A glossary for a second Trump term

In a public health context, this is the impact of chronic stress and other negative factors on a person’s mind, body and overall well-being. The impact of these stressors are individual, collective and cumulative and results in shortened life spans and a range of chronic health conditions.

Weathering is a concept that disproportionately impacts Black and brown people, the poor and working poor and working class, the unhoused, undocumented people and refugees and members of other marginalized groups. In total, collective stress is a large public health problem.

The American people are going to experience great weathering from a resurgent Trump administration, the MAGA Republicans and the larger “conservative” movement and its allied forces. This weathering will also impact those people who voted for Trump — his “working class” supporters in red state America will be particularly vulnerable.

This weathering will be caused by both a direct attack on and general undermining of public health and the social safety net as well as from the experience of living in a state of near-constant fear and anxiety from the disruptions to day-to-day life and expectations of relative normalcy that are going to be a defining feature of Donald Trump’s time in office. Such an outcome is the predictable result of Trump and his agents’ promises of a shock and awe campaign and „trauma“ beginning on “day one” of taking power in January.

In a recent conversation with me here at Salon, Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, the president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance, explains that “Witnessing means showing up and saying what’s true.”

Winbush adds, “An integral part of witnessing in the Christian faith also involves sharing what God has done for you in your life. Applying that model of witnessing in a democracy means demanding that your government does not get to mandate a state-sponsored or official religion or place one religion above others. It means refusing to allow the government to impose some „patriotic“ education program or try to erase history because it makes white people and other dominant groups uncomfortable.”

In all, the Age of Trump and the country’s larger democracy crisis are not “just” an extreme political problem, they are a moral and ethical crisis as well. The individual and collective character(s) of the American people are going to be tested by the next four years (and beyond) and how and if they choose to resist the unconscionable being done in their names. This moral testing will also include the bystanders who enable and give permission for such behavior, public policies, and abuses of power through tacit consent and/or claims of ignorance and willful denial such as “I didn’t know….” or “Who could have ever imagined!”

This is a feeling of great fear and apprehension. Dread can be in response to real fears and experiences of what is known. Dread can also exist in response to the imagined if not the unthinkable where the very idea and possibility of the horrible may be worse than the real thing. In one example of reasonable dread, Trump and his agents have promised to deport more than ten million (non-white) undocumented people, migrants, refugees, and other “illegal aliens.“ Trump, without apparent shame or empathy, has literally said that these mass deportations will be a “bloody story.” Trump has also promised to purify “the blood” of the nation — American citizens will likely also be thrown out of the country as part of this campaign.

In a 2018 interview with The Los Angeles Review of Books, David Theo Goldberg, author of “Dread: The Politics of Our Time”, explains:

Less like fear and more in keeping with melancholia, dread has no defined object. It follows from lack: of possibility, of predictability, from denial of principle. Dread emerges out of an unpatchable tear in being, existential or social. It always seeks out that which will increase its own velocity, deepen its hold, magnify its unsettlement….

The affect of dread is unfathomable torment. Dread is depthless, bottomless, lacking insight. It is an agony with no single definable object giving rise to it. It expresses a general anxiety the prompt of which is indefinable, a nagging sense that has no singularly compelling explanation. Dread freezes out all other feeling. It is world-surrounding, world-infusing.

Dread, in short, envelops. It inhabits the world it comes to constitute, to define. That world becomes at once, and interactively, dreadful and dreaded. So much so that the dread itself becomes preoccupying, all-enveloping, claustrophobic. We have shifted, perhaps, from the condition of planetary fear in the wake of Hiroshima to planetary dread today….

Goldberg offers this advice, “The dread fueled by persistent injustice is to be faced down by acting in concert for the sake of the commons, of the shared, crucial to the mutual survival and flourishing of all.”

This is the relationship of the body to politics, specifically how we engage with “the political” and “the public” through our individual bodies and relationships with other people in groups, community, gatherings, meetings, organizations, movements, and marches. Our visible presence and intentional decision to be physically present in certain contested spaces can also constitute an act of resistance.

Corporeal politics also means a willingness to literally have “skin in the game” and to “take a stand” as one stands “shoulder to shoulder” with other people in a public way as they confront power.

In practice, corporeal politics will mean the decision to stand together and in embodied solidarity with protesters, activists, responsible politicians, and other such leaders and voices who believe in the American democratic project, the Constitution, and the rule of law. This will also mean standing together with and in defense of marginalized and other targeted groups marked as the “enemy within” and the Other by the regime.

In societies that are under siege from fascist and other such authoritarian, illiberal, and antidemocratic forces, be it from within or without, there is a temptation to surrender in advance. The reasoning here is that preemptive surrender and compliance will somehow create safety. This is largely an illusion. Since Trump’s victory in the 2024 Election (and during the election campaign itself – and prior) there have been many such examples of anticipatory obedience by the supposed “liberal” news media, the Department of Justice, the FBI and larger legal system, corporations and the moneyed class, the Democrats who believe they can triangulate or find areas of compromise with the Trump administration, and other actors who instead of trying to slow down the progress of autocracy and American neofascism, are trying to figure out how to navigate if not profit from it.

Timothy Snyder, who is a leading historian of fascism and the author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”, explained the logic of “anticipatory obedience” to The Guardian in the following way:

Oligarchs, the very wealthy people, want to tell us that they’re just ‘staying out of politics’. But of course, when you stay out of politics in a way that harms democracy, what you are really doing is saying, we, the really wealthy people, are going to be fine in the new post-democratic order. What they are saying is: after democracy dies in darkness, they’ll be the ones who will be moving happily about in the shadows.

This concept helps to explain Donald Trump and the MAGA movement and larger right-wing’s hold on power and the country’s political imagination.

In a recent essay at Scientific American, leading psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton elaborates:

In contrast, when factual truth breaks down—with a denial, say, of the outcome of a legitimate election—there can be a rush of factual falsehoods inundating a whole society. That is because factual untruth requires continuous additional untruths to cover over and sustain the original one. And the defense of continuous falsehoods relies on more than repetition; it relies on intimidation and can readily lead to violence. Philip Roth had both the falsehood and the violence in mind when he spoke of the “indigenous American berserk.”

What results from this situation is malignant normality, society’s routinization of falsehood and destructive behavior. That can produce psychic numbing, the inability or disinclination to feel, which can reach the point of immobilization.

Malignant normality has much overlap with the term “sanewashing.” That term does connect with a wider audience but can become glib and vague. Malignant normality, in contrast, has a greater suggestion of a psychological experience on the part of individuals and groups.

Given how widespread falsehoods and lying have become, any reference to the value of truth telling can seem counterintuitive. But factual truth telling can bring psychological relief to the teller who can disengage from malignant falsehoods. In this way, truth-telling helps diminish psychic numbing.

This state of malignant normality will likely endure long into the future because the collective relationship between truth and reality has been so disrupted by right-wing malign actors and such forces as disinformation, propaganda, social media, the algorithm, digital media echo chambers, conspiracism, closed epistemes and alternate realities, a failing public education system, a weak Fourth Estate and the death of local newspapers and other legitimate news sources, and perhaps most importantly the Trump-MAGA political experience-infotainment machine and pseudoreligion.