Tuesday, November 05, 2024

Thoughts On Election Day, 2024

Going about this day, Tuesday, November 5, with equal parts hope and trepidation. Though it is one of many very uncomfortable days leading up to the election, I am savoring these hours when I can still believe that America remains the America I grew up in, where truth matters and there are consequences for misbehavior. If Kamala Harris wins, there will still be vast challenges. But if she loses, the election will represent a seismic shift for a country already shaken and paralyzed by artificial political polarization, disunited by deepening income disparities, and increasingly battered by climate change. 

If trump wins decisively, many of us will be eating irony paradoxide. That is to say, it would be ironic if, after so much concern about a violent revolution if Trump were to lose or the results were not definitive, it turns out to be the Democrats who must acknowledge clear defeat and cede power peacefully, respecting democracy while yielding to someone determined to undermine it. 

Evidence that Trump could in fact win by a substantial margin are opinion pieces like the NY Times' deputy opinion editor, Patrick Healy, who reported on the opinions voiced over three years by focus groups of voters. Inflation looms large for many. The Time's chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, points to evidence of a rightward shift that's been underway for some time. In this view, if Trump loses, it will reflect less an embrace of progressive values than the failure of conservatives to field a candidate with fewer liabilities. 

What is left unmentioned in these formidable opinions is the extraordinary power of propaganda being generated by Fox News and many other outlets that has made many in the country unresponsive to evidence. While Trump is free to think and say essentially anything and everything without apparent consequence, he has muzzled his followers and forced the Republican Part to strictly conform, to either parrot his words or face eviction. 

Along with the increasing isolation from and imperviousness to differing views, there is the cathartic power of "throw the bums out", in which voters are so busy directing their discontent at those in office that they forget to consider what sorts of bums they will be throwing in. Constantly fueling disgust towards his enemies, Trump's talent for harnessing this cathartic power is matched only by his capacity to stir disgust towards himself. If he wins in 2024, he will be thrown back in by some of the same cathartic energy that threw him out in 2020.

Also unmentioned in other analyses is how Republicans have a built-in advantage, not only due to the electoral system and the skewing of the Senate due to sparsely populated conservative states. The Republican Party lets voters off the hook, offering tax cuts while expanding government, and pretending climate change isn't real. Running from tough issues is a sign of weakness, and yet Republicans still claim to be strong protectors. This abdication of responsible governance has shut down productive debate and left the government paralyzed as these core threats grow ever larger. 

Even if Kamala Harris were to win, there will still be propaganda, a constant stirring of artificial political polarization through lies, and a political party that claims to protect the nation while ignoring looming threats.

What is heartening on this day of profound uncertainty is the Democratic Party's nominee. I was not expecting to like Kamala Harris after her campaign in 2020, but she has grown significantly in ways that fit this moment in history. She has the requisite experience, embodies compassion and caring, has found the joy, and there is widespread acknowledgement that she demolished Trump the one time he dared to debate her. She has the aura of a winner, while Trump stumbles to the end, showing his true colors, muddled, angry and extreme. Four years of unbearable and debilitating chaos await if he wins.

When Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, my take on divine intervention was that God saved Trump so that he could be roundly defeated in the election. For him, that would be a fate worse than death. If he does lose, again, it will not deepen my belief in God, but will deepen my belief in the prospects for this beloved country. 

Friday, October 04, 2024

Understanding Donald Trump Through an Undiagnosed Learning Disability

A woman I know, 98 years old, sharp as a tack, excited about the upcoming election, offered a theory about why Trump is the way he is. She used to work with kids with learning disabilities, and based on her experience, she believes Trump has multiple learning disabilities, most prominently dyslexia. Undiagnosed when he was a child, and combined with a father who had no tolerance for failure, these caused him to become a pathological liar to hide his inadequacy. Thus the bizarre inability to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election.

I had never heard this take on Trump before, and so I searched the internet for similar opinions. A similar view came from Harriet Feinberg, a former teacher, who wrote a piece entitled "Why Trump Can't Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher." She describes dyslexia as "a neurobiological condition that makes it difficult to learn to read and can also affect sentence formation and vocabulary." Trump has long had trouble speaking in full sentences, and on the campaign trail is said to use a 4th grade level vocabulary. According to what she calls her "informed speculation," a "mild to moderate" dyslexia is "foundational to his inability to learn and grow while in office," and also serves "as a way to link disparate troubling elements in his makeup."

