It’s possible that no previous presidential candidate, at least in
contemporary American history, has exhibited the range of aberrant,
offensive and outrageous behaviors Donald Trump has. Belligerent,
unstable and anything but presidential, Trump has turned much of the
country into armchair psychotherapists. His behavior is so undisciplined
and erratic, he’s even prompted licensed clinicians to break with
orthodoxy—not to mention
rules—to
declare he suffers from a personality disorder.
Despite
all this, Trump rose to the top of the Republican ticket, and as
recently as September, posed a real and viable threat to Hillary
Clinton’s candidacy. Even with his chances of a successful Hail Mary
growing slimmer by the day, Trump seems poised to collect about 40
million votes, a sizeable segment of the voting populace. Those numbers
should force those of us who oppose Trump to understand what motivates
those who support him.
One contributing factor is how
ideologically, economically and socially divided America is. Those
factors are compounded by elevated—if not unprecedented—levels of
anxiety, fear and trauma.
Much of the country’s wealthiest and most
highly educated citizens live along its coasts and in its major cities.
Trump supporters not only live outside those areas, they feel as if
they’re foreign in nearly every conceivable sociocultural way. This goes
hand-in-hand with a number of other social ills: a raging opiate
epidemic, persistent gun violence, the disappearance of manufacturing
jobs. It’s no wonder America now finds itself coping with a troubling
trend of middle-aged white, mostly working-class
men and
women prematurely succumbing to the wages of despair: drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide.
Trump
has expertly exploited the pervasive pain, anger and marginalization of
millions. From the outset—and far more than most of us realized 18
months ago—Trump recognized that politics is an emotional business, and
that people’s political thoughts and allegiances are often shaped by
fear, lack of knowledge and trauma. Trump’s overt expressions of racism,
misogyny and homophobia have been ugly, naked appeals to those
feelings.
Much of Trump’s campaign is fear based. For a variety of
reasons, many people are fearful of many things, and their fears are
egged on by a news media that thrives on creating anxiety. Advertising,
political ads, news coverage and social media all send the constant
message that people should be afraid, very afraid. The result is that
many people are fearful of the wrong things, which makes our society
ripe for militarism, spying and Trump’s own messaging. These fears often
have little to do with the things people should really be afraid of.
But the constant fear-mongering explains a lot of Trump’s appeal. As
AlterNet said last year, “
People
cannot think clearly when they are afraid. Fear is the enemy of reason.
It distorts emotions and perceptions, and often leads to poor
decisions.”
The best way to make sense of the Trump campaign’s
success is by examining its impact on millions of Americans’ mental
states. When Donald Trump says some outlandish thing and then denies it
in the same breath, how does that affect our perceived reality? If a
presidential debate starts to feel like a sick twist on
The Most Dangerous Game,
how can we name and cope with the unsettling feelings we experience?
Why does fact-checking mean absolutely nothing to a wide swath of the
American populace? And perhaps the most obvious question of all: are we
watching an illogical fool or a masterful psychopathic, narcissistic,
master manipulator at work? Or perhaps both?
We’ve created this
handy guide to identify the brain games we’ve witnessed over this
seemingly eternal race. We begin with the psychopathic and narcissistic
personality, which includes traits Trump so often exhibits. Then, we’ll
look at some of the realities of life for so many Americans, which make
them vulnerable to Trump’s appeals. We take apart the tactics and
defense mechanisms used to cope with the economic and social changes
that have changed the nature of life in America for so many.
Here’s your useful political glossary of psychological terms for the 2016 presidential election.
Psychopathology and Sociopathology
Though both fall under the designation of
antisocial personality disorder, psychopathology and sociopathology differ in critical ways.
The general consensus is that psychopaths
are born, while sociopaths
are made. That is, while psychopaths are hardwired, sociopaths are products of their (often troubled) upbringings and environments.
While
psychopaths and sociopaths share some traits—a disregard for laws and
societal rules; lack of conscience; little concern for others’
well-being; frequent use of lies and deception; impulsivity—they present
in highly different ways socially. Sociopaths,
according to
psychologist Scott A. Bonn, “are likely to be uneducated and live on
the fringes of society, unable to hold down a steady job or stay in one
place for very long.” People may categorize them as “disturbed,” and in
some cases, they exist as the stereotypical “drifter.” They’re able to
form social and emotional bonds, though with greater difficulty than
most people.
