How are you feeling today? Jovial? Excited about the future? Eager to wake up to see this morning’s phone alerts?
If you answered no to any of this, join the bourgeoning crowd of people who are dealing with significant mental health issues as a direct result of living under a regime that promotes psychological terror every day, and terror created by physical violence almost as often.
Before the current campaign of terror in Chicago and Minneapolis, therapists across the U.S. were already seeing an uptick in appointments to the point that many mental health professionals became backlogged.
From March 2025:1
Mental health providers in Massachusetts said they’ve noticed an uptick in demand for services since the election, and research shows the uncertainty related to a tumultuous political climate wreaks havoc on the psyche.
Elly Humphrey is the owner and clinical director of Queer Therapy Boston. She said the business, described as therapy by and for the queer community, is receiving twice the number of inquiries as usual. They have upwards of 300 active clients with a running waitlist, and they’ve had to make referrals out to other practices.
That’s easy to understand. The LGBTQ+ community was one of the first on the regime’s hit list.
A peer-reviewed study from Mad Clown 1.0 (the 2016-2020 regime) noted:2
Large numbers of Americans reported politics takes a significant toll on a range of health markers—everything from stress, loss of sleep, or suicidal thoughts to an inability to stop thinking about politics and making intemperate social media posts.
Before the 2024 election, “more than 7 in 10 adults reported the future of our nation (77%) as a significant source of stress in their lives,” according to a poll by Harris for the American Psychiatric Association (APA).3
Around 2 in 5 adults reported the state of the nation has made them consider moving to a different country (41%) and the political environment in their state has made them consider moving to a different state (39%). In addition, nearly two-thirds of adults (64%) felt as though their rights are under attack.
A strong majority (82%) were worried that people may be basing their values and opinions on false or inaccurate information. Furthermore, around a third of adults (32%) reported the political climate has caused strain between them and their family members, and 3 in 10 (30%) said they limit their time with family because they don’t share the same values.
61% of those polled thought the 2024 election would bring about a change in mood for the country. I haven’t seen a poll on the disappointment that must have set in among those people, most of whom were hoping that an end to Trump’s loud mouth was finally in view.4
Psychiatric professionals were reporting problems before all the terror began in earnest. Christy Denckla, an associate professor of social behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says:5
“This moment in history is filled with so much uncertainty for so many people in terms of access to healthcare, social safety net programs, equity, job security, free speech and fair representation.”
Normal presidencies have their share of economic stress, no matter who’s in charge. But take note in Denckla’s observation that free speech and fair representation are added to the mix under this regime.
Healthcare and social safety net programs are sometimes marginally affected by incoming Republican administrations, but, usually, all that Republican presidents can do is chew at the edges. This regime is trying to tear it all down. This is stressful.
There was also plenty of anecdotal evidence during Mad Clown 1.0 that it was all getting into our heads:6
Multiple therapists told CBC that they observed symptoms, including lack of sleep, excessive use of social media, feelings of losing control and helplessness, in their patients that they attributed to Trump-related anxiety.
Just waking up to a Tweet in the morning can be enough to set our teeth on edge.
The toll on our kids
High school senior Kirat Virk got in his car, picked up a friend, and headed to Carroll High School for the second football game of the season. The team was poised to make it to the state semifinals; the bleachers were full and the crowd raucous. “Everyone was so loud,” Kirat recalled. “And, for the first twenty minutes, I was having so much fun.” Then, reality came rushing back. “I got a terrible feeling. I felt guilty that my mom was home alone. I felt guilty that my dad wasn’t going to be there, either. I didn’t want my dad to think that I didn’t care that he’s in there and I’m out here having fun.”
That’s young Kirat Virk talking about the stress of attending Friday night lights, one of many venerable American institutions that the Trump regime is destroying by simply waving his tiny little hands and making people disappear.7
Why was Kirat worried about Dad? Because Dad was one of 66,000 people estimated to be languishing in horrific conditions in ICE detention centers — unregulated concentration camps that make county jails feel like cozy extended stay hotels. That number doesn’t separate those who are sent to other countries, often far from the detainee’s original homeland.
Latinx and Asian students are bearing the brunt of this psychological terror, for now. Peer-reviewed studies of the effects of Trump’s war on American kids are only now beginning to trickle in.
