Criticism of Trump and vigorous efforts to remove him are vitally necessary, but piling on personal insults adds unnecessary fuel to the fire.
It began as an irreverent stunt during Donald Trump’s 2018 visit to
London, a helium-filled swirl of yellow hair atop an obese, orange,
diaper-clad Trump, his small hands clutching a phone. After a brief nap,
Baby Trump has been pressed into service as the unofficial mascot of
the anti-Trump resistance, with at least nine appearances in the United
States so far.
It’s easy and gratifying to insult Trump. He offers a daily smorgasbord of contemptible
flaws to feast upon. And he dishes out as good as he gets, his Twitter feed a
virtual firing range of baseless, crude and bigoted put-downs. Mocking him as a
fat, tantruming baby may seem a fitting and well-deserved counterattack, one
that is orders of magnitude less terrible than the many acts of cruelty Trump
has perpetrated.
The Baby Trump blimp, however, is emblematic of the counterproductive manner in which
the left too often registers our very justified outrage.
To start with, there’s the body shaming. Hardly a day goes by without
Trump’s body size, shape and color being ridiculed as grotesque. Body
shaming is a form of bullying that isn’t any less cruel when done to
people we don’t like. Even though Trump is the target, the blimp
stigmatizes every person with bodies deemed too fat by our
thinness-obsessed culture, much like the atrociously cruel and classist —
yet wildly popular — People of Walmart website, which lampoon unsuspecting shoppers with
shabby clothes, fat asses and other “white trash” offenses. Sizeism is
one of the few forms of bigotry still tolerated by mainstream society.
Why do we perpetuate it?
Spectacles of leftist schadenfreude paint us into a hypocritical
corner, as was pointed out to me by a conservative woman I met at a
cross-partisan dialogue. To put it in crass, realpolitik terms, cruelty
damages our brand. It prompts the public to fixate on our
ugliness instead of the dastardly policies of the Trump administration.
Furthermore, it perpetuates the us-versus-them divisiveness that adult
Trump so masterfully leverages to his advantage. (One of his supporters recently slashed a Baby Trump balloon with a razor blade in a self-proclaimed act of “good versus evil.”
Like any skillful demagogue, Trump has forged a counterfeit bond with his base, a bond
premised on a shared victimhood narrative of lost honor and wounded pride. What
I’ve learned from conservatives over the past two years is that Trump supporters
perceive an attack on him as an attack on themselves — those high and mighty
liberal elites are not only smugly self-righteous, they’re mean, they hate
us, we are under siege and must protect our tribe and our
leader Trump.
Conservative journalist Rod Dreher has written that, when Trump goes off the rails, his voters justify
their support by saying to themselves, “He may be a fool, but he’s our
fool.” Liberal mockery of Trump’s copious flaws only serves to entrench
their loyalty and bolster Trump’s persecution narrative.
As has been amply documented, partisan (some call it “tribal”) polarization has reached a
deleterious extreme in the United States, leading people to form knee-jerk
partisan opinions instead of reflecting on the merits of contentious issues.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt told National Affairs that, when
we attempt to rationalize our partisan bias, we get rewarded with a highly
pleasurable hit of dopamine. It feels good to belong to our team, our party,
our tribe, and if tribal membership requires that we denigrate the “other”
tribe and publicly humiliate their leader, we do it, and we do it gleefully. And
when we do so, we prompt the right to hate and fear us back. For this reason,
humiliating Trump plays into Trump’s us-versus-them strategy of rousing his
supporters to battle against the common enemy: us.
There is, to be sure, a long tradition of satire aimed at undermining the authority and
respectability of the powerful. The question is, what, if anything, does the
public learn from it? Literary critic Tim
Parks distinguishes effective satire, which points
toward positive change, from failed satire. “[W]itty mockery of a
political enemy can be hilarious and gratifying and can intensify our sense of being morally superior. But as satire it has failed,” he writes in the New York Review
of Book. “The worst case is when satire reinforces the state of mind it purports to undercut, polarizes
prejudices, and provokes the very behavior it condemns.”
enlightening than playground taunts — such as “you’re a baby,” “no you
are” and “I know you are but what am I?” The overarching problem with
Trump isn’t that he’s immature (or fat), it’s that he’s created what
Ralph Nader calls a “cocoon of falsity”
in which he smashes and breaks democratic and cultural norms and
governmental functions that keep people safe, healthy, fully included
and respected.
Poking fun at a degenerate figurehead is not automatically effective. If mocking Trump
turned fence-sitters against him, late night comedians would have successfully
blocked Trump’s candidacy before it ever gathered steam. For all the ridicule
Trump’s endured, it doesn’t seem to have undermined his brazen abuse of power.
Perhaps if our national culture were one of reverence for politicians, then the mere act
of mocking one would have some shock value and jolt us into seeing them in a
new and unflattering light. Perhaps if Trump attempted to present himself as a
dignified head of state, we would need Baby Trump to expose the contradiction
between his pretend and actual disposition. At this point, anyone who doesn’t
already see that the emperor has no clothes is not likely to be enlightened
upon seeing him in diapers. It’s simply meanness for meanness sake.
The creators of Baby Trump said they wanted to boost the morale of Trump’s foes and to “get under his skin.” As one of the organizers wrote in the Independent,
“Trump has repeatedly shown that he doesn’t respond to reason, to facts
or to science. What he does respond to is humiliation.” Yes, he sure
does, and that’s precisely the problem.
