Biology Explains Why People Normalize Trump
How authoritarians hack our nervous systems to desensitize us to their assaults on democracy.
1. New Normal
America has been navigating a slow-rolling catastrophe for the better part of a decade. I would like us to pause for a moment to observe the extent to which we have normalized it.
Why? Because I want us all to consider what we might normalize by 2028, if Trump wins.
Back in April, Ross Douthat came on Tim’s show and said that the Trump presidency had turned out much better than he’d expected. The transcript is here:
In 2015, I expected that if Trump was elected president, the stock market would crash. He would pull the U.S. out of NATO or do, you know, do something, something along those lines. And that there would be an immediate, not immediate, but sort of a sort of slow-rolling test of the limits of U.S. strength along every major front in the world. . . .
I had a very dark view of Trump’s personality in 2015. I thought it was going to be worse, much worse than what it was.
I am sorry but this is bullshirt.
In 2015, nobody expected that Trump would mismanage a global pandemic to the tune of one million dead Americans.
And in 2015, nobody expected that Trump would direct an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol with the express goal of murdering his vice president so as to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
Ross Douthat did not expect those things. I know. I read his columns.
But those things actually happened. And the only way Douthat could maintain his worldview was to normalize them.
I don’t mean to pick on Ross1 because this normalization process happened across the board. Republicans and conservatives who witnessed the Trump catastrophe talked about how terrible and unacceptable it was. And then later, they accepted it.
Republicans and Conservatism Inc. normalized Trump because they wanted to.
The rest of us normalized Trump because we had to. Human beings can’t live in a state of emergency indefinitely. Our nervous systems can’t handle it. Which is why we’re wired to re-anchor our norms.
Re-anchoring is usually a gradual process that takes place imperceptibly. In this election, we’ve been able to track it in real time.
You could see it on Hugh Hewitt’s face yesterday. Trump called into his show and Hewitt tried to guide him through the interview and keep him on track. It didn’t work. Trump said the following exact words:
The nuclear is the single biggest problem the world has. Not global warming, where the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch in the next 500 years, you know these people are crazy. The biggest problem we have is nuclear warming, not global warming. And—and the nuclear people can’t have the nuclear. The nuclear is the power. You know I rebuilt our entire force and our nuclear is the best in the world and Russia’s right behind us.
Watch the video and you see Hewitt staring into the camera with his best Serious Face, slowly nodding in agreement.
Nothing to see here.
You could see normalization in a less malign form during the 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris when Bill Whitaker asked the following question:
You have accused Donald Trump of using racist tropes when it comes to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, when it comes to birtherism, when it comes to Charlottesville. In fact, you have called him a racist and divisive. Yet Donald Trump has the support of millions and millions of Americans. How do you explain that?
Whitaker notes the extraordinary. But then he says, since half the country likes this sort of thing, isn’t it actually ordinary?
This is normalization. This is how it happens.
Complaining about normalization is like complaining about evolution. It’s a process that happens whether we like it or not.
Authoritarians use this neurological process to hack democracy. This strategy goes by many names—desensitization, flooding the zone with shit—but the theory is the same. If you create a constant stream of abnormalities, then eventually people accept them as normal.
Which is why authoritarians, like Trump, provoke. They seek to accelerate the neurological process, thus normalizing the authoritarian project and creating pathways to power.
My point in all of this is to warn about two things.