The Trauma Didn’t Start With Trump and It Won’t End When He’s Gone

Trying to understand "them," through the lens of my experience

(I recently had a conversation on FB with a Canadian who asked for the 100th time, how Americans could choose such a disaster of a human to be our president, a second time. I remembered writing this article, and am astonished, six years later, how spot on it still is.)

I’ve have long felt ambivalent about the term “P.T.S.D.” First, because, I don’t think it’s quite fair to call an intense, long-term reaction to trauma a “disorder,” and second, because the stress of combat is so deservedly specific, I hesitate to use it in another context. But to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, ‘you write an essay with the words you have, not the words you oughta have,’ and I can’t find a term that fits our current national nightmare better than “trauma.” And before it actually occurs, I’m predicting that we will suffer a national P.T.S.D. from Trump well after he is out of office.

And it will be less from anything he’s done as President, but from the fact of him, the reality that such a manifestly unqualified, cruel and incompetent man could have ever been chosen to lead this country by 63 million of its citizens. He’s such a self-evident clown we never should have had to worry about his ascension. And yet on November 9, 2016, there he was, Commander-in-Chief-elect, and the 66 million of us who did not vote for him felt we’d woken up in a different country than the one we’d gone to sleep in.

We really and truly thought that there was no way, in any universe we could think of, that the United States could do worse than George W. Bush. Really, a President with less command of English, after 8 years of the most oratorically gifted President since Lincoln? Unimaginable is the only word that applied. After believing that Dubya was the ultimate national jumping of the shark, we discovered that there was another great white lurking behind him, and this time we weren’t going over it, but right in its jaws. Like everyone I know, I was in a state of nauseous shock for days.

But the dark pit in my stomach also felt vaguely recognizable, and I wondered if some primal memory of Kennedy’s assassination had being reawakened. I was five in November 1963, just between John and Caroline, and it stands out as one of my first memories. I was very attached to my mother, and watched the television with her as she sobbed, trying to puzzle out what an assassination was, and why the stirrups on the empty horse faced backward.

I got horribly, terribly, and inevitably used to Trump, and that feeling did not completely go away, but by necessity became manageable. Then recently, I read Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. Her novel is a masterful portrait of a group of gay men in Chicago in the mid-80s, as AIDS descends on their lives. (It is interwoven with a story set in 2015, about a sister of one of these men, haunted by that time.) She captures what it was like exactly — I know because I was there, except in Manhattan. That feeling that the unimaginable was actually happening, that you had no choice but to accept that it was, to react to it, to live with the fear and the death and the loss that was consuming your world — it was sanity-challenging time to live through, to put it mildly. (Yours truly actually spun into addiction, drug dealing, and a stint in prison. That kind of crazy.)

It was the slow-motion trauma of near-constant dread for 15 years (more if you include my incarceration). Which friend was going to call today telling me he was positive, or his lover was in the hospital, or would I speak at a memorial service? Today I feel exactly the same way every morning when I pop on MSNBC asking, “What fresh hell is this?” And every single day, along with everyone else I know, I get a brand new serving of it. Everyday this atheist utters the same prayer I uttered back them. “Oh God, please let this be over. Let this be over. Let this be over.”

As I connected these two periods of near-constant dread in my life (80s AIDS and the Trump present), an interesting insight came to me, part of my incessant search since the election for a truly convincing explanation of how my co-citizens chose a man who is not only an ignorant, obnoxious, lying narcissist, but doesn’t even hide it. I thought to compare the toxic act of voting for this man with my own many toxic acts after my own diagnosis. If my trauma could lead me to do something so insane as lead a double life for 10 years using my dead brother’s identity, perhaps their decision to vote for this blatantly mendacious Mussolini-wannabe might have been caused by trauma as well, trauma I could initially not see because it was superficially so unlike my own.