One such study, in Psychiatric News, concludes:8
Immigration policy in the United States is a source of chronic fear, instability, and trauma for millions of immigrants, with the expansion of enforcement mechanisms transforming daily life for families and children. Psychiatry cannot remain on the periphery…
This includes not only children who are themselves immigrants but also the millions of U.S.-born children living in mixed-status households—children who, despite being citizens, are deeply affected by the precarious legal status and systemic exclusion faced by their caregivers.
Sadism and the psychology of terror
Studies, at least so far, haven’t attacked the real issue at hand. What happens to a nation’s mental health when a sadist is in control of the government?
It just so happened that I was working on this article when a Substack from bumpyjonas dropped into my inbox. Brian felt compelled to drop the definition of sadism into this comment on the brazen murder by ICE of a mother in broad daylight in Minneapolis:9
“Sadism is a personality trait, broadly defined as the tendency to experience pleasure from other people's physical or psychological suffering (e.g., O'Meara, Davies, & Hammond, 2011).
Sadistic traits are continuously distributed in both community (Buckels, Jones, & Paulhus, 2013) and forensic (Mokros, Schilling, Weiss, Nitschke, & Eher, 2014) samples, and span from the enjoyment of embarrassing others to the enjoyment of committing torture and murder (MacCulloch, Snowden, Wood, & Mills, 1983).
It is undisputed, and unsurprising, that individuals with high levels of sadistic traits are more likely to behave antisocially. These individuals get pleasure from being cruel to others, so they are more likely to behave in this way, both online and offline.”(Ferguson, White, Cherry, Lorenz, & Bhimani, 2003; Sest & March, 2017).
We often hear the phrase in our echo chambers, “The cruelty is the point.”
The phrase is not hyperbole. It is not an overreaction or an emotional fallback. Cruelty is indeed the point behind sadism and the psychology of terror.
We commiserate over the malevolent nature of the regime. How is it possible, we wonder, that so many people with the same dark tendencies work for this regime?
Sadism attracts sadists. That is the explanation.
The mainstream media, of course, because they are lazier than the barking walruses on San Francisco’s Pier 39, doesn’t focus on sadism when reporting on the soaring mental health issues under this regime. Instead, they blame “polarization.” We can’t agree! There’s a political divide!
Polarization isn’t the issue, aside from the fact that non-sadists are polarized by the existence of sadists in our midst — sadists who are now in command of the U.S. government.
Similarly, the divide isn’t political. It’s haters versus the rest of us. How else do you explain centrists and conservative Republicans joining hands with lefty Democrats in the streets to protest this heinous regime?
We are one group, undivided by our politics.
Thom Hartmann today posted some numbers to demonstrate the motivations of the sadists. I’ll quote him:10
We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since the 1920s in America, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:
Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.
By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.
After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.
As Hartmann correctly points out, the only reason ICE is in force in Blue cities (for now, but you can bet the scourge will spread as the 400% increase in ICE’s budget pays its dividends) is to sow terror.
Democratic House Representative Ilhan Omar describes the situation in Minneapolis as “complete terror.” She reports that ICE agents are an “occupying force” terrorizing “almost every single block:”11
“They’re taking the people, and so cars are just being abandoned at gas stations. It’s very dystopic.”
A man was shot last night, too, as the Minneapolis surge in ICE violence continued. The regime, in one report after another, doubles down, with Trump last night, in one of his late night stupors, threatening to invoke the poorly understood Insurrection Act.
This, of course, is another form of terror. “You think you’re scared now, Minneapolis?” he is saying. “I’m just getting started.”
And now, the people of Maine need to buy whistles.
The reign of psychological terror Trump invokes is not limited to his war against American citizens. It spreads across every single policy action he and his henchmen/women initiate.
It’s terror against scientists and medical researchers who lose their funding, rural hospital administrators who have to shut down their facilities, women for, well, almost everything, but especially body autonomy, and Blacks for the things that have haunted that population group forever, but get an added dose of brutality under this regime.
“We’re going to take away addiction funding! Psyche! We were kidding!”12 Psychological terror.
He’s even employing psychological terror on America’s closest allies, like Denmark. The entire population of Greenland is terrorized by the thought they’ll lose their European-style health care as America’s 52nd state (after Canada becomes number 51). They’re terrified they’ll lose their way of life. Their fisheries. Their culture.
It’s terror against every single American who isn’t wearing a Pantone white on their skin, and even then, it better not be any darker than Pantone 9064 C.
It’s terror against the 30-year-old adopted daughter, now a U.S. citizen, saved when she was a toddler from the dangers of Medellin when its streets were filled with drug lords trying to dominate the North American drug trade.
