5 Common Trump Stories That Are Based On Junk Science

If you're really trying to psychoanalyze the relationship between millions of Americans and a complicated subject like masculinity, that approach is about as representative as augury. Maybe people searching for "Viagra" are just, you know, old? Voters 65 and over swung for Trump, and while I'm sure that their views on masculinity could stand to be modernized, searches for "testosterone" probably say more about someone's health concerns than their foreign policy stance. The Post did mention the limitations of their study ... at the very end, after you'd already skimmed the first paragraph and posted to Facebook alongside a joke about how Trump voters can't get it up.

Any headline that claims to have unearthed the deep-seated psychological roots of Trump support via a poll is by nature bullshit. If an expert wants to uncover immature emotional patterns or innate submission to authority figures in a population, they'd need to actually go in-depth with those individuals, one on one, over time. That is, if the goal was to actually study them and not just toss out spiteful red meat for people eager to see them put in their place. But that brings us to how ...

Elsewhere, a psychiatrist opined that Trump can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. (Remember those couple of weeks when we were all terrified that Trump was going to start a nuclear war with North Korea, and then it dropped out of the news cycle completely?) Here's a letter to The New York Times from 35 mental health professionals concerned about Trump. Here's a former Harvard professor of psychiatry calling Trump a sociopath. Here's a psychiatrist saying, "Yes, we should be scared," because Trump is infantile, tyrannical, and incapable of love (and is erotically fixated on his daughter and has a fascination with feces, burn).

All of those stories went viral because they justify our immense loathing of Trump with some vague form of science. But one story that didn't get frantically shared was of a psychiatrist who helped write the DSM explaining how wildly irresponsible it is to diagnose someone you've never met with a mental illness. If you want to criticize Trump, criticize him for his cruel policies and awful behavior, not by using his body language to lump him in with people who are certifiably ill. It's no more conductive to stopping Trump's policies than calling him fat. It's just a thin veneer of credibility to make name-calling feel intellectual.

This isn't a new phenomenon, by the way. Psychiatrists have the "Goldwater rule," which states that it's unethical, and also idiotic, to diagnose a public figure they've never personally examined. That rule was put in place after the 1964 presidential election, when the magazine Fact polled psychiatrists about whether Barry Goldwater was fit for office, then ran a cover that screamed "1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit To Be President!" Then Goldwater successfully sued Fact for libel, because the headline was about as accurate as publishing "1,189 Proctologists Say Goldwater Has Stick Up Ass!"

Trump may be a factor, but so are concerns about the economy, housing, health, and everything else that makes up the complicated morass of modern life. Genetics and loneliness contribute too. Blaming it all on Trump is part of the problem, because it spreads the idea that if we just get rid of him, we'll all be happy again.

But if you are anxious -- really, clinically anxious, not just "I don't like reading about this jerk" anxious -- there is no quick fix. If Trump returned to his home planet tomorrow, all of the infinite other sources of stress will still be there, and you'll still have to figure out how to deal with them.

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.

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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