"People are not okay": The mental health impact of the Trump era

“People are not okay”: The mental health impact of the Trump era
His presidency is over, but the trauma isn’t.
By Anna North Jan 28, 2021, 10:00am EST
A red MAGA hat on fire in the road.

snip//

The problems Trump brought to light — racism, xenophobia, and transphobia, to name just a few — certainly didn’t start with him. But from the moment he announced his campaign in a speech maligning Mexican people as rapists, he made such attitudes more explicit than ever before within the bounds of traditional party politics.

His rhetoric helped embolden a wave of hate crimes across the country targeting Muslim Americans, immigrants, and a number of other groups he had demonized. Meanwhile, his constant all-caps tweeting, his preference for staff who enabled rather than checked his worst impulses, and his return to campaign-style rallies shortly after his election all led to a relentless news environment that subjected Americans to the president’s disjointed and frequently abusive thoughts multiple times per day. In the first three years of his presidency, Trump tweeted more than 11,000 times — 5,889 of those tweets, according to the New York Times, “attacked someone or something.”

While Trump was able to energize a core of supporters with his mix of bravado, defiance, and racism, for many others, his presidency was, quite simply, scary. In the American Psychological Association’s 2016 “Stress in America” survey, 63 percent of Americans said the future of the country was a “significant source of stress,” and 56 percent said they were stressed out by the current political climate. In the 2018 version of the survey, those numbers went up to 69 percent and 62 percent, respectively.

Clinical psychologist Jennifer Panning even coined the term “Trump anxiety disorder” to describe the stress many people were feeling in the weeks and months following the 2016 election. “People tended to experience things like ruminations, like worries of what’s going to be next” as they awaited each new tweet or action by the president, Panning told Vox.

Trump also subjected people in America and around the world to language and tactics used by abusers, Farrah Khan, a gender justice advocate and manager of the Office of Sexual Violence Support and Education at Ryerson University in Canada, told Vox. That includes gaslighting (like when he claimed that the official Covid-19 death tolls were fraudulent, or that the virus would “go away on its own”), lashing out in anger (his perennial rage-tweets about “PRESIDENTIAL HARASSMENT”), and seeking revenge on people for perceived wrongs (his attacks on Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer after she criticized his administration’s Covid-19 response). In a relationship with an abuser, “you’re constantly hypervigilant to what he’s going to do next,” Khan said. Under Trump’s presidency, that hypervigilance extended to the millions of Americans affected by him and his policies.

more...

https://www.vox.com/2021/1/28/22249273/trump-presidency-trauma-covid-19-2020-election