Psychopaths don’t have deep, meaningful connections
to others; they lack the empathy to do so. That said, they’re able to
convincingly mimic those feelings, so that those around them might be
oblivious to their disconnectedness. They often appear to be more
charming and engaging than the average person, and often attain high
levels of education and
career success.
For
the record, while Trump outranked Hitler when Oxford University ranked
the candidates according to the standard Psychopathic Personality
Inventory, he wasn’t the only one who scored high numbers. According to
the
UK’s Telegraph, the study placed Clinton somewhere “between Napoleon and Nero.”
Narcissism
Narcissism isn't all
bad; most of us possess some narcissistic traits that ensure we have
healthy levels of self-confidence and positive self-images. The
unhealthy kind of narcissism happens when self-assuredness grows out of
control,
resulting in grandiosity and what might be dubbed a superiority complex, serving to mask an otherwise astoundingly fragile ego.
"Narcissists feel superior to others," Stanford University developmental psychologist Eddie Brummelman explained to
Psychology Today, "but they are not necessarily satisfied with themselves as a person."
For
this reason, narcissists desire control to maintain their precarious
sense of self, and the illusion of being the best. They may be bullies,
making others feel small to make themselves feel big (or
bigly).
They’re self-absorbed, concerned with appearances, prone to
overestimating their competency at any number of things, and often
vicious in response to the tiniest perceived criticisms, which threaten
their shaky self-image.
Anita Vangelisti, a UT Austin psychologist, told
Psychology Today
that “tactics in the narcissist’s toolbox include bragging, refocusing
the topic of conversation, making exaggerated hand movements, talking
loudly, and showing disinterest by ‘glazing over’ when others speak.”
Psychologists Nicholas Holtzman and Michael Strube, also speaking to
the site,
have found that “subjects who scored higher in narcissism engaged in
more disagreeable verbal behaviors, arguing and cursing more—and using
more sexual language than their more modest counterparts.”
If this
reminds of you of behavior you’ve seen on the campaign trail, you’re
not alone. Several mental health clinicians interviewed by
Vanity Fair expressed the same thoughts.
“Remarkably
narcissistic,” said developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, a
professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, [about Donald Trump].
“Textbook narcissistic personality disorder,” echoed clinical
psychologist Ben Michaelis. “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video
clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of
his characteristics,” said clinical psychologist George Simon, who
conducts lectures and seminars on manipulative behavior. “Otherwise, I
would have had to hire actors and write vignettes.
He’s like a dream
come true.”
Narcissists also lack empathy, a trait Joe Biden
pointed to when he noted that for years, Trump delighted in firing people on national TV.
Projection
This
defense mechanism, first recognized by Sigmund Freud over 100 years
ago, projection causes people to deny negative aspects of themselves and
instead attribute them to others. Virtually everything Trump says,
particularly during debates, is a projection.
When Trump—the man you can “
bait with a tweet”—
says Hillary Clinton does not have the temperament to be president, that’s sheer projection. He
tweets that Clinton is “pandering to the worst instincts in our society,” a classic example of projection. Telling
his base
that Clinton is "running a hate-filled and negative campaign with no
policy, no solutions, and no new ideas,” is the ultimate projection.
Then there are the one-word, catchphrase-style projections: Hillary is a
crook, crazy, etc.
Wikipedia
notes that projection “is more commonly found in the neurotic or
psychotic personalities functioning at a primitive level as in
narcissistic personality disorder.” As we know from this glossary,
psychopathic and narcissistic personality traits seem to accurately
capture Donald Trump's personality disorders, and he has often often
operated on a primitive level unprecedented in modern presidential
campaigns.
Displacement
For Trump voters,
and millions of Americans of all political stripes, much of the fear and
anxiety of this moment can be boiled down to one powerful psychological
and emotional experience: displacement.
Displacement is
defined
as “the moving of something from its place or position.” In physics,
displacement occurs when an object is submerged in water, causing an
equal volume of water to be displaced to make room for it. Freud’s
psychological definition of displacement suggests that when we cannot
express fear or anger at a person or situation, our minds unconsciously
transfer/reassign that anger to a safer target. For example, a worker
who’s angry at his boss might displace his feelings by taking out his
anger on his family. A teenager who experiences abuse by a parent might
become a school bully, redirecting misplaced aggression toward fellow
students.
