3

"Trump Anxiety Disorder" Isn't A Thing

Living under the Trump presidency sucks. Every day it seems like some terrible new thing happens while Trump does something outrageous solely to anger and sadden his critics. It's no wonder that psychologists are now seeing patients suffering from Trump Anxiety Disorder -- anxiety induced solely by having to live in the hellworld Trump is creating.

The symptoms are "increased worry, obsessive thought patterns, muscle tension and obsessive preoccupation with the news," which you may recognize as applicable to everyone reading this. Maybe you're worried about your career, or that we're all going to die. Whatever Trump is making you fret about, it's ruining everything from friendships to sex lives. How can you even be justified in focusing on anything but Trump? Don't you care about the fate of the nation?!

Meanwhile, we have stories of individual therapists seeing more patients, a phenomenon explained with rationale like "Authority figures represent the parent, [so] President Trump seats [sic] in the seat of parent for all Americans. So now, my 'father figure' is a bully, is an authoritarian who doesn't believe in studying and doing homework." Sounds vaguely credible. You certainly don't like thinking about Trump, so there must be some truth to this.

2

Trump Can't Be Solely Blamed (Or Credited) For The Economy

Every personal opinion about Trump aside, the man is clearly terrible for the economy. The professionals are saying as much, with worrying stories about Trump being "bad for the economy" and even an "economic traitor." His "impulsiveness" and "vanity" could tank America, and once he's done destroying us, he could "derail" the entire planetary market. Trump's claims to the contrary are nothing but more of his nonsensical bluster. We're lucky we haven't reverted back to a barter economy.

Oh, but just a few months prior to all those stories of doom and gloom, Trump apparently deserved some credit for turning the economy around. He had "set economic growth on fire," and was the "unsung hero of the world economy," which you probably only heard about if those stories were forwarded to you by your grandma. Even today, we're told that while voters don't like Trump, they like his economy. Of course, according to experts, the real credit for a booming economy goes to policies introduced by Obama ... unless you prefer to read the other experts who insist that actually, we really do have Trump to thank.

So the economy is doing great, unless it isn't, and it's all because of Obama, unless we should really be crediting/blaming Trump. Does that clear things up?

In reality, economies are hugely complicated beasts, and they can be measured in all sorts of different ways to make a president look good or bad. The president, in fact, has much less power over the economy than people think, and the impact they do have can't truly be analyzed until years or even decades after they're out of office. Remember, the economy is global. Your financial fortunes are partly decided by events in China, Europe, and other places that Trump not only doesn't control, but may not understand or even know about.

Related: Trump's Biggest Lie (Most Liberals Believe)

1

There Is No Single Definitive Reason That Trump Won

Immediately after Trump's election, the narrative was that he was carried to power on the backs of poor white Americans frustrated with their economic lot in life. But a recent study swept aside that bullshit with the obvious truth: Trump voters are a bunch of well-off sexists and racists! Trump voters were terrified that white men would no longer be relevant in a changing America, and they voted accordingly. This study went viral because it vindicated what every Trump critic had been insisting for years: His supporters are bitter, hateful people motivated by spite and rage, and now we have the data to prove it.

Except another study associated Trump's victory with declining health in rural areas. A third attributed the results to fake news demonizing Clinton. A fourth said that Trump appealed to authoritarian tendencies. A fifth placed the blame solely at the feet of third-party voters. Remember that narrative, that your one hippy friend who voted for Jill Stein was somehow responsible for throwing America into four years of darkness and should be thrown under the bus accordingly?

You see the obvious problem here. Five different studies each naming one definitive reason that Trump was elected can't all be correct. Voter behavior is in fact often irrational, often contradictory, and always complicated. Lots of people voted for Trump because they just always vote Republican (the opposing candidates will count on some blind party support too). Lots of people voted for one reason and then lied to pollsters about it later. Lots of people didn't have any single clear reason in mind, but came up with one when a pollster asked the right leading question.

The problem is that polls just record answers, they don't read minds, and society would look a lot different if something like racial resentment was that easy to detect and quantify. Only a small fraction of these people march with swastikas, and many of the ones who are racists don't think of themselves that way. If you're interested in actually winning the next election, you have to deal with, for example, the six million or so voters who voted Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016 ... and the fact that they had about six million different reasons for doing so.

Stories that try to boil this all down to a simplistic battle between the good/rational and the hateful/deranged make for entertaining reading, but judging our information purely by how much it entertains us is terrible for the world. That will be true no matter who wins in 2020.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book that is mercifully not about Trump.

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