Trump’s TraumaLand

Recovering from Chaos

Pay attention to what Trump does, not what he says.

So we hear again and again. But sometimes speech is not just words but what language philosophers call speech acts. The leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy J. L. Austin called them performative utterances. I do in a marriage ceremony is what seals the deal. Your clergyman pronounces you married, formally declaring to the world what your vows already made so. The deal is done before he speaks. Marriage is the only Christian sacrament consecrated by the laity, by you and me.

Trump threatens to pardon the January 6^th insurrectionists, and the damage is done even before he signs the Executive Order. We clutch our pearls, wondering, what can we do to stop this?

Trump nominates a clown car of cabinet secretaries, dreams of buying Greenland from our NATO ally Denmark and take over the Panama Canal and make Canada the 51^st state and the Gaza beachfront “the Riviera of the Middle East,” and crazy as those ideas are (and there are many more), the menace is increased by those pardons. Three-card monte, bait and switch, flooding the zone, throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what will stick — choose your metaphor. It's all about the chaos, fast and furious.

For David Super of Georgetown Law School, “So many of these things are so wildly illegal, that I think they're playing a quantity game and assuming the system can't react to all this illegality at once.” The chaos game diminishes not only the system’s ability to react but our own sense of agency.

Trump’s threats and dreams are speech acts. As he gets what he wants, one after another, we are challenged to wonder what can be done to stop him? We need to pay attention as our trust in our agency slips away: what can we do?

Trump's avalanche of improvised speech acts have been abetted — spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art after all — by the handy cheat sheet provided by the Heritage Foundation: Project 2025.

During his campaign, after a backlash over some of its more radical ideas, Donald Trump repeatedly disavowed Project 2025. Once elected however he dragged its authors from the shadows of the Heritage Foundation and placed them at brightly lit administrative desks.

Among the most prominent is Russell Vought, Trump's pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget. In secret camera footage published by the Centre for Climate Reporting, Vought outed Trump, claiming he had “blessed” the project and is “very supportive of what we do,” (Alison Durkee, Forbes, Feb. 6, 2025).

Vought authored Project 2025’s chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States and spearheaded the project’s playbook for Trump’s first 180 days. Hence the avalanche. And we are only 18 days in.

Vought has said we live in a post-Constitutional age. In a series of previously reported speeches Vought advocated for putting career civil servants “in trauma”:

We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.” That’s a speech act to pay attention to.

There are many kinds and levels of trauma. What Vought describes is the trauma known as moral injury, what the Greeks called thémis, named after Zeus’s second wife who oversaw what is right. Not only will their financial bandwidth be removed, members of “the deep state” will be subjected to dehumanization, viewed as villains. According to Harvard trauma psychiatrist Judith Herman, traumatic events inspire helplessness and terror, robbing “the victim of a sense of power and control.” (Trauma and Recovery, 159). January 6 wasn’t the last event of domestic terrorism. The DTs have been brought in-house, the newest government operation, perhaps soon to rise to Cabinet level, the Department of Domestic Terrorism. No, it doesn't prevent the DTs, it foments terror and the trauma it creates.

Helplessness — the inability to act, to trust in one’s agency — brings the ouroboros to mind, the snake that bites its tail. Traditionally the ouroboros symbolized a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal. In Trump and Vought’s little hands it seems to represent eternal cyclic destruction.

The Senate confirmed Vought on Thursday night. He must be feeling his oats.

Which makes me wonder. Does Vought know that he shares his name with the company that runs the supervillains in the comic book and Amazon Prime series called The Boys?

In The Boys, Vought-American (VA) persuades the US government to incorporate superheroes — The Supes — into the national defense. Like Trump and his administrators, VA is better at big ideas, top-down, than in training and execution, bottom-up. In the comic books, which I follow here, the VA’s premier gang of supes — The Seven — try to stop terrorists on a passenger plane, but do not understand the tactical or physical challenges involved in entering a plane during flight. They end up killing all the passengers and sending the fractured plane into the Brooklyn Bridge. As Bill Mahr jokes, “Today Trump fired a guy for bringing in an idea that was fully baked.”

