Still Trying To Figure Out Why People Vote For Trump? Some May Be Suffering From COVID-Related PTSD

Others Are Just Brainwashed By Fox & Hate Talk Radio

In the Trump era, there’s no way to analyze politics without the help of psychiatrists and psychologists. Good ones are experts in understanding individual behavior, emotions, motivations, and mental health. They can provide valuable insights into the psychological factors influencing the decisions and actions of political leaders, policymakers and voters, helping to explain why certain political phenomena occur and how they might be addressed. They’re trained to assess mental health conditions and personality traits, so play a crucial role in evaluating the mental health and psychological stability of political leaders, desperately needed not just in regard to Trump, but also many of his deranged cronies and the MAGA followers, where expertise in group dynamics include how social, cultural and environmental factors influence behavior of and within groups. They can analyze the dynamics of political parties, interest groups and social movements to understand how group processes shape political behavior and outcomes. They’re needed to examine and explain how individual experiences, traumas, identity formation and interpersonal relationships of MAGAts intersect with broader political contexts to shape political beliefs and actions.

Let’s face it, the age of Trump has highlighted the influence of psychological factors on political behavior, such as identity politics, polarization and conspiracy beliefs. Psychiatrists' understanding of human behavior and group dynamics could shed light on the psychological underpinnings of these phenomena and their impact on political discourse and decision-making. Many psychiatrists have been arguing for the importance of speaking out about concerns regarding Trump's and his followers’ mental health. And yesterday, The Atlantic published an essay by two prominent academic psychiatrists, George Maraki and Richard Friedman, It’s Not the Economy. It’s the Pandemic. The essay, though, has more to do with Biden than with Señor T. “Joe Biden,” they wrote, “is paying the price for America’s unprocessed COVID grief. America is in a funk, and no one seems to know why. Unemployment rates are lower than they’ve been in half a century and the stock market is sky-high, but poll after poll shows that voters are disgruntled. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has been hovering in the high 30s. Americans’ satisfaction with their personal lives— a measure that usually dips in times of economic uncertainty— is at a near-record low, according to Gallup polling. And nearly half of Americans surveyed in January said they were worse off than three years prior. Experts have struggled to find a convincing explanation for this era of bad feelings. Maybe it’s the spate of inflation over the past couple of years, the immigration crisis at the border, or the brutal wars in Ukraine and Gaza. But even the people who claim to make sense of the political world acknowledge that these rational factors can’t fully account for America’s national malaise. We believe that’s because they’re overlooking a crucial factor.”

Four years ago, the country was brought to its knees by a world-historic disaster. COVID-19 hospitalized nearly 7 million Americans and killed more than a million; it’s still killing hundreds each week. It shut down schools and forced people into social isolation. Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger— exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.

The pressure to simply move on from the horrors of 2020 is strong. Who wouldn’t love to awaken from that nightmare and pretend it never happened? Besides, humans have a knack for sanitizing our most painful memories. In a 2009 study, participants did a remarkably poor job of remembering how they felt in the days after the 9/11 attacks, likely because those memories were filtered through their current emotional state. Likewise, a study published in Nature last year found that people’s recall of the severity of the 2020 COVID threat was biased by their attitudes toward vaccines months or years later.

When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful— even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

But consigning painful memories to the River Lethe also has clear drawbacks, especially as the months and years go by. Ignoring such experiences robs one of the opportunity to learn from them. In addition, negating painful memories and trying to proceed as if everything is normal contorts one’s emotional life and results in untoward effects. Researchers and clinicians working with combat veterans have shown how avoiding thinking or talking about an overwhelming and painful event can lead to free-floating sadness and anger, all of which can become attached to present circumstances. For example, if you met your old friend, a war veteran, at a café and accidentally knocked his coffee over, then he turned red and screamed at you, you’d understand that the mishap alone couldn’t be the reason for his outburst. No one could be that upset about spilled coffee— the real root of such rage must lie elsewhere. In this case, it might be untreated PTSD, which is characterized by a strong startle response and heightened emotional reactivity.

We are not suggesting that the entire country has PTSD from COVID. In fact, the majority of people who are exposed to trauma do not go on to exhibit the symptoms of PTSD. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t deeply affected. In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm.

Traumatic memories are notable for how they alter the ways people recall the past and consider the future. A recent brain-imaging study showed that when people with a history of trauma were prompted to return to those horrific events, a part of the brain was activated that is normally employed when one thinks about oneself in the present. In other words, the study suggests that the traumatic memory, when retrieved, came forth as if it were being relived during the study. Traumatic memory doesn’t feel like a historical event, but returns in an eternal present, disconnected from its origin, leaving its bearer searching for an explanation. And right on cue, everyday life offers plenty of unpleasant things to blame for those feelings—errant friends, the price of groceries, or the leadership of the country.

