Trump Contagion: Even More Violence Ahead

... Unless We Choose to Confront It

Our country is experiencing increasing polarization, discord, alienation, and an escalation of anger and discontent.  Fragmentation is a cardinal sign of breakdown of mental health.  At the societal level, this manifests in more and more violence—which is why I have called violence a “barometer” of societal mental health.

It is vital that we understand correctly what is happening, if there is any chance that we will confront the ominously deteriorating situation in the weeks and months ahead.  The resultant violence can take many forms: violence against self, against family and friends, against identifiable groups, and even against strangers.  These forms of violence related to one another, as I have expounded in my textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures.

The entire situation is leading to social discord and tension as never before experienced in our own country—other than, as many say, the time of our long-past Civil War.  However, that comparison is fallacious and not very relevant to our situation today, other than the phrase, “civil war,” itself.  Back then, society communicated slowly through newspapers, pamphlets, and word of mouth over days, not instantaneously and non-stop, based largely on impressions that can go “viral”.  Also, warfare back then was conducted by uniformed armies using single-shot firearms, not by everyday people on the streets with semiautomatic assault weapons.

We must be capable of a different conceptualization today.  The extreme proliferation and fragmentation of “news” and opinion sources that have continual access to everyone via their “smartphones” and personal computers, as well as algorithms and artificial intelligence that tailor material to the likes, interests, and biases of each individual, set conditions that favor the spread of pathology.

The violence that this situation spawns goes beyond the contest of one turf against another, one ideology against another, but ventures into destruction for destruction’s sake.  When matters reach this level, they are no longer in the political realm.  They are in the realm of life or death, and health or disease.  One must restore health for any political discussion to be possible in the first place.

I am a forensic psychiatrist with expertise in the overall subject of violence.  I have devoted my twenty-five-year career to preventing violence from a public health perspective, and I have shown how different forms of violence are interrelated: that is, suicides, homicides, collective violence, warfare, and even nuclear violence and climate destruction.

When Donald Trump launched his first U.S. presidential bid in 2016, I saw him not so much as a candidate for office but as a vehicle for the spread of violence.  Many winced when I used the word, “dangerous”, as in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, but it will now be clear that there was a reason—for preventing violence is easy, inexpensive, and effective, whereas trying to respond after-the-fact is extremely difficult, costly, and uncertain if it will at all succeed.

Just as with the Covid pandemic, the degree of our ability to apply scientific evidence and scholarly knowledge to take preventive steps—in advance, against something that has yet to occur—determines the degree of spread of violence.  Just as with the Covid pandemic, ignorance and denial are our worst enemies, which can determine whether we would lose 1.1 million American lives—almost twice the casualties of the nineteenth-century American Civil War—or none.  In the case of the Covid pandemic, denial played a greater role than ignorance, since the United States was home to the greatest concentration of the world’s best scientists and source of the largest production of scientific research.  Denial is worse, since a denier cannot learn.

The same fate would meet the American epidemic of violence, if we again choose denial.  The current moment has the benefit of thirty-five years of revolutionary knowledge on the prevention of violence, as first conceived in the 1980’s in the United States and spread across the globe with the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) World Report on Violence and Health, the launch of which I played a small role in helping in 2002.

In 2014, I showed with my eminent colleagues that the two political parties in the United States were not about equally life-affirming political differences (as healthy ideologies would be), but a difference of life versus death: the Republican Party doubled violent deaths by the end of each presidential term as a rule, while the Democratic Party halved them.  We also showed that a substantial portion of this was attributable to an influence larger than just differences in policy—which we deduced to be a psychological factor, such as rhetoric.

During Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, in which he used violent rhetoric against his critics and opponents, counties hosting Trump rallies in 2016 saw subsequent increases in violent crimes.  His election itself was associated with a surge in hate crimes.  And objective studies found increases in violence, violent threats, and domestic terrorism during Trump’s term in office, while journalists identified over fifty cases in which perpetrators of violence invoked Trump’s influence as an explanation or justification.

The Trump years began with the August 2017 deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and ended with the January 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. The best predictor of future violence is past violence. We cannot afford to see Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign as just another “presidential bid”; it is a drive for the destruction of American democracy, and potentially of human survival itself.

The Trump phenomenon is not new.  When the man says things such as, “If you f*ck around with us,… we are going to do things to you that have never been done before,” it conjures what violence experts such as myself have seen in our offices, in jails and prisons, and in the streets.  The first thing a violent offender desires is for one’s dysfunction and destructive tendencies to be deemed “just another personality,” or “just another ideology.”  This is because they wish to be seen as constructive and life-affirming, as healthy persons are.  But as Albert Einstein has noted: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  In other words, we cannot contain perpetrators of violence by using their kind of destructive thinking.  When matters become life or death, they enter the domain of medicine—and one must first restore health, which can sometimes mean the removal of an unfit candidacy, just as we would remove a cancer.