The concept is particularly relevant in the context of
our current reality. When millions of immigrants, legally documented and
otherwise, flock to the U.S., some—often white Christians—perceive that
these new arrivals take up space they believe is rightfully theirs.
It’s easier to express rage, rancor or blame toward powerless others
than to consider the complexities of issues that can feel out of one's
control. Many have embraced Trump's anti-immigration stance and the
fantasy of building a “
big,
beautiful, powerful wall.” Few have likely given real thought to what
it would require to track down and forcibly remove 11 million people
from the country, as Trump says he'll do.
Arlie Hochschild, author of
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right writes that
displacement among Trump supporters “reflects pain” rooted in the
feeling that “you've done everything right and you're still slipping
back.”
The displacement defense “focuses blame on an
ill-intentioned government,” Hochschild writes. “And it points to
rescue: The Tea Party for some, and Donald Trump for others.”
Robert P. Jones, the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of
The End of White Christian America, explained in an
AlterNet interview
that “conservative white Christians, who could see themselves in [a]
mythical depiction of 1950's America...are having a more difficult time
seeing their place in a rapidly changing country.” For tens of millions
of people, this displacement reflects feelings of loss—of culture, jobs,
community, religion, economics, identity, and hope for the future.
Jones says Trump has transformed these “self-described ‘value voters’”
into “nostalgia voters,” casting their ballots less for any one
candidate than for a return to a past in which their place in the social
order was secure.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Trauma
is the emotional response to a distressing life event. For many victims
and survivors of trauma, such as sexual abuse, personal violence, war
combat, natural disasters and beyond, remnants of the pain, anguish and
suffering from the original incident remain within. Post-traumatic
stress disorder, or PTSD, is a mental health condition that develops
when bygone traumas continue to live on in the psyche. They can be
triggered by any number of factors, causing the person to re-experience
the feelings they had during the traumatizing event.
PTSD kick starts our innate drives toward fight-or-flight, or even freeze. It
is likely that both severe trauma and PTSD are under-reported and affect
a much broader slice of the population.
This article,
in the British Journal of Psychiatry, showed that life events and
divorce are likely to cause more symptoms of PTSD than recognized
triggers such as car accidents or brushes with death.
Gabor Maté, a doctor and the author of
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts,
suggests that most
alcoholics and addicts endured childhood trauma. Drugs and alcohol,
according to Maté, serve to dull the overwhelming emotional pain many
addicts often feel. For any children who grow up in poverty, “the
constant and sustained instability and stress of basic survival
translates into a pervasive and unstinting trauma. The added issues of
crime and violence in many low-income neighborhoods further traumatizes
those who live in them...It makes sense that children living in constant
low-grade terror, in homes and neighborhoods where the conditions can
be similar to a war zone, complete with militarized police presences,
would manifest the same conditions as soldiers who have endured combat
or victims of war.”
Psychology Today
notes that, "It has long been established that stress-related
illnesses, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trigger changes
in brain structure, including differences in the volume of gray matter
versus white matter, as well as the size and connectivity of the
amygdala.”
Long-term stress affects the brain by “decreas[ing] the
number of stem cells that mature into neurons and might provide an
explanation for how chronic stress also affects learning and memory.” It
also raises the level of cortisol, dubbed the “stress hormone.”
Researchers indicate this can lead to a “domino effect that hardwires
pathways between the hippocampus and amygdala in a way that might create
a vicious cycle by creating a brain that becomes predisposed to be in a
constant state of fight-or-flight.”
It’s true that our electoral politics are often drive by fear. But as we've
previously noted, “on the other hand, there are many millions of people who are afraid for very real reasons.”
These
include bad policies and messed-up priorities resulting in half the
country living on the economic margins or in poverty; widespread PTSD
from our wars; and massive militarization of local police departments
who use their equipment, gear and racist attitudes to treat citizens as
if they were terrorists. These are real and valid fears. But they tend
to be the ones politicians and the wealthy elites deny or ignore.
Triggers
Long
after a traumatic event has ceased, the imprint—of the fear, sadness or
panic it caused—may remain buried within. A trigger is an action or
event that causes survivors to return to their initial trauma, causing
those feelings to resurface, sometimes as viscerally as the moment in
which they were first felt.
