Watching President Trump’s February 16th press conference, I felt stunned into silence. I could not think of how to comment on that performance. These notes are my attempt to figure out why. They are a departure from my usual writing: more speculative. I’m reaching for something here. Which means I could be wrong about some or maybe all of it. If I am, you will tell me.
1. Since the start of the Cold War some 70 years ago, Americans have been aware of a crazy thing about the holder of the Presidency. That person could blow up the world. The possibility of nuclear annihilation changed the institution by introducing new psychological facts to the relationship between the American people and the occupant of the White House. And, we should add, between the publics of other nations and the American President. For this was a terrible power to invest in one man. (It has always been a man, which is part of the terror, so I will be using the masculine pronoun.)
2. By giving the order, the American President could blow up the world — or at least Europe, North America, and Russia — and everyone at some level was aware of this. Which meant we had to have confidence that he wouldn’t do it, or we would never vote for him. There would be no time to go to Congress, or for any plebiscite. The power had to be entrusted to one man, and his reactions in the moment, as with Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. We didn’t have to trust Theodore Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln in that way. But from the Cold War on Americans have been required to extend to their president an almost inhuman degree of trust: don’t blow up the world, Mister President… Please!
3. It’s not possible to have a normal relationship with a mortal who obtains that kind of power. And yet the American President has to present himself as a “normal” person who has a very, very important job. Through successive governments since Truman the presidency has been adjusted to meet these conditions. How do you make people comfortable with the fact that the President is able to blow up the world? Or: how do you make them forget that he has this power? Well, you project an image of inner strength, measured calm, unflappable temperament. But that is just a start. In fact, the whole model of the modern presidency is affected by this demand to quiet a completely rational anxiety surrounding the president’s awesome, god-like and mostly unearned powers. In a word, the American presidency has to do psychological work. It has to reassure.
4. So how is this work done? Through a series of propositions that are implied in the behavior we expect of presidents, in the daily rituals of the job, and in the way the executive branch organizes itself. Here are a few of those propositions. (There are many more.)
* The President has access to the best intelligence in the world.
* The President starts his day with a classified briefing on all possible threats.
* The President is kept constantly informed.
* The President is never, even for a moment, “off the grid.”
* The President is never alone.
* The President is surrounded by people who know what they are doing.
* The President is of sound and sober mind. He does not easily “fly off the handle.”
* The President does not free associate, speak carelessly, or grant roaming privileges to his id.
* The President does not make factual statements that are wholly insupportable.
I’m not saying that these features of the modern Presidency don’t serve other ends. They do. But one of them is to make us feel okay with a man who gets to play god with our civilization.
5. Part of the psychological work the American presidency had to do was done through the media. Rituals like the televised news conference were supposed to show that the president was in command of the facts, and could handle challenges without losing his cool. Command of television in a speech or interview is one way that presidents show us they’re in command of themselves. That’s reassuring. That’s acting “presidential.”
6. Trump does not participate in this regime. He may have access to the best intelligence in the world, but he is at war with the intelligence community. The apparatus exists to keep him constantly informed, but he prefers to watch cable news, so that he can rage at his unfair treatment. He flies off the handle constantly. He makes threats. He free associates, speaks carelessly, and grants roaming privileges to his world class id. He doesn’t care if what he’s saying is true. When a reporter at his February 16 press conference told him his facts were wrong, he shrugged and said, “I was given that information; I don’t know… I’ve seen that information around.” That is the opposite of reassuring.
7. Trump is thus revising the Presidency before our eyes. In his grip, it no longer attempts to muffle anxiety about the President and make people around the world feel okay about granting one person such enormous, unthinkable and inhuman powers. Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm. He moves fast and breaks things. He leads by causing commotion. As energy in the political system rises he makes no effort to project calm or establish an orderly White House. And if he keeps us safe it’s not by being himself a safe, steady, self-controlled figure, but by threatening opponents and remaining brash and unpredictable— maybe a touch crazy. This too is psychological work, but of a different kind.
