The Trump Psychosis That Is Us

Can we find ways to avoid the darkness together?

Image licensed from Adobe Stock

The first Trump presidency took me to a dark place. I didn’t handle it well. I am not going to let it happen again. I don’t want it to happen to you this time, either.

My recent health scare on election eve dictated new terms of engagement. First of all, aside from a few comments at the end of this essay, at the meta-level, I’m going to try not to assume the worst. He may not seem like it now, but Trump is a waning force. He’s old, feeble, controlled by an angry form of dementia that I wouldn’t wish upon a sworn enemy. His is likely to be a Weekend At Bernie’s presidency. He will either die or be bound in a straight jacket in a padded room before he has a chance to do substantial damage. His relentless anger alone will choke the life out of him.

It’s almost a biological impossibility to be that angry all the time and survive much longer. The few accidental photographic peekaboos that show what he really looks like are telling me all I need to know about his immediate future. He looks ghastly and ghostly, like the dying science fiction monster he has become — a creature whose orange skin is peeling off and whose wart-filled head desperately needs Darth Vader’s armor to lend a pittance of grace to his sinister personality.

The rapid-fire pace of his cabinet selections does not imply that his dementia is somehow in remission. The pace is designed to trick you into thinking he’s healthy and of sound mind. He is not. All it proves is that he has been working on his nominees for a long time, with the help of a gleeful, spite-filled right-wing staff that was ready to spit names into the realm of public discourse the moment the election results afforded that possibility.

When JD Vance succeeds him after he passes into the dark realm from which he came, politicians will do what they always do. They’ll resort to power plays and backstabbing. Vance doesn’t elicit the strange level of fear among piles of eight-legged sycophants that Trump does. He commands no loyalty. Most people in and out of politics think he is a buffoon. Unlike his boss, who is also a buffoon, Vance can’t control a bathroom, much less a meeting room. When he walks into a donut shop, people run and hide so they don’t have to say hello. He is a non-factor. He is nothing more than Trump’s spittle. He’ll be pushed aside by forces much more powerful than he.

Vance won’t have a MAGA army to threaten people with. The MAGA horde, instead, will wander aimlessly, like the Walking Dead, unable to find itself tethered to any cause.

Chaos will ensue, and when chaos ensues, the government just sort of hums along waiting for the nonsense to stop. In-fighting legislators will clobber each other over the head and jockey for position while the food stamps and social security checks are sent out and the American military machine seeks out its next battlefield. Politicians will vie for control. The winners will be the ones who manage to generate enough money and find someone who lies best to the media, social and otherwise.

There is, of course, the real possibility that a foreign leader will challenge whoever emerges at the top, and we could all die. But that’s always true. If I’ve learned nothing else from my health scare, it’s that we can all die today for mysterious reasons at any moment. It takes but a snap of destiny’s fingers, and I’m gone. Who cares, really, how it happens? When it’s my time, it’s my time. Why spend countless bytes on social media doomscrolling over a potential cause of death or worrying about every thought excreting out of the soiled mind of a sociopath who thinks tariffs are a way to control fentanyl?

But what if I’m wrong? What if he survives his own cancerous existence? Then I’ll need to ask myself how much I want to engage with the topic of constant despair that is at the heart of the anti-Trump blogosphere.

What if, instead, I choose survival? What if I choose to march forward through the madness, refusing to react to every tweet that flies my way? I’m not capable of shutting up, so I know I’ll continue to occasionally react to the onslaught. But for the sake of my mental and physical health, I need to keep it all under control.

We all do. How we each manage that is an individual affair. Maybe we find a way to spend a little more time with the people we love. Maybe we simply read more. Travel more, while we can. Take in an ocean view somewhere before the oceans boil away.

Maybe what really sustains some of us is to fight even harder. If that’s your choice, bless you. But take time to measure your strength every day. Take breaks. Breathe. Exercise a lot. Feel strong to be strong.

