Trump using cynical psychological trick to overwhelm Americans
Trump’s first four years in office were exhausting.
Five years later, his second term is much worse.
It is relentless tiredness mixed with a great dread that decent people feel down into their bones and which makes everything — even the most quotidian tasks — much more difficult.
Each day there is more cruelty, more corruption, more violence, more destruction, more lawlessness, more death, more suffering, more deprivation, more evil, more lying, more assaults on reality and truth, and more fascism.
Individuals and societies have a limited “cognitive load”: the amount of information that working memory can process at one time before the brain and decision-making become overwhelmed and cease to function properly.
Trump’s second presidency is pushing the American people’s cognitive load to the breaking point — and beyond.
To that point: A 2026 report from Pew Research Center found that 53% of Americans view their fellow Americans as being morally bankrupt. Even more worrisome: compared to people in the 25 other countries surveyed, Americans are much more likely to view their fellow citizens and neighbors this way.
Last month, CNN’s Stephen Collinson documented one of these maddening and exhausting days.
On Monday, August 10, in the Oval Office, Appeals Court Judge Emil Bove — one of Trump’s former personal attorneys — swore in Todd Blanche, another former Trump attorney, as the new Attorney General. Blanche and Trump have repeatedly demonstrated that they believe the Department of Justice’s main job is serving as the president’s personal law firm. The collapse of the rule of law in America lurches forward.
Trump then signed an executive order to reduce the number of vaccinations that children receive to protect them from such diseases as the measles. Public health experts warn that reducing the number of vaccinations will likely lead to many tens of thousands of preventable deaths in the United States and around the world.
In the same Oval Office meeting, Trump then attacked progressive and democratic socialist candidates who won recent Democratic primaries as “jihadists,” which, for him, means terrorists and enemies of the state.
Collinson tried to make sense of this day in the following way:
Just one of the wild actions and comments on Donald Trump’s manic Monday would rank among the most notorious things another president ever did.
By close of business, Trump had taken strides toward the presidency he’s always wanted: one of unfiltered authority flowing from the presidential Sharpie, shredding traditional institutions and providing a platform for demagoguery.
Often, the round-the-clock cacophony from the White House seems expressly designed to stifle public comprehension of each individual act planned to irrevocably change the country and the world….
“Nothing bad can happen from what we’re doing,” he said. “Nothing bad can happen.”
In the month or so since Collinson wrote the above essay, the maddening and exhausting days continue, collapsing into one big blur.
There’s the losing war against Iran and Trump’s continued threats to annihilate and destroy it; the naked self-dealing of a crypto business part-owned by the Trump family, now chartered as a legal bank by Donald Trump's own regulators; an apparent influence-peddling scheme where Trump sells early access to his Truth Social posts for up to $100,000 a month; a comedic escape in which Trump hid in a catering truck and was spirited onto a military flight while the press corps and senior cabinet officials were left on Air Force One as human decoys for a possible assassination attempt by the Iranian government.
And still it goes on a twenty-first-century Red Scare targeting the "enemy within" and the "Commies"; the ongoing purge of the military's senior leadership; the replacement of independent inspectors general with political loyalists; a MAGAified Supreme Court issuing rulings in service to its patron in the White House; the continuing destruction of the East Wing to build an estimated $600 million ballroom and a secret bunker for Trump to burrow into; ICE and other federal agents being equipped with electric shock gloves; the arrests of approximately 50,000 "illegal aliens" by ICE and other federal agents in August; an executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America"; an unrelenting campaign to use the Big Lie to stop Americans who oppose Trump and MAGA from voting; and the continued smothering of America's multiracial democracy.
The Trump-controlled John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts took down the beloved “Blue” statue without warning or explanation. I read this as an act of spiteful vandalism.
And Trump is now de facto holding the Kennedy Center hostage and threatening to have it closed down or even demolished if the building is not renamed to honor him.
Some technology CEOs, software engineers, and other experts — most notably Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic — are warning that Artificial Intelligence may decide to destroy the human race by the end of the decade. How did President Trump respond to this apparent threat?
In a series of posts on Truth Social, he proclaimed: “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!” and “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”
How do you feel?