8. Remember: the launch codes are with him at all times. We are supposed to not think about that. Since Truman, the Presidency has been styled to help us with the forgetting. Donald Trump is busy blowing that up. But how do we surface this story?
40 Comments
You have written what I have thought. Bravo.
Thank you for your eloquent and thoughtful writing. The enormity of the situation we find ourselves in never leaves me.
I think that #7 speaks to the dis-ease that has surprised me the most about the Trump presidency.
“Instead, a new model is proposed: the president keeps everyone in a constant state of excitement and alarm.”
There’s a fatigue and resignation. My self-care routines have fallen first in this new state, exercise, nutrition, sleep. Attempting to stay abreast of the situation has disoriented me from the ordinary logic that kept me moving forward before.
I stumbled into the 2.16 conference on NPR as I drove between meetings. I was alarmed, excited in the sense of nervous attention, confusion of how to process the very contradictory messages I was hearing.
My only thought is to look beyond Trump to attempt to understand his supporters, and what it says that they are not disturbed. How different am I from my neighbors? How different must their world views be, and what am I missing?
Keep up your self health routine! We. Need quality thinkers like you! What about the meticulous dismantling of the EPA!!?
Hillary tried to tell us this very thing during the debates. She tried to enact that difference. For me, the question is, how is it that some portion of the American population–Trump voters–has bought into Trump’s revision of expectations well enough to not be in the same state of alarm & anxiety as are non-Trump voters.
She did try to bring this up. In fact it was her lead strategy. “He doesn’t have the temperament.”
I have had some discussion with Trump followers who relish the thought of blowing things up. They seem to think that they will be safe, a sort of capitalistic/fascist rapture that will preserve their purity and destroy those who oppose them. They shrug off concerns about nuclear war (” I have secret methods to survive this” or “Trump would never do THAT”).
It is as though Trump supporters engage in the same magical thinking as religious fundamentalists and imagine themselves somehow set-apart from the unworthy, one might almost say “saved”. Same delusion, and very possibly many of the same people.
The key narrators of this new model are, of course, journalists. They are torn by conflicting impulses: to be stenographers (after all, anything the president says–or tweets–is by definition newsworthy); to break news via leaks or (we hope) outside-in reporting; and to fight back against the escalating war on media (what Stelter today called “verbal poison.”)
I’d suggest the comparative approach, made as American-relevant as possible; look for European examples; look for historical (even ancient) examples that demonstrate the failure of putting faith in norms and guard rails.
Really excellent. A superb summary of what we all are getting bits and pieces of, I’ll do what I can to spread it around. Keep up the good work.
A system gave rise to this man. Thought and energy need to go into that. All the war and greed and addictions have hollowed us out. I think Trump is a tumor, not the cancer.
This is astute. Gary Kasparov tweeted yesterday that America will survive Trump, but that Trump has made Americans newly aware of things they took for granted. You have, too, in your description of what the president has been and (alas) now is.
You make a number of very valid points that I don’t want to discount. However I feel your article misses the mark in several ways.
1) Trump is sane and rational; he is not disturbed, unstable or mentally ill. See Dr. Allen Frances, author of relevant sections of DSM5. He is anti-Trump but also debunks notion that Trump is clinically unsound.
2) Wanting reassurance about nuclear weapons is perfectly understandable and I want the same thing. However, if we are relying on the outward projections of a father figure to preserve civilization, we are in big trouble. Any good actor can pull that off. Contrary to what you wrote it is not one person and one person alone who can launch. Trump does not have the power to wake up one morning and start pushing buttons. Even if he did have that power, to do so would imply he is insane. And every indication is that he wants to defuse nuclear risk with the Russians.
The cold war mentality of mutually assured destruction on the other hand IS crazy and we are lucky that a flaw in process did not set off nuclear exchange. Or in the case of Cuban missle crisis, a nuclear armed vessels that misread intentions almost launched a tactical warhead.
3) There is no evidence that Trump is at war with his own Intel agencies. He is at war with elements within that community that appear to be trying to publically discredit. To me this is of far more concern than thr blustering that Trump delivers to the media.