Evelin Lindner, a psychologist and founder of Human Dignity and
Humiliation Studies, or Human DHS, has documented cycles of humiliation
met by violent reprisals met by more humiliation, until the society
spirals into genocidal violence. “Humiliation,” she writes,
“is the nuclear bomb of the emotions, perhaps the most toxic social
dynamic of our age.” It reinforces the tyrant’s self-serving
rationalization that they are valiantly fighting the evildoers who are
attacking them.
Linda Hartling, a community psychologist and director of
Human DHS, emphasizes the boomerang nature of humiliation. “If you use
humiliation as a shortcut to attack an opponent, it will come back in some way,
if not at you then at someone more vulnerable,” she said. Hartling sees Trump
as a “humiliation entrepreneur” who is constantly retaliating against those who
pierce his thin skin.
Trump has already been ratcheting up his incitement of violence,
calling for his persecutors to be tried and executed for treason and
warning that civil war could break out if he’s impeached. Dozens of
preeminent psychiatrists have raised red flag warnings about Trump’s
anti-social, narcissistic, sadistic and sociopathic behavior. “Trump’s
sociopathic characteristics … create a profound danger for America’s
democracy and safety,” retired Harvard psychiatry professor Lance Dodes told the Washington Post.
“Over time these characteristics will only become worse, either because
Mr. Trump will succeed in gaining more power and more grandiosity with
less grasp on reality, or because he will engender more criticism
producing more paranoia, more lies and more enraged destruction.”
Ridiculing Trump achieves nothing and risks provoking him to even more outrageous attacks
and counterattacks. That’s what narcissists and demagogues do when their
fragile egos are threatened. Psychiatrists warn that someone with Trump’s malignant
narcissism and anti-social personality is vulnerable to a total psychotic
breakdown and that, by the time the warning signs are evident, it may already
be too late.
Criticism of Trump and vigorous efforts to remove him are vitally necessary, no matter
what the risk of further destabilizing his mental health. But piling on
personal insults adds unnecessary fuel to the fire. A deranged Trump is
incredibly dangerous.
For all the grievous harm Trump has done, I cannot and do not respect him. But withholding
respect and diminishing his humanity are two different things. At a minimum, I
feel obliged to treat Trump with the basic decency I extend to every human
being, no matter how awful I find them. To do otherwise, to dehumanize them as
the “enemy other,” is to set in motion a vindictive spiral that cannot end
well. Human dignity is sacred and, when it’s violated, our ability to negotiate
and tolerate discord erodes, and hate and violence reign.
“Humiliation is the most destructive force on the planet,” Hartling said. “It leaves a wake
of destruction, disrupting relationships in ways that are extremely difficult
to repair.” Why risk so much collateral damage just for the sake of inflicting
suffering on a man who is already seemingly one of the unhappiest on earth, his
inner life its own perpetual torment?
“Speak the truth but not to punish,” Buddhist monk and peace activist
Thich Nhat Hanh counsels. What that means to me is that, when I
criticize Trump’s rampant misconduct, I focus on the actions, not the
person, and contextualize the actions in systems and structures of white
supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, militarism and the resource
extraction mindset. I also want to contrast Trump’s nihilism with my
vision for an equitable and sustainable future, a beautiful,
inclusively-interconnected sacred place where humans and all living
creatures bow to each other in the great dance of life.
During the Sept. 25 Climate Strike in San Francisco, artists and activists from 10
environmental justice and human rights groups transformed two downtown blocks
into a series of street murals representing “community-oriented and earth-based
solutions” to the climate crisis. Taken together, the murals invited viewers to envision a more
beautiful future that celebrates the interconnected lives of people, plants and
wildlife. To me, honoring what’s sacred is worlds more inspiring than
denigrating what we already know is awful.
Diné (Navajo) land and water protector
and poet Lyla June Johnston suggests that the struggle of resistance against
Trump and fossil fuels shouldn’t be one of hate-driven revenge against
but, rather, a movement for life in all its sacred beauty. It’s not
about winning, Johnston said in an interview with the podcast “For the Wild,”
it’s about sustaining, diversifying, protecting and, above all, loving life.
So long as I attempt to implement my vision by denigrating those evil people who stand in my
way, I am taking one step forward and two back. Aggressors usually rationalize
their behavior as serving some higher purpose; seldom is that the case.
Trump must be held accountable but accountability need not take a
vindictive cast. I don’t believe murderers should be executed or rapists
raped. I don’t want Trump hung in effigy or body shamed, I simply want
him gone and, potentially, imprisoned where he can do no further damage.
And I want his supporters to feel that they have a rightful place in a
post-Trump America, a place where they are treated with the same basic
decency and respect as everyone else. If they don’t feel this way, brace
yourself for President Donald Trump, Jr. or whatever other humiliation
entrepreneur is waiting in the wings.
Hating on Trump incessantly isn’t going to be any more effective in
2020 than it was in 2016. The more we hate and humiliate him, the more
his supporters will be inclined to defend him. Even if we win, we’ll be
sowing the seeds of a vicious backlash. And our hatred could trigger an
adult Trump tantrum of existential dimensions. Our desperately sick
culture needs to heal, and more poison isn’t what the doctor ordered.
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