Occam's Razor

I call it Trump Disorientation Disorder (TDD), and that’s being kind. Whatever it is, Trump is making people sick. I am not talking about just the children who have fled with their parents to our border hoping to present their case for asylum, only to be cruelly separated from their parents. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can’t even be bothered to identify the family unit before separating them, making it difficult if not impossible to reunite the family in the future.

Trump is also making my wife sick. It actually started before Trump’s election when my wife had a premonition of his election. I happened to be out of town during the election. When I spoke with her on the phone the next morning she was crying, disoriented, hadn’t slept and could barely function. I got home as soon as the airlines would let me but the truth was that I too was suffering from TDD too. For both of us, after Trump’s election the country we thought we knew was gone with the wind.

Granted that the country we thought we knew was always something of a delusion. Moreover, we both came down with a milder case of TDD in 2000, then known as BDD (Bush Disorientation Disorder). BDD though took a few years to fully settle in, particularly after our disastrous invasion in Iraq. With the election of Barack Obama in 2008 though it seemed that some common sense had returned to our country again.

I think I know why TDD is so bad in my wife. It’s because she came from a broken home and I didn’t. Lately, just hearing stories about these child refugees on our borders being put into what amounts to tent cities and cages have deepened her depression. One way of coping is to get a massage. Her back is a mass of extremely tight muscles. It works for about a week then it invariably comes back. The crazier the news gets, the faster symptoms reappear.

They’ve been coming back quicker since Trump’s new zero-tolerance policy was announced. When she was six or seven, her father abandoned her, leaving it to her mother to raise her and her brother. These news reports have resurfaced very painful memories of being literally kidnapped by her father at this tender age. Fortunately, it didn’t last very long but fifty-plus years later the scars remain and this new policy and graphic images on TV have resurfaced them. She doesn’t need to imagine what these kids have gone through; to some extent she has lived through it herself.

She longs for an ordered, kind and predictable world where our government is benign, not evil. This is one of the reasons in retirement we relocated four hundred miles away to Massachusetts. Here things are better-ordered, less crazy and mostly safe. But the arm of the Trump Administration is very long and even around here with our sensible gun control laws and progressive taxation, undocumented immigrants have been swept up by ICE. Many churches have offered sanctuary to these people, including one right here in our city.

Had she grown up black instead of working class white, perhaps she would be coping better. Black people know systemic racism and discrimination. They obviously don’t like it, but they have gotten used to it and have learned to cope with it. Whites like us have often lived pretty insular lives where you took things for granted, like there would always be a floor beneath which you could not fall. Trump and the Republican Party are doing their damnedest to ensure there is no floor. Your only chance of avoiding misery is by acquiring wealth. Republicans of course make it virtually impossible to climb the financial ladder as they keep removing rungs, not only above you but behind you as well.

Here’s how she spends her days: sleeping in late, moping around, watching videos on YouTube, mostly on the volcanic eruption on the Big Island in Hawai’i. She tries to avoid other news if possible. If I turn on NPR she will often ask me to turn it off. She simply can’t cope with the awfulness in the news. But in truth there is no place for her to hide. She has to confront it because it is everywhere. And Trump’s extreme egomania and the press’s willingness to keep it constantly in our faces make her sicker and more miserable every day. The crazier it gets, the more depressed and anxious she gets.

It’s clear to me though that this new policy on the border has caused her condition to reach a new phase, one she struggles to everyday to get through. Trump’s brash upending of governmental and societal norms has her feeling off kilter every waking hour and inhabits her dreams as well. She showed me this story of a woman who was birthed at home and can’t get the federal government to give her a passport because it won’t recognize her birth certificate. She shows me a story of permanent resident that may be deported to Mexico for an assault he was convicted of in 1990. Even naturalized citizens are sometimes not immune from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions. The portrait is one of an administration and an agency wholly out of control willing to break any law they don’t like to see if they can get away with it.

It’s pretty clear where the Trump Administration wants to go: dictatorship. Trump admitted that he wants to govern as a dictator. That congressional Republicans refusal to hold Trump accountable for almost anything indicates that this doomsday scenario is closer than we think.

It’s possible though improbable that this latest policy of separating families at the border and permanently scarring innocent children will be a bridge too far for Trump and his administration. Republicans are beginning to call for a change to this policy but so far Trump is predictably doubling down.

I grant that cruel actions like these are not unknown in our past. During World War II, for example, we placed Japanese Americans in internment camps, a horrible thing to do but at least families were kept intact. We refused to let in Jews who were escaping Nazi Germany. Those Indians we did not inadvertently kill through disease and war we forcefully moved to reservations far away where they struggle to survive to this day. All these actions mirrored what we now see from the Trump Administration: keep America safe for white people, but not safe from crazy and ill-informed white people.

There are times when I wonder if my wife will be a casualty of TDD too. She is already a victim. Perhaps November elections will bring her some relief but everyday she seems to be less functional and inhabiting ever-darker places.