Trump, who has campaigned on hate and
misogyny, has triggered millions of survivors with the toxic masculinity
and sexism he has continuously put out for the last 18 months. Though
many were already deeply troubled by Trump’s anti-women rhetoric
throughout the primaries—he has insulted women in every way and at every
turn—his leaked boasts about sexually assaulting women caused many to re-experience their trauma. During the second presidential debate, as
Trump skulked creepily across the stage, lurking behind Clinton in
vaguely menacing ways, calls to a
national sexual assault hotline increased by a third.
“Symptoms
of PTSD result when a person has been frightened to the degree where
they frequently have no words,” Gail Wynn, a sex therapist and professor
in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA,
said during an interview for a
related piece.
“They have no behavior, no response that they know of that they can use
to stop whatever is happening, that is frightening them and terrorizing
them. This is the body’s way of registering to an individual that
whatever they’re experiencing is really beyond what the body can
process. The body frequently goes back to those same symptoms and those
same kinds of reactions with other experiences that may be similar to
what they went through, or even where the same language might be used.”
Triggers
set off responses that are beyond the control of those who experience
them. They tend to take the form of fight-or-flight, or the survivor may
freeze, immobilized by the overwhelming rush of feelings they’re
experiencing. Survivors describe reactions from sleeplessness to
flare-ups of chronic pain to uncontrollable crying. Many went offline or
turned off their televisions when Trump and other related election
stress became too much to bear.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive
dissonance is what we call the tension and anxiety that result from
holding, and attempting to reconcile, two contradictory or conflicting
ideas, thoughts or opinions. We all experience cognitive dissonance at
some point; think of it as a kind of internalized, nagging discomfort
over our own hypocrisy. Vegans who wear leather, or joggers who smoke
cigarettes, could possibly experience cognitive dissonance. In the case
of the election, patriot hawks supporting a five-time
draft dodger; pious evangelicals voting for a thrice-married philanderer who publicly cheated on his
first two wives; conservative moralists boosting a man who brags about grabbing women “by the pussy”; and long-time Kremlin critics
rooting for the guy who can’t say enough good things about Putin could likely be afflicted with cognitive dissonance.
The
ways we cope with cognitive dissonance include rationalizing the
schisms in our thinking; for example, dismissing a candidate’s vivid
description of sexual assault as mere locker-room talk. It might also
include modifying our opinions to eliminate discrepancies in thinking.
Case in point: a recent
study by
the Public Religion Research Institute found that just five years ago,
only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants and 36 percent of
Republicans agreed that “an elected official can behave ethically [in
public office] even if they have committed transgressions in their
personal life.” In the age of Trump, that number has more than doubled
to 72 percent among white evangelicals, and increased to 70 percent
among Republicans overall—the largest gains among any demographic
groups.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
A
psychological phenomenon first identified in 1999 by Cornell
University’s David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the effect describes the
tendency of those who lack information on a subject or topic to
erroneously overestimate their knowledge or skill in said area. In other
words, to know how bad you are at something, you need to have some
knowledge of what it takes to be good at it, without which, you’re
likely to be overconfident about your competency. (Conversely, if you
have a lot of knowledge about a certain thing, and a fairly good
understanding of its complexity, you’re more likely to underestimate
your abilities.) The principle might be regarded as the inverse proof of
the famous Einstein truism, which states, “The more I learn, the more I
realize how much I don't know.” It also brings to mind the old adage,
“A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.”
In a recent op-ed for
Politico titled,
“The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You Love Donald Trump,”
Dunning concluded that the effect extends to “political judgment”:
“In
voters, lack of expertise would be lamentable but perhaps not so
worrisome if people had some sense of how imperfect their civic
knowledge is,” he writes. “If they did, they could repair it. But the
Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests something different. It suggests that
some voters, especially those facing significant distress in their life,
might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they do not know
enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes. They
fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps…[T]he key to the
Dunning-Kruger Effect is not that unknowledgeable voters are uninformed;
it is that they are often misinformed—their heads filled with false
data, facts and theories that can lead to misguided conclusions held
with tenacious confidence and extreme partisanship, perhaps some that
make them nod in agreement with Trump at his rallies.”
Throw in a little
confirmation bias—a
cognitive bias that makes people interpret new information, including
facts that directly contradict what they believe, in a way that confirms
their preconceived ideas—and we're off to the races.
The numbers bear this out. In
study after study,
researchers find that college-educated voters are statistically far
more likely to vote for Clinton than for Trump. What’s more, Fox News
watchers are the
most misinformed of television news consumers, scoring even lower than those who consume no news at all, and Fox viewers
mostly fall into the Trump camp.