There is also no evidence that he watches cable news rather than Intel briefings. If there were I suspect that evidence would be leaked in a heartbeat.
4) The way to oppose Trump is by playing it straight and forming a coherent opposition to policies. And by voting. The media struggling for new heights of indignation and hysteria has not work and I doubt it will.
Thanks.
1.) I didn’t make any observations about Trump’s mental health.
2. ) “No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons. That’s by design: The whole system is set up so the president — and only the president — can decide when to launch.” By Alex Wellerstein, historian of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
3.) No president has ever made the kind of comments about the intelligence community that Trump has. There is simply no precedent for it.
I’ll add that there is plenty of evidence that Trump watches and reacts to cable news. There have been four incidents that I can think of where he has tweeted something verbatim that appeared on cable news within an hour of the story (Chelsea Manning ungrateful, sending troops into Chicago, Lawfare blog pull quote, Eli Lake pull quote) and he admitted his Sweden comment at the rally was based on a story he watched on Fox News the night before.
Trump is not sane. For every one expert you can find who pronounces Trump mentally fit, there are hundreds signing letters and petitions pronouncing him unfit. See the NYT on Feb. 13: “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump,” in which 35 U.S. psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers signed a letter warning about Trump’s mental health: “[Trump’s] grave emotional instability… makes him incapable of serving safely as president.” Previously, more than 18,000 psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals signed a different letter, agreeing that Trump has “a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.” His words and his actions are not those of a sane person.
How about reprogramming the American people so they understand that Russia is not the threat they currently have been led to believe it is.
Sign the USSR collapsed at the end of the Cold War, when it was shown to be an infant militarily vs the US, it, Russia has only spent 1/10th as much on armaments as the US.
That is, the US spent over $10T while Russia has spent $1T. (roughly)
In short, Russia is still an infant militarily vs the US.
ITS NOT THE THREAT THE DEEP STATE AND MEDIA CONTINUALLY SAY IT IS!!
How about educating Americans to understand this!
That will dramatically lessen tentions and paranoia about Trump.
As a second step, promote normalisation of relations with Russia!!
Where do you get such information? Intelligence community is not a deep state, and it knows PUTIN wants to destabilize to get hands on oil through Ukraine. He’s a dictator and there’s nothing normal about that and especially wanting to “befriend” one!!
How is this message imparted to those who proudly stand beside this president? Those who blindly cheer for his impudent and dangerous behavior.
I suspect they all blindly believe that “he will never do that”. Like saying “he’s crazy, but not that crazy”.
I do not know.
Thank you for writing this. Honestly I think this is the best piece of psychological insight, not into Trump but into the feeling he causes in most people. I have literally stayed up night with a lingering sense of dread. There’s a gallows humor joke I make frequently about the end of the world is coming, and this piece helped me understand why I specifically identify the dread as a fear of the “end of the world” as opposed to fear of the many other real and existing terrible things that are happening as a result of this presidency. Yet it’s disconnected fear of an actual world’s end, which I mask with frequent jokes about it, that is at the heart of some of my actual psychological distress. Thank you.
Thanks, Rachel.
A lot to think about here. Thank you.
An early thought, partly enunciated by others above. This argument implies that to vote for Trump, one must discount or disbelieve the entire edifice of nuclear war and how it might come about. Since 1991, the end of the Soviet Union, Americans have tended toward the belief that nuclear war is no longer possible, as indicated by the expectation of a peace dividend.
New voters growing into that role were born since that mindset came into being. Older voters, being human, prefer not to think about the annihilation of humanity. Trump’s revision of the Presidency (#7) provides them with the comforting idea that they are right; we are in a new world where we no longer have to worry about such things.
Unfortunately, the nuclear weapons, their numbers much reduced but still enough to destroy the world, remain.
“New voters growing into that role were born since that mindset came into being.”
