Right now, all the Trumpsters must be in Seventh Heaven. Their man Donald Trump is in a position as president to provide endless shocks to their brains by constantly doing unpredictable things that upend their lives. The next four years of their lives are going to be filled with abrasive surprises. Which is, after all, what they want.
Take, for instance his choices for different cabinet positions. Matt Gaetz, Attorney General; Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense; Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary. These are the four most outrageous choices so far. They are all bitter outsiders, who will carry forth Trump’s desire to get revenge for things that have happened in his life, and by extension, in their lives. They all carry explosive tension-pocket attitudes within them, and they all are like emotional time bombs. The good news is that as of today, October 31, Matt Gaetz has withdrawn his name from nomination to be Attorney General of the United States of America. The new choice is Pam Bondi, former Attorney General of Florida and another Trump loyalist. Oh well! At least she has had courtroom experience unlike Gaetz.
Anyway, these are just some of the most salient abrasive cabinet picks. And then there are all the abrasive policy plans Trump has. Exporting millions of undocumented workers that the American economy desperately needs. Placing tariffs on tons of foreign products, which is just going to make them more expensive for the American consumer. Forcing the Ukraine to make a premature peace with Russia which is just going to encourage Russia to go after Ukraine again as well as other neighboring countries in the future.
Now, as I said before, all the Trumpsters are exceedingly happy with the new atmosphere Trump is bringing to Washington. As for the rest of us, I would say that the reactions range from feeling stunned to living in denial to outright panicking. But no one that I know or that I have heard of has escaped the impact of this cataclysmic event. It would be sort of like trying to escape the impact of a natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake. Even the people who live in denial are being profoundly affected by Trump’s election. The question is how is the impact of Trump’s election on the people who didn’t vote for him different from those who did.
First of all, we must understand, that everyone who is part of the modern American electorate is affected by numbness from the experiential vacuum in which they are immersed. But whereas the numbness affects the Trumpsters directly, putting them in conative anesthesia, namely, the numbing of the will; for the anti-Trumpsters, the numbness primarily causes them to over-react in the opposite direction: conative acceleration rather than conative anesthesia, acceleration of the will rather than numbing of the will. Keeping busy all the time, trying to figure out a way to survive Trump’s attempted dismantling of the U.S. government. Whereas Trumpsters somehow accept their fundamental numbness and break out of it only merging with a cult leader, namely Trump, anti-Trumpsters refuse to accept their ongoing immersion in the living death of numbness and the experiential vacuum. They constantly try to find situations where they can generate their own friction, their own traction, and do it independent of any cult leader. Somehow the anti-Trumpsters are more alive than the Trumpsters. This character type has always been looking for ways to pull themselves out of numbness since the beginning of modern technological society.
Anyway, whereas Trumpsters try to use Trump more and more as a vehicle to pull out of their numbness by psychologically merging with him, the anti- Trumpsters use Trump as an oppositional figure, sort of like striking a match, to generate friction while standing apart from him. In truth, they seem to need Trump or someone like Trump to pull themselves out of their numbness and feel fully alive. Now the desire of the anti-Trumpsters to approach the problem of numbness from a position external to, and apart from Trump, means that their connection to a Trump figure would be very different from the Trumpsters. The Trumpsters are like zombies. The anti-Trumpsters are more like cyborgs. I used to use the words zombie and cyborg interchangeably, but there are some differences. A zombie is, in its original meaning, a will-less person who is controlled by a voodoo priest. I use the word to mean a will-less person who is psychologically controlled by a cult leader like Trump. A cyborg (and here I am talking about a psychological cyborg and not a physical cyborg, someone who thinks like a cyborg) is a person that is partly mechanized mentally, but he is not will-less. He’s a person who uses his robotic side to steel himself against some gross sensory distortion in the external world. In this case it relates to the frightening social atmosphere that Trump has created. As cyborgs, the anti-Trumpsters are constantly moving around, keeping busy, and doing things much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator did, although not necessarily in a destructive way. The Trumpsters, on the other hand, turn to Trump to shield them from the fundamental sensory distortion that is part of all our daily lives. The vacuum is part of all our daily lives, but the Trumpsters try to deny its existence by creating chaos.
Today, we are living in what can only be called a crisis presidency. Here’s hoping we can all make it through to the other side.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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