After Trump threatened to jail Hillary Clinton during their second presidential debate in 2016, Josh Marshall described Trump's caustic manner and reality-warping sense of normalcy as akin to living in the home of an abuser. This would come to be a useful framework for understanding Trump's relation to the public the first time he occupied the White House. Even before he was inaugurated, the term "gaslighting" was being used to describe the way Trump's lies about and denials of obvious facts were causing us to doubt the existence of a shared reality. While critics of Trump were far from silent about their concerns over perceived threats, Trump and his defenders played the role expected of an abuser and his enablers by reducing and dismissing those concerns as hysteria. Trump may be unorthodox, they might say, but America is fine; to be fixated on him is not a sign of concern (for yourself or for the country) but a psychic pathology, a bout of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a case of "orange man bad."
With Biden's win in 2020 and with Trump thought to be vanquished from the political arena after Jan. 6, there was a willingness among some Trump critics to wonder if Trump and his defenders might have had a point. With the Mueller investigation popularly seen as failing to produce a smoking gun and with the pandemic raging, they thought maybe the constant focus on Trump was a bit much. Thomas Frank, of What's The Matter With Kansas fame, described an "extraordinary wave of hysterical rhetoric that came to dominate American culture over the last five years," and questioned whether, apart from his connection to Jan. 6, Trump was really all that different from other presidents. Its true certain dynamics and financial incentives of the media landscape at that time lead to a hyperinflation of anti-Trump content. And aspects of what is now disparagingly referred to as "the resistance" could be melodramatic and cringey. But could you, working backward from that, realistically claim that the basic premise that Trump posed a threat to the country was wrong? Could you point to the fact that America and its democracy still existed to prove objectively that all the hand-wringing over Trump had been a "hysterical" waste of time? This is all fine and good in the abstract, but raises significant questions, as Trump returns to the White House, about how you're supposed to act when feeling genuinely threatened. Is there a right way to say you're afraid?
Here I have to break the fourth wall to say that my wife is Canadian and her family, and mine by extension, live in Canada. Acknowledging that Canadians are likely well down the list of those who might have their lives upended by Trump, his recent jokes/threats about annexing the country as America's 51st state have caused considerable consternation among her family members. Despite years of experience with Trump's bluster and grandstanding, it's hard for them not to look at Putin and Ukraine and question, at least in the back of their mind, if something like that isn't now possible in North America. And while it's one thing to call for people to be clear-eyed, to understand that Trump is unlikely to act on his threats and that keeping his enemies off-balance is how he derives his power — that to take the bait is to let him win — this does little to dispel the underlying fear that is initiated the moment the threat is made. As Josh Marshall wrote in the post in which he first analogized Trump to an abuser, "the threat itself is like a bell that can't be un-rung."
While it may not be fashionable or politically salient right now to talk about Trump in terms of the threats he poses, there is also risk in trying to explain the threats away as all part of his act — something adjacent to the technocratic impulse to wipe away negative feelings about the economy by pointing to the data. People have valid fears whether the likelihood of those fears coming true ranks high on the probability scale or not. What has long distinguished liberals as a political coalition is the public embrace of empathy as a strength. Conservatives were the cold political tacticians. Liberals are the ones who are supposed to give a shit about how you feel.
In her 2008 essay, "Men Explain Things To Me," Rebecca Solnit includes the following story told to her by a boyfriend's uncle who happened to be a nuclear scientist:
One Christmas, he was telling — as though it were a light and amusing subject — how a neighbor's wife in his suburban bomb-making community had come running out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming that her husband was trying to kill her. How, I asked, did you know that he wasn't trying to kill her? He explained, patiently, that they were respectable middle-class people.
On the eve of Trump's second inauguration, it hardly seems necessary to explicate the point Solnit was making with this story. But it might be worth remembering that even if the screaming lady was in the house and the streets were quiet, it wouldn't mean everything was ok.
Also this week … Josh Kovensky helps you figure out which Trump inaugural ball is right for you ... Hunter Walker talked to one of Reuben Gallego's top strategists about how they won a Senate seat in a state that swung hard for Trump ... Khaya Himmelman on why the Democratic incumbent, and the apparent winner of the North Carolina Supreme Court race, thinks her GOP opponent's 'mass disenfranchisement' efforts belong in federal court.
In The Backchannel, Josh Marshall is starting to get a strong Iraq War vibe about Greenland.
And on the podcast, Kate and Josh host the show's first live episode at the Eaton hotel in Washington D.C.
-Derick D.
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