This is a reaction I had to the blog post “The coming weeks and months will be the most dangerous period of this presidency”. Throughout, the post presupposes that Trump actively creates delusional thoughts and unhealthy emotional states within his base. I offered one quote to illustrate the author’s assumption (in this case saying that Trump ‘conditioned’ his followers for an extreme emotional reaction, as if their lives are threatened if he loses the election) and thoughts that similarly paint Trump as some type of freaky mass hypnotist abound, and all such thoughts problematic for the same reason: they indicate a previously distressed and mentally unhealthy public.
“Many of [Trump’s] followers will equally experience his downfall as a life-or-death matter, since he has conditioned this into them.”
It’s as if the author thinks of Donald Trump as the Riddler turning a massive brain drain device on a helpless American public. But how can anyone who is a rational and mentally healthy adult (much less near half of an entire population) be led around the nose by an obvious liar whose dishonesty has been pointed out by all media (including Fox News) and is evident by his contradicting his own health experts among many other examples. Pre-existing mental illness, excessive life stress, and generally poor brain health among the population is the only explanation available. No one has “jedi mind tricks” to make people believe things that are evidently false and knowably false due to freely available expert testimony to the contrary. Poor brain health among much or most of the American public is an independently established fact, depression affects 1 in 4 Americans. The suicide rate has been steadily going up year after year. Mounting Income inequality with a rising cost of living create stress in people’s lives and probably accounts for the record number of young adults living with family, shocking upticks in food insecurity across several demographics, record numbers of adults working two jobs, Etc. Hitler rose to power during deep economic distress in Germany. Trump is a tamer version of the same phenomenon and due to similar causes. Trump did not create the times, the times created Trump.