This is an important point. It’s much like the mindset of young parents who fear vaccines because they’ve never lived with the visible consequences of the diseases they’ve nearly eradicated. If you didn’t grow up doing drop drills, hearing airstrike siren tests, and watching nightly news reports about the status of the nuclear arms race or describing nuclear winter, your voting decisions are made without valuable experiential data.
Also, don’t underestimate the influence of extreme religiosity—and its inherent anti-logic dogma—amongst DJT’s supporters. If your life decisions are formulated on a conviction of being special and magically protected, particularly within the doctrine of what is fundamentally a doomsday cult, it’s no leap to firmly believe that you will survive, and that only the bad guys will be destroyed, in a nuclear Armageddon.
Jay, hope you had a chance to read Emily Nussbaum today (New Yorker, “How Jokes Won the Election”) since she has a partial answer to your question, How do we surface this story?
Nussbaum quotes this guy: “We memed a President into existence,” Chuck Johnson, a troll who had been banned from Twitter, bragged after the election.”
The implication is clear: it’s going to take a better meme to undo him, an anti-Trump super-meme that erodes his authority by relentlessly revealing his grandiosity to be a sham. Strong reporting, hacksaw-sharp comedy (like SNL), music, theatre, literature, And yes, even pink knit hats. A total barrage. The antidote is the anti-meme.
We need to will it into existence.
Thank you Jay for your insightful observations. Keep up the good work.
I really do not think it is necessary to psychologically place his behaviour into a DSM category. In my layman’s opinion he is an erratic, unhinged narcissistic demagogue who will go to any lengths to boost his own ego. He has demonstrated this time and again with his lies and fabrications.
We cannot allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency just because he does not fit into a DSM category.
He has grown up getting what he wants without having to answer to anybody, except perhaps to his father in earlier years.
He is a real danger to the world and needs to be removed from office as soon as possible before some serious irreversible damage is done.
I think that Trump supporters are getting media feeds that are not critical of, and therefore not disturbed by, the behavior. Also true enough are fundamentalists to either welcome or ambivalent about an apocalypse- and that’s frankly to me, more frightening.
Thank you. This is very well said.
You answered your question with this post. Good work. You’re now reporting. There’s so many facets to the new situation there’s no excuse not to participate.
Thank you, Dave. I think of this as describing something that can’t really be reported. To me it’s writing, being a writer with a responsibility to my fellow citizens to remain alert and put what I see into words.
Seems to me there are many risks emanating from the sheer existence of this Trump presidency that are way, way more dangerous –in the sense of likely to happen– than The Donald starting thermonuclear war just because he can. Yes He Can, but since he’s NOT a lunatic, the odds of him actually starting it are, I would argue, comparable to other infinitely small risks — i.e. of natural disaters happening on a worldwide scale, like the Yellowstone volcano blowing up, a huge meteorite landing on earth, or (man-made) a nuclear reactor blowing up right through all its supposedly infallable protection layers. All these events have a distinctly non-zero chance of happening, but in day-to-day life no one really pays attention to them. And besides, there’s very, very little one can do to prevent any of those. Similarly, Trump’s nuclear capabilities going rogue on just some nice Sunday morning is, in my view, not worth spending time+worries+energy on, particularly when compared to all other damage Trump IS likely to cause and which one CAN perhaps act on to prevent.
Furthermore, suppose some REALLY huge military/political crisis would at some point occur. Then what are the chances just about ANY leader may, no matter how sophisticated in thinking, inadvertently get sucked over an event horizon into a path of destruction? And would the Chinese, Russian, Iranian or South-Korean leadership (to name just some) in their paranoid governamental/power/ideology bubbles really be multiple levels wiser than Trump? Still, you HAVE to assume the latter to be the case, when arguing that Trump is an outlier risk +purely on his own+.
Thanks, Walter.
But I wasn’t really writing about relative levels of risk and the chances of Trump starting a thermonuclear war just because he can. I was trying to describe one way in which he is altering the presidency before our eyes, by abandoning practices that had addressed a psychological fact. Just as these practices made Americans comfortable with a President who could blow up their world, they made the nations of the world more comfortable with American power. And so abandoning them has consequences, quite apart from whether the apocalypse is nearer because of Trump.