Trump-supporting straight white males in my age cohort, (between 50 and 70) may not have suffered the incessant death of friends for two decades, but that doesn’t mean their lives weren’t rife with loss. In the past thirty years, many of the assumptions they’d grown up believing were gradually challenged and dismantled. They discovered that being a white male American was not a personal accomplishment, but an accident of birth. They saw the terra firma of their future turn into quicksand, as jobs fled elsewhere, pension funds disappeared, and the gig economy took root. Then came the subprime housing crisis and Great Recession of 2008. These shocks to the American system are well known. What has been less diagnosed is what it represented psychically to those most affected by it, what a deep disorientation it must have been to have started adulthood out with one set of expectations and decades later, have completely lost faith that any of them would come true.

And this I really do understand. At 20, I had every reason to assume I would have a normal life span. By 30, I’d no choice but to assume exactly the opposite. It’s hard to understand what a deep shift that engenders in one’s thinking, perhaps even neurologically. It was so profound that it took a good ten years after the first miracle drugs appeared before I allowed myself to start thinking again in terms of a normal life span. I still have to work at it.

When I put myself in the position of the core Trump voter, I try imagining how his sense of loss might have been as intense as mine. Not only did they have to let go of most every certainty about getting more and more prosperous each decade, but this was accompanied by social and cultural change that accelerated at a dizzying pace. How many 55-year old men in 2016 did not have either a divorce under his belt, or a wife who must work in order for the family to make ends meet (sometimes making more than him?) How many have a gay son or daughter, or a child struggling with opioid addiction, or one who is a single parent living in their basement — with a grandchild who interacts more with an iPad than her grandparents? Some have all of the above, few have none.

I paint a broad brush here — there are endless permutations to scenarios like this. But whatever the specific experience of each Trump voter, I have come to believe the degree of change that has occurred in the world in the past 30 years has been most traumatic to the population that grew up believing their future would continue along the same trajectory as their parents. This is why Trump resonated with them so powerfully. “Make America Great Again” may sound like straightforward nostalgia for the past, but it’s really nostalgia for an imagined future they once had and want back. And the most hopeless malfeasant grifter of our modern age, almost accidentally, stumbled onto a message that gave them hope that they could have their expectations back.

Trump’s downfall will be equally traumatic for them as his ascent was for us, both for those who realize they were sold a bill of goods, and for those who will be in his cult till one of them is six feet under. But all of us on both sides of the political divide will be suffering from a national Post-Trump-Stress-Disorder for years to come.

Perhaps we should explore now ways to lessen the damage that awaits. I think an essential part of that process is to acknowledge the experience of Trump voters that brought them to the point of blinding themselves to this utter travesty of a human being. Their vote for him did come out of the blue, its seeds were planted long ago. Their vote came after one perceived diminishment after another, over decades. (Note the use of “perceived.” It sure doesn’t seem to me that gay marriage, or Black Lives Matter, or #MeToo, for example, should make them feel diminished. But it did. Rightly or wrongly, that has been their experience.)

Make no mistake, understanding with compassion where the Trump voter is coming from is an extremely heavy lift for me. I have been so preoccupied with the obvious toxicity of him, (“how could anyone vote for that guy?”) that I didn’t really make much effort to look behind it. But our country may be on the verge of a moment as determinative as the aftermath of the Civil War, when the initial hope of Reconstruction gave way to the century-long nightmare of African-American life in the South. Trump will have his Appomattox, but winning this war risks being the ultimate Pyrrhic victory if we lose the peace. We didn’t think we could get worse than Bush, and we got Trump. We daren’t make a similar assumption this time.

As deeply traumatic as the AIDS years were for me, I never suffered from anything I would remotely describe as PTSD. Sometimes I wonder if my success at convincing myself not to plan for the future had the perverse result of depriving a place in my psyche for all that dread about it to lay into my brain pathways as deeply as it might have. Or maybe it was the numbing effect of the drugs — I displaced myself at the time over and over rather than fully feel the horror of the moment.

Perhaps it’s a stretch to apply my own experience too much to the nation’s, but I think my psychological recovery was inextricably related to understanding the logic of my own choices, however destructive, and forgiving myself for having made them. Similarly, if we don’t recognize the emotional logic from which the Trump voter made his or her choice, we might be nurturing an anger against him that serves us all very badly in the future.

My father used to say, “Comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.” “To understand is to forgive everything.”

Let’s understand.

MCO 2019/2025