Now just a bit more than a month into President Donald Trump’s administration, I’ve found myself returning to the imagery of that ad because it seems to so perfectly encapsulate the cognitive damage that we risk as a result of the Trump presidency.

While there is little question that the Trump team is set to unravel our democracy, our foreign relations and every stitch of political progress our nation has ever made; that isn’t all that is at stake here. A healthy democracy depends on an active and engaged citizenry. It demands a citizenry attentive to issues and able to productively debate and dialogue. But, most important, it requires a nation that can think.

Stop for a moment, if you will, and attempt to take stock of the various phrases that you and your friends have been throwing out to describe our collective mental state in the Trump era. While some folks might highlight anger and a feisty sense of resistance, the majority of comments we hear refer to a sense of cognitive numbing and mental anxiety.

In an effort to crowdsource some of the responses, I asked more than 1,200 people via Facebook and email and received the following list: “wearing me out,” “burning me out,” “frying my brains,” “beyond belief,” “turning my mind into mush,” “brain overload,” “mental meltdown,” “crippling depression,” “constant low level dread,” “making me numb,” “stressing me out,” “abject horror,” “disoriented and scared” and “scaring me to death.”

Others offered descriptions such as “nonstop,” “overwhelming,” “relentless,” “mind-blowing,” “devastating,” “exasperating” and “surreal.”

One friend wrote, “I often wake up in the middle of the night thinking about Trump and unable to get back to sleep from anxiety.“ Another simply posted this Nicolas Cage gif.

In our efforts to make sense of all this we have often turned to George Orwell’s “1984.” While the dystopian novel has a lot of insight to offer, it can’t actually capture the cognitive effects of Trumpism. And that’s because the Trump team is not just brainwashing us or numbing our brains with Newspeak. It is actually implementing, consciously or not, a complex five-point strategy poised to make our minds shut down. Each of these tactics has a special impact on cognitive functioning, and until we understand what’s going on, we have no hope of stopping it.

1. An epidemic of lies

The lying of Trump is legendary at this point. But we have paid less attention to the cognitive impact of processing an endless stream of lies. As Maria Konnikova wrote in Politico, all presidents lie, but Trump is in a category of his own, with a whopping 70 percent of his statements coming in as false.

The lies are certainly bad, especially when they are the basis for policy. But Konnikova explained that one of the most pernicious effects of a serial liar is on cognitive functioning: “When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything.” For Konnikova the frightening reality is that Trump’s endless lying runs the risk of colonizing the brains of those who never even supported him.

Political comedian John F. O’Donnell did a bit on this exact issue for “Redacted Tonight,” where he explained that research shows that in order to cognitively process a lie, we first have to provisionally accept it as true. After accepting the lie as an idea, we can then reject it as false. The problem is, though, if we are overloaded with constant lies, our brains may become too exhausted to reject the lie. Before we know it, claims that are obviously false, like allegations of massive voter fraud during the past election, can seem true.

But there’s more.  Trump’s fabrications are a special type of lying. He is what CNN called the “gaslighter in chief.” Gaslighting relies on creating a parallel universe that blurs any real connection to the truth and it is a common practice for narcissists. “The techniques include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth,” according to CNN.

Gaslighting is an especially abusive form of lying. Psychologists explain that it “can lead to the victim losing all trust in their own judgment and reality.” It results in self-doubt, angst, turmoil and guilt.

2. An assault on logic

Critical thinking doesn’t just require facts; it requires the ability to reason, deduce, infer and analyze.  Those skills are also under attack. Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation while she rants about “your words” reminds us that circular logic, tautology and flawed thinking rule the arguments made by the White House.

Jeet Heer wrote in November that fact-checking Trump was simply not enough to understand the cognitive effects of his statements. Heer keyed into the fact that Trump contradicts himself constantly.

Contradictions, though, are only the tip of the illogical iceberg for Trump. President Trump and his team practice an ongoing and incessant assault on all forms of logic. And without logic, we can’t get any real thinking done of any kind. As I wrote before the election, the assault on logic will eventually make us all stupid, but in the short run it will wear us all down.