This election was incredibly perplexing. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t read the room. I was sure Kamala would win in a landslide given everything we all know about the most mendacious character in modern American history. The various blueanon conspiracies don’t mean much to me because without the millions of people who legitimately voted for Trump, none of the conspiracies, legit or not, would have mattered. Trump should never have received more than ten percent of the vote. Something is ingloriously wrong when he can reach past 25%.

When Merrick Garland told Jack Smith to abandon the cases against Trump under the shallow excuse that that’s how Justice Department rules work, I realized we are faced with no power center through which to launch a counterattack against the menace we face. Garland and his insipid silence was always as big a problem as Trump. The legal blogosphere has reminded us that Smith’s dismissal was without prejudice, meaning the charges can be revived. But I take small comfort in that.

Does anyone expect Trump to be alive to see those charges revived in four years? If he is alive, he’ll desperately cling to power, trying to find a way to advance to a third term. He’ll use any means to achieve that goal. Nothing will be off the table. If that means locking up Jack Smith and Joyce Vance, that’s what he’ll do. If he survives the next four years, his new eager minions in the Justice Department and various security agencies will render dissent a quaint concept for future historians to ponder.

Democrats, who have lost their usefulness for failing at the one job they had, which was, quite simply, to render a madman mute, have lost agency. I’m no longer interested in anything they have to say. Biden’s done some good work, but much of it will be washed away by the new toxic tide rolling in.

Despite his mad tweets over tariffs, Trump has no formal policy. He’s like a live firehose that has been left in the street to whip around on its own, the water pressure on at full force. He’s insane. I truly believe those of us who don’t have substantial levers of power or influence at our fingertips need to focus on how to move forward with our lives and gather our acorns while the world burns around us.

This is not to suggest we give up. We can’t just let him have our nation. But we need to reconsider every aspect of our resistance, especially considering that it isn’t so much a resistance as it is an opposition to a majority who voted for him. It was no landslide, to be sure, but a fuckload of people offered him the Oval Office. This is like going to a baseball game to root for your team, in your city, and discovering half the crowd is rooting for the other team and that the other team cheats on every pitch.

Whatever our plans, we need to focus on how to protect ourselves.

What we’ve been doing hasn’t worked. We need to start over, even if that isn’t the comfortable choice. This uncomfortable choice was handed to us by a feeble alternative to the Republican Party. The Democrats have done little to halt climate change or address inequality. It has been Republican Party Lite since the Reagan era. They are governed by corporations, so this election was an expected outcome by many who are smarter than me. Many of us gave them a pass, assuming that the Democratic Party was the most realistic path to avoiding another round of Trump.

They couldn’t even accomplish that. That’s an unacceptable failure.

While we all take some time to take care of ourselves and reach out with some extra urgency to our friends and family, I hope many of us think about how worthless the Democratic Party has become.

All that is left of the Democratic Party is a husk that is now consumed by the psychosis of hysteria over Trump because that is its only reason for existence. On places like Substack and Medium, Democrats will cheer on the cottage industry that has evolved around opposing every Trump tweet and thought. Meanwhile, they’ll trot out the same candidates, and fire off email blasts begging for your money, which they don’t deserve.

The few exceptions, the very few who excite us, will need to find a way to reformulate their party, but I find it tragic that the most progressive major Democratic politician with substantial governing power, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, is a billionaire, and one of the party’s most effective, Gavin Newsom, makes many people feel icky.

A party with such a void in leadership inspires me to do little more than complain and feel sorry for the generations behind me, which will face deteriorating civil rights, a frightening AI ecosphere, one climate crisis after another, and, very possibly, a collapsing financial system dominated by oligarchs searching for ways to eliminate them on a mass scale, because, truthfully, that will be easier than appeasing the restless masses of desperate refugees fleeing uninsured homes, floods, and fires.

Ultimately, I think folks will find this an unacceptable fate. Ultimately, the psychosis of Trump will be replaced by something else. If the price of eggs spurred many of them on to vote for a cellar dweller with no moral compass, perhaps what follows will spur them on to loftier goals.

Thanks for reading!