Feinberg further elaborates her educated guess, 

"Because trying to read was frustrating, as time went on he read as little as possible. Because he experienced humiliation and shame in the early grades when he saw other children acquiring information with ease from books, I believe he came to resent those children who were academically successful, who loved school, and drew the teacher's praise. His own natural curiosity about the world waned."

The humiliation and shame Trump likely experienced in elementary school goes a long way in explaining the narcissistic and vengeful qualities so much on display in his public behavior.

Like my 98 year old acquaintance, Feinberg links an undiagnosed and untreated learning disability to pathological lying:

"How does Trump's difficulty in reading relate to his penchant for uttering falsehoods? I think he began faking when he was six or seven and couldn't keep up with the other children his age who had learned their letters and were starting to read sentences and little stories. He wanted to be "great" so he made things up. Faking got baked into his personality. He couldn't stop now, not for anything."

Imagine someone growing up in such a vice, trapped between an undiagnosed learning disability and his father's high expectations, with no one to turn to for solace or help.

Another view in a similar vein comes from Divergents Magazine, whose mission is to shift us away from the language of disability and towards neurodiversity. In an article entitled "Trump's Likely Struggle, Our Nation's Consequences," the unnamed author, who has "worked with adults with learning disabilities for 30 years," describes Trump's shame and dissembling when asked to read a legal document. The author's diagnosis: "'a hyperactive dyslexic'--a term coined by Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, in his autobiography."

Describing this rare combination of hyperactivity and dyslexia, the author says that "either challenge by itself presents high hurdles in education. Taken together, they can be devastating to a child’s ability to attain literacy."

The author went to New York Military Academy a few years after Trump, in an era he describes as 
"the Dark Ages then when it came to learning disabilities. I can well remember how struggling students were humiliated by teachers in public and the exodus of some students to schools with greater behavioral rigor and lower academic demands. Only in 1977 did a federal law begin regulating education for individuals with learning disabilities.

Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I remember how humiliation was sometimes used in schools, most memorably by a high school symphony band director who presumably modeled his approach on that of university band directors William Revelle and George Cavender. Though ultimately earning respect and even reverence from his musicians, Revelle acknowledged "I'm intolerable when it comes to perfection. Sometimes I'm even downright mean about it." Of Cavender's admirable pursuit of excellence by less than admirable means, it is said that he "accomplished a lot through intimidation and humiliation." For those who could weather the tactics, these directors offered an inspiring commitment to excellence, but imagine someone with an undiagnosed learning disability trying to survive in such a milieu. 

Trump was sent off to the Military Academy, a private boarding school, at age 13. The author's description:

In those earlier years, students with learning problems had few options for compensation. One common one was to become the class clown. Another was to become the class bully. Trump seems to have chosen the latter.

Being exiled from home and from one’s circle of friends is hard for any child. It seems possible that for Trump it caused a narcissistic wound that has driven much of his behavior as an adult: the need to surpass his father, his mistrust of most others, his terrible pride and anger, his drive to be the best in all ways.

That’s all speculation, of course.

A third source suggesting Trump has an undiagnosed learning disability is Trump's niece, Mary Trump, in her 2020 book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

There will never be a professional diagnosis. To fill that void, a mix of informed speculation, educated guesses and insider family exposes are all we will ever have as each of us seeks to make sense of Trump's behavior. 

What is particularly striking is how our political reality has come to mimic the conditions Feinberg believes to have been at play in Trump's childhood. The Republican Party's refusals to acknowledge human-caused climate change and taxcut-caused deficits play out as a learning disability. The doubling down on falsehood, the reflexive export of blame--these strategies work with the electorate much as they may have worked with an unforgiving father. And when Feinberg speculates that Trump "came to resent those children who were academically successful," it's hard not to think of the Republican Party's cultivation of resentment and its dismissiveness towards academia. 

These traits--denial of reality, anti-intellectualism, bold fabrication, a need to stoke resentment of the "Other"--were already deeply embedded in the Republican Party long before Trump came along. The groundwork was laid for him to take existing traits further, and brand the Party in his image.

On this blog, I have viewed Trump through varied lenses, as a suicide bomber, a narcissist, a hypnotist. Now an insightful 98 year old has offered a fourth lens, perhaps even more powerful and foundational than the others. Reminiscent of the apparently fictional story of the Spanish king whose lisp became embedded in the national language, the Republican Party now speaks Trump's language, dutifully parroting his fictions. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, there is currently a 50/50 chance that the nation, too, will succumb. If he gains control of the nation as he did of the Party, for the duration of his reign we will be forced to live within the harsh, polarizing realities of a most unfortunate childhood.