Gaslighting
The term gaslighting comes from the classic 1944 psychological thriller
Gaslight,
starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman as a married couple. Boyer
plays an unscrupulous husband who secretly dims and brightens a
gaslight, then denies any change has happened when his wife questions
him about the shifting light levels. He follows up the gaslight trick
with a number of other manipulations, all while maintaining that his
spouse is imagining the changes around her. The maddening ruse has its
intended effect, with Bergman’s character growing to doubt her own eyes,
judgment, and ultimately, her sanity.
Psychotherapist and author Christine Louis de Canonville
describes gaslighting
as "a form of psychological abuse used by narcissists in order to
instill in their victims an extreme sense of anxiety and confusion to
the point where they no longer trust their own memory, perception or
judgment."
Most often, gaslighting is used in romantic relationships by
one partner trying to manipulate the thinking of the other. Think
cheaters attempting to make their spouses doubt evidence of infidelity,
controlling lovers who wield confusion and blame to crush their
partners’ self-esteem, leaving dependence and over-reliance in its
place. By pretty much every measure, Donald Trump is the king of
gaslighting, a mind game he’s employed on a massive scale to disorient
tens of millions of people in his quest for the presidency.
Trump
has deftly used gaslighting throughout his campaign to avoiding
responsibility for pretty much anything, employing topsy-turvy “logic”
to instead place blame on everyone else. So, the media is out to get
him, the election is rigged and debate moderators are unfair.
New Republic's
Brian Beutler highlights Trump’s attempted gaslighting of voters to
deny his use of “birtherism and other forms of racist agitation to build
a political base for himself" by pointing the finger at Hillary
Clinton’s long-term adviser Sidney Blumenthal. Even electronics do not
escape unscathed: Trump's
debate mic was purposely sabotaged, and a “
lousy earpiece” is to blame for his refusal to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.
Perhaps
Trump’s most blatant use of gaslighting came just after the leak of the
2005 Access Hollywood video. Following the revelations, a number of
women—
at least 11
so far—have publicly stated, using detailed examples of Trump’s alleged
sexual abuse, that Trump behaves in real life as he described on the
tape. Trump’s response has been to dub all the women liars, accuse
Clinton, a Mexican
billionaire and a
globalist conspiracy of trying to destroy him, and suggest that
he’ll sue them all.
According to
Paul Rosenberg, Trump’s reaction "was not surprising: a wholesale
denial, accusing everyone else of lying, secrecy and bad faith, thus
creating an alternate reality and claiming it to be true." In other
words, textbook gaslighting. Rosenberg cites psychotherapist and
political analyst Leah McElrath, who writes that “Trump’s statement is
an eerie replica of psychological manipulations made by abusers after
episodes of abuse.”
Trump Anxiety
For millions of Americans and people
around the world, the
thought of having a race-baiting, sexual assault-promoting, xenophobic,
policy-ignorant demagogue in the White House is a genuinely scary
prospect, one frightening enough to keep them up at night. Back in
April, the
Washington Post
spoke with numerous psychologists and massage therapists who reported
seeing a new strain of fear and stress among their patients. They
identified this as Trump Anxiety, a crippling psychological condition
that has everything to do with potential for Trump to become president,
and falls under the umbrella of Election Seasonal Affective Disorder.
All of the factors described above—narcissism, gaslighting, projection,
trauma and PTSD, etc.—contribute to Trump Anxiety.
“Usually it’s
combined with other anxiety triggers that they may be having, and it can
cause sleeplessness, restlessness, feeling powerless,” Kimberly
Grocher, a psychotherapist in New York, told
Slate’s Michelle Goldberg. “It can lead to feelings of depression.”
The
pressure seems even more acute among those with histories of personal
or familial trauma. Goldberg spoke to a therapist who said one patient,
from a family of Holocaust survivors, told her “it feels to her like all
the stories she heard from her grandparents.” Grocher, who is African
American, says her patients of color have expressed fear about, “What’s
going to happen in my community if this person is in office?”
The fear and anxiety surrounding Trump’s ascent haven’t only affected adults. A Southern Poverty Leadership Conference
survey
found “more than two-thirds of the teachers reported that
students—mainly immigrants, children of immigrants and Muslims—have
expressed concerns or fears about what might happen to them or their
families after the election.”
In the end, many are finding that
their fear has been heightened by the prospect of a Trump presidency,
and the question of what will come next.
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.
Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.
