The election of Barack Obama as the U.S. president also represented a great shift in the nation’s life and psychology, though of a different nature. Blacks have historically carried connotations of Otherness in America, by the difference of their skin color and the circumstances of their arrival on the continent, compared to the majority population, which has led to persistent racism. Certainly, the election of an African American man to the highest office in the land represented a dramatic civic achievement in the country’s history. It gave cause to consider the possibility that the United States may have reached a postracial consciousness.
Yet, the production of the “birtherism” movement, in this historical context, tells a different story. How so?
The questioning of the authenticity of Barack Obama’s native birth is without precedent in the history of the American presidency. No other president, all of whom were white, was ever subjected to the deep offense of such a cruel falsehood. It was as if such an arrogant affront to the dignity of the president, or any man, was permissible because he was black. With such calumny, Donald Trump signaled thinly veiled bigotry. While not expressing directly an outright racist slur, his embrace of birtherism was a “dog whistle,” an unmistakable call to delegitimize a black American citizen as the Other because he aspired to the presidency of the nation.
The American public takes great pride in the fact that any of its native born could become president. It has always been the aspirational ideal of this country’s self-image as a place of freedom and opportunity for all. Both Barack Obama, an African American professor of constitutional law with a record of community service and the audacity of hope, and Donald Trump, a brash real estate developer with no political experience, could succeed in the quest for the highest office in the land on the strength of their appeal to the citizenry.
The bigotry of birtherism set a limit on this national aspiration. It signaled that a black person could not be truly American. Just as the election of Barack Obama thrilled the nation, imbuing us with civic pride in the seeming achievement of a postracial society, birtherism signaled that it was permissible for America, deep in its soul, to continue harboring and nursing the historic racial prejudice. It said that a black president could not be legitimate, and so the factual reality of his very birth on American soil had to be denied. In this willful distortion of fact, Donald Trump showed the essential quality of his personality: the perversion of his relationship to truth. It showed that he could and would distort and deform the truth in his quest to secure any deal he was after. Truth and reality were commodities just like any other—a matter for a transactional sale of a desired acquisition. This appears to be the hallmark of the Trumpian mind-set. Birtherism was its opening political bid.
We are living in a time of great demographic, economic, social, and political transformation at home and abroad. What it means is that the pressures from outside the national realm resonate with those within it. America’s unrivaled democratic diversity, as seen in its immigrant descendants continues to evolve, just as its standing in the global transformation is adjusting anew to evolving realities, global terrorism among them. This stretches the psychological resources of the nation, and its resilience. The American citizenry meets its moment of truth under conditions of shaken security and changing identity. It becomes a matter of paramount importance to the well-being of the country, therefore, that it withstand and manage these pressures with a calm resolve based on a moral sense of decency and reason.
At such times, the nation looks to its leader to uphold its vital interests and values. It is for this reason that we celebrate those presidents who showed the capacity to meet the challenging realities of their moment in history with dignity, and appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” This is the reason that Lincoln stands in the American presidential pantheon with George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each of these men lifted the nation not with partisan transaction but with vision and moral purpose.
Donald Trump’s appeal has just the opposite effect. It debases civic discourse and corrodes national unity.
Birtherism shows the essential characteristics of Donald Trump’s mind-set: A self-professed ultimate dealmaker first and foremost, he pursued the presidency in an entirely transactional manner. He did not hesitate to make up falsehoods or wink at bigotry to win. In a manner similar to exploiting every available tax loophole; every feasible advantage over his debtors, contractors, and workers; every opportunity to have “special” relationships advance his deal-making aims, he made an unerring political calculation to seize the transitional moment of national insecurity. His business acumen worked brilliantly, against all odds. But his transactional win represents a profound danger to the nation because it sells out the most essential qualities of democratic values, of moral integrity, and of true inventiveness. What binds us together is the shared reality of our country’s history and its present: E pluribus unum. “Out of many, one.” The country’s cherished motto cannot hold when truth is open to transactional competition from “alternative facts.”
We are left with the question about what made the American public receptive to Donald Trump’s promissory bid despite his falsehoods. Yes, our country is ever open to enterprising inventiveness and grand boldness. But it is not naïve. There has been too much toil, hardship, and strong civic pride in building this nation for its citizenry to surrender the habits of common sense and clearheaded pragmatism. However, this does not make America immune to the lingering effects of its own historical legacy of slavery and racism. Without a full reconciliation between that legacy and the nation’s founding ideals, the significant fault line between the two will open up in times of increased strain. The startling fabrication of the birtherism movement offers a window into just such a fault line.
It does not require particular professional schooling to recognize that birtherism was a telltale sign of a preoccupation with Otherness. It is easy to grasp the sense of threat from the foreign Other in the age of terrorism and massive global migration. It is more difficult to acknowledge the persistent fear and lingering mistrust of the black Other at home in America.
