adult behavior? Is Trump capable of self-reflection and empathy? Is he in fact a sociopath? Is Trump’s infantile behavior and chronic lying unprecedented in the history of the American presidency? Why are some people so intensely attracted to Trump and what he represents — and what does his power over his supporters reveal about their collective mental health and psychological well-being? In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Dr. Justin Frank. He is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center and a physician with more than 40 years of experience in psychoanalysis. He is the author of the bestselling books “Bush on the Couch” and “Obama on the Couch.” His newest book is “Trump on the Couch.” Dr. Frank’s work has appeared in Time magazine and the Daily Beast and he has appeared as an expert commentator and guest on MSNBC, CNN, PBS and other outlets.
Bad Movie
Scary Hateful Hysteria
It’s truly mind-boggling what we’re regularly witnessing from rabid Trumpeters. Can you believe the crowds we see at his rallies are actually happening here in America? Yes, it’s every bit as scary as it is crazy. It appears to be a collective warped mindset existing in an alternate reality so deceiving, with a malevolent hatred so demented, it threatens to rage out of control. That’s why it’s so important we be aware of this percolating wayward movement, in the hopes we can stem the tide before it blows. While I’ll admit making modern correlations to atrocities in our country’s past with pictures of those who delighted in lynchings is a bit much, but it is related in that it arises out of angry & evil hearts. So a related article is inside The-Cruelty-Is-The-
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police. The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile. Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted. Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her. Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together. We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life. The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process. This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
A blockbuster New York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty. Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
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