Succinct, incisive, and understandable, Jay. Our “system” so susceptible to media manipulation has been exposed by Trump, a master of con and appealing to our base instincts. It truly is a reality TV show, and the MSM needs to stop letting Trump and his cronies play them like a violin. Send interns to press conferences (wasn’t that your idea?) Don’t cover his rallies, just say it’s not time for 2020 campaign, it’s not relevant. Run a script that tells the truth when Trump or a surrogate is speaking. Take it back.
Fantastic article. Said many things I had been thinking. I wish there was a way to prevent him pressing the red button. That power should never have been given to one man.
Overdone, Jay. No. 6 almost says it all … though Trump has access to the best intelligence in the world, he prefers Fox News.
2. What is particularly troubling to a greater degree is how easily President Trump seems to be swayed by his “advisors”. 3 AM phone call to the President that he needs to launch? President Trump has not demonstrated the capacity for rational thought or consequences for actions.
3. President Trump is using his “psychological work” as a weapon to create fear in attempts to exercise control. You could say this tactic might keep foreign powers off balance not knowing what the President will do next, but this comes at a high price for the American psyche. There is no reassurance.
4. The out of control id of the President is no match for the mediation efforts in Freud’s model. The President is all “id”.
5. President Trump said he will be able to act “presidential”. When Stephen Colbert took over The Late Show he said it took him a while (6 months) to figure out how to leave his TV character behind and “be himself”. The President is extending his reality TV character to the White House, but in his case he appears to be making no effort to separate the two. Reality shows across the board are high drama, yelling, secrets and strange alliances. Americans love it and they like what’s playing out in the White House. Unlike other shows, this one can’t be canceled by someone other than the President.
6. See 3, 4, 5
7. If there is some purpose to the chaos, then the President must be a genius to orchestrate it in a manor that’s disguised to everyone else. I doubt this is the case. In the heat of the debate, amongst all the volume, profanity and obfuscation there sometimes is a thread of substance. We need to look for the substance, if any, while calling out the distractions.
8. We may be on a long road and their needs to be a methodical brick by brick foundation of facts, truths impacts (or lack thereof) of the policies and character of the President and his Cabinet. Your thought describes what we’re used to in a President, what’s “normal”. The President’s supporters detest normalcy. The more it’s stated things aren’t normal the more cheers there are. We need to change the approach from “normal” to a narrative of what is decent, humane, compassionate, (legal), etc. It will take awhile.
Dear Jay, thank you for brazenly naming a nerve that is being hit.
Your writing made me think that maybe the permanent reassurance by American Presidents that they will not use their nuclear powers was for internal consumption only (the perspective you give words to) but was picked up by non-Americans as a sign of weakness – which might be why some dared to attack a nuclear giant: they did not fear nuclear retaliation.
With President Trump the opposite might be going on. His flirting with a nuclear option is for internal consumption only, but is picked up by non-Americans as a serious threat – which might be why the United States are perceived as a dangerous adversary again to reckon with.
In that case the real problem lies in the focus that American Presidents with the power to destroy the world have. This focus is mainly on their own constituents, on their voters, rather than on the world.
Good article, as usual. But how do you explain that Trump supporters, most of whom are normal, sane people, watched the same press conference and were not made uneasy?
Seems that a large number of Americans are not in need of these psychological safeguards you described. Either that, or they’re unaffected by Trump’s weakening of them. Either way, doesn’t their response have to be explained as part of all this?
The press conference was 77 minutes. The unbuilding I’m talking about is happening because of the entire way Trump conducts himself.
I have no special insight that would explain the reaction of Trump voters. There I would recommend the work of Chris Arnade.
Great to read this in print, as it articulates a dreadful vision that I (and i suspect many others) have been having. There may or may not be a real increased risk, but I certainly feel a marked decrease in confidence.
That said, I hate to think about a 9/11-style event happening on this guy’s watch.