We want to believe in our postracial integration and equality. We are proud of the progress we have made. The election of Barack Obama is its rightful proof. It is a lot more difficult to recognize the prejudices of an inborn and ingrown kind of stereotyping. The fact that Donald Trump could successfully use the myth of birtherism as an under-the-radar deployment of bigotry attests to its subterranean persistence.
This is not an indictment of American society. It is a call for recognition of America’s historical conditions. We associate the settling of the country with white colonists. We grow up with those lessons of our history and culture. Although the labor of the Blacks was indispensable to the fledgling American economy, slavery denied them the recognition and rights of equal participation. The result was persistent discrimination, which further disenfranchised them from full civic participation, with each perpetuating the other. White and black cultural traditions came to develop their own idioms, furthering the racial divide.
It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the myriad ways in which racism continues to plague our national realities. It remains our challenge to right the political, civic, and interpersonal relations needed for the mutual benefit of the present and future American generations: white, black, and any Other. In order to rise to the challenge, we need the courage of truth and awareness. We need to question rationalized public policies that maintain segregation and inequality, be it at the voting booth or in judicial or police protection. We need to tune into and question habits of prejudice and bigotry. We need to probe better the stereotypes of our culture and of ourselves. Such an examination will inoculate our civic consciousness against the lies masquerading as truth. We will choose worthy leaders aware of their responsibility to represent the integrity of the nation’s essential values. Birtherism shows Donald Trump not only as un
worthy but as dangerous to the nation’s central tenet: E pluribus unum. It is not negotiable.
Luba Kessler, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice. Born in the post-Holocaust displacement in the Ural Mountains, she has lived and received her education in the Soviet Union, Poland, Italy, and the United States. That journey included essential lessons in history, geography, culture, art, and politics. Postgraduate training and faculty appointments followed, in psychiatry at Hillside Hospital on Long Island, and in psychoanalysis at NYU Psychoanalytic Institute (now the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, affiliated with NYU Medical School). She is editor of Issues in Education for The American Psychoanalyst of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
TRUMP’S DADDY ISSUES:
A Toxic Mix for America
STEVE WRUBLE, M.D.
As a psychiatrist, I am interested in why people are the way they are. Ultimately, the more I understand others, and my relationship to them, the better I understand myself. I am intrigued by the factors that have guided Donald Trump into the Oval Office and into the hearts, minds, and clenched fists of so many Americans. I’m especially frustrated by his having captured the attention and respect of the man I have always craved a closer relationship with—my father.
Fathers and sons have a storied history of playing off each other as they grapple with their evolving separate and shared identities. We tumble through time doing our best to make sense of all that we witness and experience. I, like Donald Trump, grew up watching and interacting with a strong, proud, and successful father. We both looked up to our fathers for guidance, but at the same time we also felt a certain competitiveness with them as we fought for our innate need for separation and individuation. The spectrum of how sons interact with their fathers is vast. The early beliefs that each has about himself will determine the path chosen to act out their drama. As much as I am disturbed by Trump’s behavior, I can’t help but wonder what of him is in me and vice versa. Who is this man who has captivated so much of the American electorate, and for that matter, the whole world? As a son locked into a drama with a father, can I shed light on that question?
Politically, many people in America are single-issue voters. Whether it be abortion, the economy, or foreign policy, it’s that one main issue that holds sway over their vote. In my family’s case, that one issue is Israel. I come from a family of Modern Orthodox Jews, and Orthodox Jewry as a group has thrown its support behind President Trump because it feels Israel will be safer under his watch. Of course, other issues are also important to Orthodox Jews, but these are usually overshadowed by concern for Israel.
About ten years ago, I made the difficult decision to let my family know that I had stopped following the many dictates that an Orthodox Jew is expected to follow. This new choice was quite freeing for me, since I had already been living this way secretly for a few years. At the same time, it was upsetting to my parents and especially my father, because Judaism is a major part of his identity. He said he was worried that this would create chaos in our family and wished, for my children’s sake, that I would keep my secret to myself. On a deeper level, it felt as if he perceived it as a threat to his leadership in the family.
My decision to leave Orthodox Judaism feels connected to the evolution of my political views toward a more liberal agenda. This, at first, was uncomfortable because it was frowned upon in my community to question anything that supported the State of Israel. Donald Trump’s behavior was clear and disturbing to me and overshadowed his support for Israel. However, my misgivings were not echoed in my community. My attempts to be understood by family and friends were surprisingly difficult.
Many Republicans seem to be locked in a dysfunctional relationship with Trump as a strong father figure who appears to have far less to offer than they’re pining for. Yet, like myself, they are looking to their “father” in the hope that he will deliver them from what feels broken within them and the lives they are leading.
Before addressing the difficulties in my family around what it’s like to see the political world so differently and yet to continue to share family events and happy occasions, I’d like to take a short drive through Donald Trump’s life to show you some things that help make sense of what we’re all witnessing.
