It’s been a real struggle for me to talk about Donald Trump.
No, not because he’s an extremely unpleasant subject. I mean, that, sure. Though to be honest I’ve been talking about him a lot in various places. I wish I could ignore him – and the whole damn election – entirely, but this is not how I cope. Or my coping mechanism of choice isn’t altogether a healthy one, and it is to become totally and utterly obsessed.
Don’t ask me what my curated news feed largely consists of. Don’t ask me how many political podcasts I currently follow. Don’t ask me how frequently I check FiveThirtyEight, and how much emotional weight I attach to numbers which are, after all, not objective but instead mediated through and interpreted by human beings. The point is that I’m obsessed, which means that I’m immersed in the way you and I and we all talk about Donald J. Trump.
‘scuse me a sec.
*MUFFLED SCREAMING*
Okay. Anyway.
Something I’ve noticed we do especially much is talk about his mental health. This has been done in a serious, concerted way – attempts to “diagnose” him, usually though not always on the part of people who have received no mental health training in their lives, not that that’s the only thing that matters – but more often in a casual, offhand way – Trump is “insane”. “Nuts”. “Delusional”. “Crazy”. So are his adherents. We’re at a loss to explain the phenomenon that is Donald Trump, at least in any rational way, so we turn to the discourse of mental illness. In order to account for his existence and its nature, we medicalize him.
This is a problem, and the problem is twofold.
Firstly – and this is actually what I intended the sole focus of this piece to be – it’s ableist as hell. Taking someone like Trump, with his cruelty, his arrogance, his racism and xenophobia and misogyny, and making use of mental illness to explain it, connects mental illness with all of those things, which isn’t merely wrong and bad but dangerous. It’s part of a larger discourse that works to demonize people with mental illness, to present them as potentially dangerous. Because Trump is dangerous, and is frequently and explicitly referred to as such (and I wouldn’t for a moment disagree). Recall the ways in which we tend to explain rampage shooters with mental illness rather than things like toxic masculinity. It also constructs people with mental illness as fundamentally irrational to a hopeless extent; these people can’t be reasoned with, can’t be reached.
Talking about someone like that dehumanizes them in a way we reeeeeeally don’t want to do. Because when someone can’t be reasoned with, a central element of their humanity is denied. It’s not a tremendous number of steps from that to some very ugly things.
This is especially ironic, because this way of speaking about mental illness is supposed to be kinder and more humane. But I’d argue that it ultimately has the opposite effect. With only a few exceptions, I haven’t seen this way of framing Trump elicit much sympathy for or desire to help him. It hasn’t humanized him. It’s served to remove him from those of us who are describing him in these terms, to draw hard lines between us and him. He isn’t like us. We’re better. We’re more rational. We’re sane. By extension, we’re better than everyone who likes him and/or is prepared to vote for him.
(I’m not sane, by the bye. Another thing you should not ask me about is all my medication. I’m on a lot of medication. No, it’s frankly not helping much with this.)
We’re also allegedly smarter. Intelligence is a thing. Trump is an idiot. He’s stupid. He’s a moron. I thankfully haven’t seen anyone call him “retarded” but in spite of my obsession I have largely remained in my little safe space with my safe people, and I know it’s being done. His people are the same. They’re not just crazy, they’re dumb.
Bringing someone’s intelligence into the conversation and using it to dismiss and dehumanize them is just as ableist as calling them crazy. We do it all the time, without thinking – and that’s a huge part of the problem.
I do it. I really try not to, but it’s deeply ingrained, so it happens anyway. Plus, yeah, it feels good. In a nasty way, but it does. It feels good to be superior – or to think you are.
Donald Trump frightens us. He confuses us. We don’t know what to do with him. So we try to explain him in medicalized, positivist terms that make us more comfortable, and we try to elevate ourselves above him and his Trumpians in order to feel a little better about everything.