What could go wrong?

The corporate leader, the Guy From Vought, is a high-functioning sociopath who aims to make a profit at the expense of others, suffering no remorse for any action. Sound familiar? Oh, and he is known to cause a bit of trauma now and again. Some readers and viewers of The Boys may make the connection to life inside the beltway, seeing Dennis Vought as the villain he projects upon the imagined deep state.

Welcome to Trump’s TraumaLand

The word trauma comes from the Greek, meaning wound. Traumatic events, argues Judith Herman in Trauma and Recovery, are “extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.” We all carry within us a life narrative, one that makes sense of and gives meaning to our lives. Meaning — the truths we hold dear — is trauma’s first victim. Trauma breaks the life narrative. It wounds whatever meaning we have subjectively constructed for our lives. Trauma also breaks the community and its narrative. Without meaning to guide our decisions, how do we take action?

Nothing prepared us for an elected president to take the oath “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” and then to set about destroying it.

Most traumas involve the abuse of power. Rape, emotional abuse, immoral wars, quid pro quos to steal elections — all are abuses of power that inspire helplessness and terror and end our sense that justice reigns. The lens of trauma is one way to understand the abuse of power we experience under Trump and the loss of agency that we feel. Democracy has always been susceptible to trauma induced by demagogues whose first role is disruption: Andrew Jackson, Huey Long, Father Charles E. Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy. America always had white supremacists, guardians of The Lost Cause. Trump gave them permission to come out of their woodpile. Our new life story must include them among the dramatis personae. They’ve always been lurking in the darker recesses of the American story.

Trump’s “alternative facts” and “fake news” were a direct assault on truth. To assault personal or communal truth — meaning — is traumatizing. Congressman Jamie Raskin writes in his memoir Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy that, “Before the attempted coup of January 6 destroyed our fundamental expectations about the peaceful transfer of power in America, the norms of our constitutional democracy had already been overrun by years of political propaganda, social media disinformation, racist violence, conspiracy theorizing, and authoritarian demagoguery” (13).

Though traumatic events range from extreme violence to more subtle forms of abuse, the basic disorders that result follow a common pathway. The salient characteristics include hyperarousal, or the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion, often as flashbacks of the traumatic moment; and constriction, experienced as the numbing response of surrender: the loss of agency.

Recovery from trauma knits the life narrative back together. Restoring a sense of safety is the first step. Then we can bear witness to the harm. Telling the story and being heard equips us to take back control of our lives. Control begins with a new understanding of the pre-trauma narrative. The trauma was unthinkable — Congressman Jamie Raskin’s word from his memoir’s title — due to our national myth of American exceptionalism, that decorous metronome that promises that democracy is as trustworthy as clock-work. Improvisation’s syncopations — here’s the beat, no it’s here — pushes back against the American sense of entitlement. All the while, the traumatizer gaslights the victims: there were good people on both sides. The improviser pushes back: no, this was not normal.

Truth-tellers knit the story back together, including the dark threads. They model the hard work ahead as we rebuild the facts, norms, and the healthy balance of power envisioned by the framers. Truth-tellers help us recover our sense of agency.

Recovery can be understood as knitting the lifeline or life narrative back together, telling your story in such a way that the trauma experience is explained as part of the life narrative. Hence it means understanding the pre-trauma narrative in a new way, too, why you were surprised, how your culture didn’t prepare you for the intrusion of the extraordinary.

Recovery means finding a new trajectory, good or ill, depending on the quality of the recovery work.

For Herman, one key to positive recovery is resocialization. The trauma broke not just the individual victim’s life narrative but the social contract. Full recovery depends on finding good listeners. Good listeners suspend judgment as they hear the story. They have no need to deny its reality. Good listeners experience with emotion some of the terror, grief, and rage of the teller but without themselves being traumatized (the trauma of witness). Nonetheless they are open to being changed by the narrator.

Such, full of challenges and contradictions, is the way forward for the Resistance as we struggle to come through Trump’s brutalizing traumas.

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