It’s terror against the Indian American tech worker as he pulls into the office parking lot in Mendota Heights. Will stark, raving mad lunatics in balaclavas try to pull him out of his car and send him to Uganda?
It’s terror against the Lakota man who gets snatched from his car despite his 10,000-year North American ancestry.
It’s terror on the high seas (don’t go fishing in the Caribbean).
It’s terror against the Fed Chairman, who is fighting back against the regime’s childlike intimidation. It’s terror even against Jack Smith (good luck with that).
The mad clown is even threatening protesters in other dictatorships like Iran (under the guise of being on their side). If the violence in Iran continues, he promises, “I’ll sic a very drunk Pete Hegseth upon thee.”
The Iranian people are too involved in their own affairs to worry much about what he says, but they know enough not to trust him when he claims to be looking out for them. He’d kill hundreds of thousands of them if he thought he could sneak it underneath a busy news cycle and still get his Nobel Prize.
Almost every single action he takes is a form of intimidation and/or terror.
This takes a toll on a population trying to survive on the crumbs oligarchs leave behind while they’re rampaging through the countryside with their water-draining data centers that act as wildly accelerating electricity meters vacuuming money out of our wallets at a dizzying pace.
It’s terror everywhere. When it isn’t physical violence threatening us, it’s psychological violence fed by lies and intimidation never attempted by any other American president.
What toll has it taken on you? How do you feel right now? And how do we deal with the stone-cold looks on the faces of those who seem to have tuned out? What hides underneath those frozen exteriors?
Thanks for reading!
Cohan, Alexi. “Politics-Related Stress Driving Uptick in Demand for Mental Health Services, Providers Say.” GBH, March 28, 2025. https://www.wgbh.org/news/politics/2025-03-28/politics-related-stress-driving-uptick-in-demand-for-mental-health-services-providers-say.
Smith, Kevin B. “Politics Is Making Us Sick: The Negative Impact of Political Engagement on Public Health during the Trump Administration.” Edited by Dorothy Porter. PLOS ONE 17, no. 1 (January 14, 2022): e0262022. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0262022.
America, in. “Stress in America 2024.” https://www.apa.org, 2024. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2024.
wgbh, ibid
wgbh, ibid
Anapol, Avery. “Therapists Say They’ve Seen a Rise in Anxiety under Trump: Report.” The Hill, July 28, 2018. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/399339-therapists-say-theyve-seen-a-rise-in-anxiety-over-trump-report
Sethi, Simran. “The Emotional Toll of Trump’s Draconian Immigration Policy.” MindSite News, January 8, 2026. https://mindsitenews.org/2026/01/08/immigration-detention-trauma-immigration-policies-on-asian-families/.
Fortuna, Lisa, Kevin Gutierrez, Paula Mendoza, Omar Abbas, Austin Nguy, and Natan J. Vega-Potler. “Special Report: U.S. Immigration Policy and the Mental Health of Children and Families.” Psychiatric News 60, no. 8 (August 1, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2025.08.8.19.
Vlachou, Marita. “Trump Ramps up Greenland Threats, Miller Says ICE Agents Have ‘Federal Immunity’: Live Updates.” HuffPost, January 12, 2026. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/doj-fed-powell-golden-globes-2026_n_6964c61ee4b0b3be67eb8c89/liveblog_69680e12e4b09fa9c797274b
NPR. “24 Hours of Chaos as Mental Health Grants Are Slashed Then Restored,” January 15, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/15/nx-s1-5677711/mental-health-addiction-grants-cut-then-restored.
Sadism... great point. I guess I never really understood just how many sick people are out there. Yes, it's definitely taking a toll on our collective mental health. Since I've been backmfrom the trip, I have found it very difficult to relax.
I read this: The American Medical Association recently described racism as “an urgent threat to public health, the advancement of health equity, and a barrier to excellence in the delivery of medical care.” Hate is costing us a fortune. I told both my MAGA senators in Missouri how I felt about all this again this morning, knowing full well it will fall on deaf ears...but at least I feel better.... kinda.
GREAT essay. 👏👏👏👏👏
I wake up every morning surging with adrenaline. I turn to my phone to make sure World War III has not begun. And then I watch the atrocities committed in Minnesota and elsewhere in this country. my daughter told me today that Storm troopers are staying in hotels down by OSU’s campus across from student housing. Are they planning to start disappearing international students?