But it’s not just that it’s ableist. It also doesn’t work. It isn’t sufficient or accurate, and we need to recognize that.
Using mental illness and/or intelligence to explain someone like Trump vastly oversimplifies the situation. It reduces it to those safe, comfortable terms. It requires no stretch on our part to understand the deeper complexities, because in spite of how many words people have spent on this, ultimately it’s dismissive – as I said above – and in dismissing someone or something, you absolve yourself of any greater responsibility to understand how they and the whole thing happened.
Again, it’s like writing off a rampage shooter as a “nutcase”. It means we don’t have to think about where that person actually came from and why they became who they became. We don’t have to think about the hideous effect of toxic masculinity on cisgender men who are raised in a fundamentally misogynist culture, and about how violence fits into the picture. That’s harder. It’s uncomfortable. Not least because it implicates us.
When we use mental illness to explain Donald Trump, among other things we don’t have to think about ideology. Mental illness discourse doesn’t allow us to think about ideology. But that’s only one thing among many.
When I was considering this the other day, it occurred to me that another form of discourse exists that does some of what mental illness discourse doesn’t. Once we explained (and a lot of us still do) things like this in terms of sin and evil. We used moral and ethical concepts that were grounded in spirituality, and the dominant forms of discourse largely abandoned this when we made the switch from one to the other, from believing that people with schizophrenia were possessed by demons to identifying them as suffering from an illness that could be scientifically treated as such.
Calling someone evil has the exact same dehumanizing effect I described above, only a lot more intense and a lot more direct. An evil person isn’t really a person anymore, at least not in the way that “good” people are. I personally think evil is a useful idea in some contexts, but even if that’s true, in this specific context its hazards are significant and whatever it does isn’t nearly sufficient to make up for mental illness discourse’s many shortcomings.
It’s also much too simple.
So how do we talk about Donald Trump, if very little of what we currently use is useful and is in fact harmful? From where do we get a different kind of discourse in order to describe Trumpishness? I honestly don’t know. I’m honestly not sure it can even be done. But I think we need to try, because we should strive not to harm people, and because as long as we’re failing in our attempts to articulate who Trump is and the social context that created the event that is his presidential campaign, and our place in all of it, we’re very poorly situated to do anything about it when it happens again.
And regardless of what goes down on Tuesday, you know it will happen again.
I need to go scream into a pillow some more.
Comments 2
Nicholas Walrath — November 6, 2016
One of the alternative discourses we should be elaborating upon to explain Trump resides within a wider critique of capital, particularly the ideological aspects of late capitalism, or neoliberalism as it's referred to currently. Trump is the embodiment of a neoliberal subjectivity that has become inculcated in nearly everyone in this country, one that cuts across race, class, and gender. Upton Sinclair's famous quote about how Americans lack the necessary class-consciousness for revolution to occur is apt: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Case in point: in the working class part of the Inland Empire I live in, I'm always amazed to see how frequently people who comprise what could be called "the working poor" purchase Lottery tickets in the hopes of escaping the daily drudgery of life. Apparently, the American Dream is just around the corner and why wouldn't it be, when TV essentially mediates reality (i.e. I'd wager a large sizeable percentage of the population still believes the US invaded Iraq circa 2003 because Saddam Hussein had biological weapons or that 9/11 occurred because they "hate our freedom")? Trump supporters no doubt subscribe to this "magical thinking."
So what are the core components of neoliberal ideology? Hyper-competitiveness; an unfaltering belief in meritocracy, which undermines personal empathy as the poor are viewed as entitled, ignorant and, shiftless (even by the lower classes themselves - often Trump supporters in Appalachia and the Rust Belt); market values supplanting long-held notions of the commons/public good; rampant narcissism and a celebration of the "cult of the self"(i.e. most social media); technocracy (viz. Trump's constant remarks about appointing the "right people"); treating every personal relationship in instrumental terms (this ties in with Morris Berman's observation of a fundamental "hucksterism" within the American character); and, last but not least, notions and executions of "individualism," which increasingly align with the values of corporate America.
