Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Here are some questions I have about a post-Trump world.
1. I would describe the Trump presidency as a national trauma. The trauma has involved *humiliating loss,* one of the most potent and destructive of human emotions--

--and an emotion, many have observed, that often gives rise to deep clinical depression.

Among those who didn't support him, Trump has attacked our narcissistic pride. Our pride in being Americans; in believing Americans were immune to low-rent, third-world demagoguery;

our pride in believing ourselves, deep down, to be *serious* and *responsible* people; our pride in our system of governance--which wasn't supposed to create results like a Trump Presidency.

For Trump's supporters, the trauma is different, but will very much still be a real trauma. Many of his supporters entered the President's narcissistic delusions *with* him. At some point, they'll be forced to confront the truth: The emperor has no clothes.

That will be devastating. They will be devastated.

I'm not sure what revelation it will take for them to realize this--so far, nothing has, but perhaps a very strong electoral rebuke will do the job. Or maybe it won't.

For them, the narcissistic injury will come from the realization that the President made fools of them. This, too, is a humiliating loss.

We will be a wounded country, psychologically, no matter the results of the election.

We will be bitterly divided, sicker, poorer, permanently disabused of our cherished fantasies about ourselves, and confronting a hostile world with very few friends left.

Trump won't go away--he may no longer be the C-in-C of the military with the power to launch on command--

but you better believe he'll be sucking up media oxygen, feeding off the attention of his cult devotees, doing everything he can to undermine the Biden presidency and any initiatives it takes to try to make the country whole again.

What are the precedents for something like this in history? There is of course de-Nazification, but the US under Trump did not become Nazi Germany; it became something sui generis.

In other countries that have defeated a charismatic populist with a large cult following,

how have they re-integrated, afterward? What works?

@threadreader unroll