Yale University psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee is asking the same question many of us are asking in the wake of an election that saw existential threat Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump's vote tally go up from 2016:
“What is wrong with 68 million Americans?” is a question many are asking the day after the election. Why should the race even be close? Why did 48% of voting adults choose to remain with a president who leaves a trail of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the nation bankrupt, children in cages, and our natural habitat under existential threat?
It makes no rational sense—unless we correctly identify the problem. For almost four years, mental health professionals have been urging the nation to bring a mental health perspective to a mental health problem, instead of assuming that everything is political. All substitute approaches have failed, just as the best pandemic control comes from infectious disease specialists, not from a radiologist or economists. We have also anticipated the current situation as a product of having mental pathology in power for a prolonged period.
One indication of this effect is how Black and Hispanic voters have moved toward the president and not away, despite violent police attacks on Black Lives Matter protestors and disproportionate minority deaths from the coronavirus. No group, in fact, is immune to the spread of mental pathology, which by definition impairs insight or the very awareness that something is wrong, over time. Rational arguments, rather, face a monumental battle under these circumstances, and even something as clear-cut as death rates are not evident, as we discover. Once we place a severely mentally-impaired person in an influential position without treatment, the emotional drive of pathology is often difficult to defeat through rational means.
Lee goes on to describe the psychological manipulation and pathological bond between COVID Donnie and his cult, and the danger he still poses, especially in defeat.
There are certainly mental health issues informing COVID Donnie's appeal, but there's also the basic truth that many in his cult love and support his racism, misogyny, bigotry, authoritarianism and, yes, his corruption. And they love that you're disgusted and appalled (that's manifested in the "F*ck your feelings" meme). As Bob Schooley and Jelani Cobb noted in yesterday's tweets of the day, COVID Donnie's cult -- 68+ million strong -- live in an alternate universe, and that's an existential problem for our democracy that doesn't go away when COVID Donnie eventually does. It's who we really are as a nation. And that, indeed, is truly disturbing.
BONUS: Never Trumper Tom Nichols has a perspective on his former tribe worth reading.