So basically neoliberalism is the death of the social, the death of politics itself, which, again, is prime Trump country as his supporters are disgusted by establishment figures like the Clintons who have not only debased the Democractic Party by renting it out to Wall Street for the last 20 odd years but who have also implemented the very policies that had rendered this country a horror show and who have profited handsomely from it: a (corporate) tax code that is expanding the chasm of wealth and income inequality between the Haves and the 99%; offshoring of our nation's industrial base; deregulating Wall Street and the telecommunications giants leading to greater media consolidation; privatizing public education; mass immigrant deportations, engaging us in disastrous wars and various foreign policy "blunders" (from which many die but, that's ok, because they're not Americans and which the ICC fails to prosecute); building up the military-prison-industrial complex; and (among many others) solidifying the surveillance-punishing state.
I've digressed a bit from my original point; however, what is vital to understanding the Trump phenomena is that he is symptomatic of the rot that exists within our (neo)liberal democracy(?) and that the root causes of this economic, spiritual, political malaise have been compounding for decades ever since the "Robert Ruben gang" and "Third Way" thinking took hold among the New Democrats. Trump's supporters are merely responding to this crony capitalism, which has created disparate "dual economies" (i.e. Wall Street and Silicon Valley vs. the Rust Belt of Main Street America) much like you'd find in neoliberal India, Brazil, Russia, or other emerging economies. The US has its own caste system of haves and have nots despite the oft-repeated narrative that "we're in the post-recovery stage."
And you're right, by acting in accordance with the demands set by capital, Trump, the entrepreneur, cannot be explained away/belittled with the label of being "evil" or as suffering from some psycho-affective disorder; he is what this economic system demands, yet his followers are experiencing a psychic anguish that arises when the curtain falls and the notion of "meritocracy" is shown to be nothing more than a facade obscuring/legitimating the constant backroom deals, corporate favor peddling, opportunism, cronyism, and other features of our political system that have been known by the public for eons now: the only difference, is that a few "outsiders", like Trump (and Sanders), are willing to verbalize what is considered "impolite conversation" among "serious" politicians and stakeholders. Trump's (false) promise is that of "access," creating "good deals" for the American consumer.
Strains of fascism have always existed in the American character as evidenced by this country's constant deification of military and police personnel (as well as glorifying war culture and violence more generally); however, in times of economic stagnation it's figures like Trump who dredge up the worst aspects of US culture: its racism, misogyny, xenophobia, crass materialism, militarism, imperial hubris, Manichean "good vs. evil" thinking, etc. His followers may not entirely be the "basket of deplorables" that Hillary Clinton so snidely derided (not that I have a great deal of sympathy for Trump's followers) and, while many of them are ignorant and reprehensible, they do demand a more serious engagement from the far Left (you won't find this discourse coming from smug, professional class, mainstream liberals).
On this point you and I agree: there are no easy answers, however, sidelining and/or occluding discussion of the ideological aspects of neoliberal capital definitely hinders a more fuller analysis towards understanding Donald Trump.
Sophie Lang — November 8, 2016
I think "dangerous" is a good place to start. You use it and then move on, but I think it might be worth keeping. We use terms like "mentally ill" and "evil" to describe people and actions that pose a threat to us. I definitely agree that connecting mental illness and danger is wrong and that evil isn't a useful term here, but they're both examples of poor shorthand for a threat we can't adequately describe. "Trumpishness" is the condition of being so aggressively egotistic, competitive, and fearful as to pose actual danger to those in your sphere of influence. Calling him dangerous allows us to acknowledge the very real and terrifying impact he has without providing a scapegoat packaged in the description. Shooters and abusers can be talked about the same way. Dangerous and terrifying, especially because of our implied complicity. It may still be an oversimplification, but it leaves room to connect him with the elements of our culture that prop him up.