To come to terms with a traumatic experience, as clinicians know, you need to do more than ignore or simply recall it. Rather, you must rework the disconnected memory into a context, and thereby move it firmly into the past. It helps to have a narrative that makes sense of when, how, and why something transpired. For example, if you were mugged on a dark street and became fearful of the night, your therapist might suggest that you connect your general dread with the specifics of your assault. Then your terror would make sense and be restricted to that limited situation. Afterward, the more you ventured out in the dark, perhaps avoiding the dangerous block where you were jumped, the more you would form new, safe memories that would then serve to mitigate your anxiety.

Many people don’t regularly recall the details of the early pandemic— how walking down a crowded street inspired terror, how sirens wailed like clockwork in cities, or how one had to worry about inadvertently killing grandparents when visiting them. But the feelings that that experience ignited are still very much alive. This can make it difficult to rationally assess the state of our lives and our country.

One remedy is for leaders to encourage remembrance while providing accurate and trustworthy information about both the past and the present. In the early days of the pandemic, President Donald Trump mishandled the crisis and peddled misinformation about COVID. But with 2020 a traumatic blur, Trump seems to have become the beneficiary of our collective amnesia, and Biden the repository for lingering emotional discontent. Some of that misattribution could be addressed by returning to the shattering events of the past four years and remembering what Americans went through. This process of recall is emotionally cathartic, and if it’s done right, it can even help to replace distorted memories with more accurate ones.

President Biden invited the nation to grieve together in 2021, when American death counts reached 500,000, and again in 2022, when they surpassed 1 million. In his 2022 State of the Union address, he rightly acknowledged that “we meet tonight in an America that has lived through two of the hardest years this nation has ever faced,” before urging Americans to “move forward safely.” But in the past two years, he, like almost everyone else, has largely tried to proceed as if everyone is back to normal. Meanwhile, American minds and hearts simply aren’t ready— whether we realize it or not.

Perhaps Biden and his advisers fear that reminding voters of such a dark time would create more trouble for his presidency. And yet, our work leads us to believe that the effect would be exactly the opposite. Rituals of mourning and remembrance help people come together and share in their grief so that they can return more clear-eyed to face daily life. By prompting Americans to remember what we endured together, paradoxically, Biden could help free all of us to more fully experience the present.

This morning, in fact, a trio of NY Times reporters wrote that the coronavirus pandemic has largely receded from public attention and receives little discussion on the campaign trail. And yet… Covid-19 quietly endures as a social and political force. Though diminished, the pandemic has become the background music of the presidential campaign trail, shaping how voters feel about the nation, the government and their politics. Public confidence in institutions— the presidency, public schools, the criminal justice system, the news media, Congress— slumped in surveys in the aftermath of the pandemic and has yet to recover. The pandemic hardened voterbdistrust in government, a sentiment Trump and his allies are using to their advantage. Fears of political violence, even civil war,  are at record highs, and rankings of the nation’s happiness at record lows. And views of the nation’s economy and confidence in the future remain bleak, even as the country has defied expectations of a recession… The lingering trauma from that time, is contributing to a sense of national malaise that voters express in polling and focus groups— a kind of pandemic hangover that appears to be hurting Biden and helping Trump in their presidential rematch.”

Yesterday, Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech looked at a study from the university of Illinois that shows Americans do poorly when asked to differentiate between fact and opinion. “Americans’ inability to confidently differentiate between statements of fact and opinion,” she wrote, “have ‘grave implications’ for the future of political discourse and misinformation, the researchers said. ‘The capacity to differentiate between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact is vital for citizens to manage the flood of political information they receive on any given day’ [political scientist and co-author Jeffery] Mondak said in a statement. ‘How can you have productive discourse about issues if you’re not only disagreeing on a basic set of facts, but you’re also disagreeing on the more fundamental nature of what a fact itself is?’”

That reminded me of the survey the NY Times reported on yesterday, showing that “Republicans who get their news from nonconservative mainstream media outlets are less likely to support Trump than those who follow conservative outlets… One hundred percent of the Republicans in our poll who said they got their news from Fox News or other conservative sources said they intended to support Mr. Trump in the general election. This stands in contrast to Republicans whose main media sources are outlets like CNN and major news organizations: Seventy-nine percent of them plan to vote for Trump, and 13 percent said they planned to vote for President Biden… And across many measures, mainstream media Republicans are less supportive of Trump. They are 20 percentage points less likely than conservative media Republicans to say they are enthusiastic about Trump as the party’s nominee and more than 30 percentage points less likely to say Trump’s policies have helped them personally.”

About 30% of Republicans say they get their news from mainstream sources instead of from right-wing platforms like Fox. These are the Republicans who describe themselves as politically “moderate.” In an experiment, the researchers found that “getting conservative news viewers to watch mainstream news caused many of the participants to shift away from hard-right views on a number of issues like immigration and race relations.” And they found changes in how participants evaluated Señor Trumpanzee. Learning new facts about the world from CNN, “they also started to question their trust in Fox News itself.”