Here are two stories from last month. By the time you read this essay, both will have been long lost in the churn of the 24/7 news media and attention economy.
The Trump regime is deporting thousands of people to de facto gulags and other hellholes in Africa and other parts of the world.
In an August 12 New York Times story, journalist Nicholas Casey detailed the following Kafkaesque nightmare:
The Trump administration is building a growing detention archipelago overseas, often in unstable or autocratic countries. And in cases like Mosquera’s, it’s turning deportation into a form of indefinite imprisonment with no legal recourse.
“Can I ask you a question?” Mosquera asked me on a WhatsApp video call in June, using a phone he obtained after a hunger strike. “Do you think I’ll ever get out of here?”…
The deportations — whether they involve immigrants with criminal histories or not — often happen before deportees can argue their cases before a judge….
More than a year after his arrival, Mosquera still sits in that same maximum-security prison. No charges have been brought against him. He has no way to appeal his predicament. And there is no sign that he will ever be released from prison. “It’s like you wake up, and you’re in this place, and there’s no way out,” his lawyer said.
In Springfield, Ohio, thousands of Haitian refugees are now being fitted with GPS ankle monitors by ICE — like they are human cargo — and sent back to a country that is so dangerous American citizens are banned from traveling there. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now producing terror videos — with a soundtrack of happy music — of Black Haitian men in handcuffs and leg shackles being put on deportation flights.
Beginning in August 1791, Black enslaved people rose up against French colonial rule, in a revolt that would win independence for Haiti. This was the largest and most successful slave rebellion in history. The DHS propaganda video’s summoning of White on Black chattel slavery is so obvious that it does not merit exhaustive explanation.
A 20-year-old man named Pierre Damas Bell was forced to wear one of these ankle monitors. The shame and anxiety led to desperation and an extreme mental health crisis. He committed suicide on August 31. For all intents and purposes, the intentional cruelty of the Trump regime’s mass deportation campaign killed him. Pierre Damas Bell was, by all accounts, a good young man — a college student, member of the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps), an athlete, and a striver.
Mother Jones magazine shared Pierre Damas Bell’s words that foreshadowed his death:
Pierre Damas Bell uploaded a picture of the ankle monitor on Instagram in late July. “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” he wrote in the caption. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
“I came here to study, to build my future, and to live a better [life] not to be treated like criminal,” he wrote. “So now, how am I supposed play college sports with a GPS monitor on my leg?”
This is a difficult essay about hard truths and grappling with “political depression” — mine included.
At this point, an editor might request — or demand — that the writer pivot to “public service journalism” and offer solutions or some other upbeat ending to keep the reader engaged.
Or a writer may independently feel an obligation to leave the reader feeling hopeful and not filled with despair or dread.
And in the worst example, a writer will just become a hope peddler who promises that everything will turn out fine in the end because…. America.
In a 2018 conversation with writer Michael Lewis, Steve Bannon, right-wing imagineer and former chief advisor for Donald Trump, infamously explained that "The Democrats don't matter... The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t."
Bannon’s strategy worked.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, steamships exploded on the Mississippi with terrible regularity.
I see these horrible accidents as metaphors for a culture of death and violence and an America that was bursting at the seams with energy and anxiety about a changing country and world.
Psychologists of the era described this collective anxiety as neurasthenia or Americanitis. Today, it would be called generalized anxiety disorder or some other nervous condition.
We are on those exploding steamships and riverboats, being thrown overboard by the blast, and swimming in a river of foul things, trying to survive. Swimming in filth is exhausting.
Trump’s return to power has afflicted tens of millions of people — if not many more — with a 21st century Americanitis: severe anxiety, exhaustion, and discontent without end.
At the end of the Age of Trump and American fascism, few — if any — of us, will be clean. That is not fatalism or a surrender to learned helplessness. It is reality and the truth.
How do you feel?Chauncey DeVega is widely regarded as a leading analytical voice on the rise of authoritarianism, the MAGA movement, and what he frequently terms the "Age of Trump". His sharp, commentary-driven essays and interviews are regularly republished across progressive networks like AlterNet.