There are several details that seem to shine a light on how Trump’s relationship with his father, Fred Trump, may have impacted his development. Donald is the fourth of five children. His oldest sister is a circuit court judge and his oldest brother, Freddie Jr., died at the age of forty-three from complications due to alcoholism. According to a New York Times article (Horowitz 2016), it was apparent to those who watched Fred Trump with his children that his intensity was too much for Freddie Jr. to tolerate. As Donald watched the tragedy unfold, he stepped up and became his father’s protégé in his building empire. I can only imagine that following a brother who drank himself to death didn’t leave Donald much room to do anything but try and fill the void where his older brother had failed. Obviously, he was successful at this endeavor in his father’s world of real estate, and the two spent many years working together until Donald moved on to captain his own company. Fred Trump could never understand why Donald wanted to take the financial risk of building in Manhattan. The elder Trump felt that the ease they enjoyed being successful in Brooklyn and Queens should have been intoxicating enough for his son. However, Donald appeared to be attracted to the bright lights of the big city and the challenge of being more successful than his father.
From the same New York Times article, “Trump’s childhood friends have said they see in him his father’s intensity, but also a constant and often palpable need to please and impress the patriarch who ruled his family with a firm hand. Even today, Donald Trump seems to bathe in his father’s approval. A framed photo of Fred Trump faces him on his cluttered desk.” Donald said he learned his father’s values, and his killer sense of competition, by following him to building sites and watching him squeeze the most out of every dollar. In a speech to the National Association of Home Builders, Trump said, “My father would go and pick up the extra nails and scraps, and he’d use whatever he could and recycle it in some form or sell it.”
According to an article in The Guardian (Dean 2016), when Fred Trump died in 1999, Donald Trump gave a cheerful quote for his father’s New York Times obituary, focusing on the way his dad had never wanted to expand into Manhattan. “It was good for me,” he said. “You know, being the son of somebody, it could have been competition to me. This way, I got Manhattan all to myself!” At his father’s wake, Donald stepped forward to address family, friends, and the society power brokers in the crowd. One attendee recalled Mr. Trump’s unorthodox eulogy to his father, “My father taught me everything I know. And he would understand what I’m about to say,” Mr. Trump announced to the room. “I’m developing a great building on Riverside Boulevard called Trump Place. It’s a wonderful project.” Not the warmest send-off, but it highlighted the language and sentiment that the two men shared. It was the point of their connection. When Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was fifteen, he started in the building business alongside his mother due to the fact that his father died just three years earlier. At the age of fifty-three, Donald, with the death of his own father, was wasting no time on tears; he was moving forward in the familial quest for financial success.
Donald witnessed his father’s tough negotiating style, even at home. One time, some of Donald’s friends were confused as to why his wealthy father would not buy him a new baseball glove. Trump said it was because his father suspected him, correctly, of playing dumb about the high price of the glove he wanted, and of trying to get the salesman to go along with this ruse. It appears Donald learned early on that his father’s frugality would leave him wanting. It also may have taught him that he needed to be sneaky at times to get what he desired.
When I was about the same age, I remember my father telling me how surprised and impressed he was that I was able to convince a sale
sman to refund our money and take back an expensive board game that we had already opened but didn’t like. I could see in my father’s face that he was enamored of my moxie. The power of a father’s attention to our behavior forms a strong lock and key for that behavior to become something we depend upon in order hopefully to receive that same coveted attention again and again. Of course, I’ve learned the hard way that behaviors I picked up from pleasing my father don’t always translate to the healthiest way to relate to others. Those habits take time and experience to break.
Fred Trump’s housing projects made him wealthy and powerful. Some tenants appreciated him for his solid, well-priced apartments; others loathed him for his suspected exclusion of blacks from his properties. The famous folk singer Woody Guthrie, who wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” was a tenant of Mr. Trump’s Beach Haven apartments for two years. In the early 1950s, he composed two songs that address his disgust with the racist practices of Fred Trump that he witnessed. Here are some of his lyrics from the songs he wrote: “I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much Racial Hate he stirred up in the blood-pot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his Eighteen hundred family project.… Beach Haven looks like heaven where no black ones come to roam! No, no, no! Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”
Unlike Trump, I was fortunate to watch my father come home daily from saving lives as a physician. I can only imagine how ashamed I would have felt if my father had been accused of being racist by anyone, much less a famous composer. That being said, Donald may not have given it a second thought.
The human brain can protect us from seeing and feeling what it believes may be too uncomfortable for us to tolerate. It can lead us to deny, defend, minimize, or rationalize away something that doesn’t fit our worldview. Actually, as I observe President Trump’s behavior, I imagine that there is a good chance he identifies with his father’s aggressive business style and parenting, and is now employing that orientation to his role as president. In psychology, this is called identification with the aggressor. At first, it may appear counter-intuitive to identify with an aggressor who has abused his position of power to take advantage. However, our brains often use this early relationship as a template to shape our future behavior. We are attracted to the power we witness from our powerless position. We can be hungry for the same power that we originally resented or even fought against. Taking all this into consideration, President Trump’s aggressive behavior seems to illuminate the part of his father that still lives on within him.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump Page 26
