A New Contagious Disease: Trump Psychosis

Psychosis: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.

Tribalism: the behavior and attitudes that stem from strong loyalty to one's own tribe or social group, often in the face of underlying realities and reason that directly contradict tribe self-esteem or tribal political or social goals.

The December 7 issue of The Week magazine describes a new mental disease, that the medical division of B&B labels ‘Trump Psychosis’. The vector that spreads the disease is social media such as Facebook. The trigger is tribal political messaging, especially content that foments unwarranted emotions toward people and groups outside the tribe. The emotions typically constitute some combination of unwarranted fear, disgust, anger, hate, intolerance, distrust, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, bigotry and misogyny. The following true story shows just how severe this is for millions of Americans on the political right. How common TP is on the political left is not known, but is likely to exist to some extent.[1]

Christopher Blair's sarcasm gone horribly wrong: The Week’s story, Nothing on this Page is Real, describes how Christopher Blair, a liberal, decided to play a gotcha game with his Facebook page during the 2016 elections. It goes like this:

His wife had left for work and his children were on their way to school, but waiting online was his other community, an unreality where nothing was exactly as it seemed. He logged onto his website and began to invent his first news story of the day.

"BREAKING," he wrote, pecking out each letter with his index fingers as he considered the possibilities. Maybe he would announce that Hillary Clinton had died during a secret overseas mission to smuggle more refugees into America. Maybe he would award President Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize for his courage in denying climate change.

Blair had launched his website on Facebook during the 2016 presidential campaign as a practical joke among friends — a political satire site started by Blair and a few other liberal bloggers who wanted to make fun of what they considered to be extremist ideas spreading throughout the far right. In the past two years on his page, America's Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former President Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former President Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9.

"Nothing on this page is real," read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair's site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, amassing an audience of as many as six million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker.

Now he hunched over a desk wedged between an overturned treadmill and two turtle tanks, scanning through conservative forums on Facebook for something that might inspire his next post. . . . . He noticed a photo online of Trump standing at attention for the national anthem during a White House ceremony. Behind the president were several dozen dignitaries, including a white woman standing next to a black woman, and Blair copied the picture, circled the two women in red, and wrote the first thing that came into his mind. "President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton," Blair wrote. “They thanked him by giving him 'the finger' during the national anthem. Lock them up for treason!”

The white woman was not in fact Chelsea Clinton but former White House strategist Hope Hicks. The black woman was not Michelle Obama but former Trump aide Omarosa Newman. Neither Obama nor Clinton had been invited to the ceremony. Nobody had flipped off the president. The entire premise was utterly ridiculous, which was exactly Blair's point.

"We live in an Idiocracy," read a small note on Blair's desk, and he was taking full advantage. In a good month, the advertising revenue from his website earned him as much as $15,000, and it had also won him a loyal army of online fans. Hundreds of liberals now visited America's Last Line of Defense to humiliate conservatives who shared Blair's fake stories as fact.

“How could any thinking person believe this nonsense?” he said. He hit ‘publish’ and watched as his lie began to spread.

Shirley Chapian

It was barely dawn in Pahrump, Nevada, when Shirley Chapian, 76, logged onto Facebook for her morning computer game of Criminal Case. She believed in starting each day with a problem-solving challenge, a quick mental exercise to keep her brain sharp more than a decade into retirement.

For years she had watched network TV news, but increasingly Chapian wondered about the widening gap between what she read online and what she heard on the networks. One far-right Facebook group eventually led her to the next with targeted advertising, and soon Chapian was following more than 2,500 conservative pages, an ideological echo chamber that often trafficked in skepticism. Climate change was a hoax. The mainstream media was censored or scripted. Political Washington was under control of a “deep state.”

She lived alone, and on many days her only personal interaction occurred here, on Facebook. Mixed into her morning news feed were photos and updates from some of her 300 friends, but most items came directly from political groups Chapian had chosen to follow: Free Speech Patriots, Taking Back America, Ban Islam, Trump 2020, and Rebel Life.

Now another post arrived in her news feed, from a page called America's Last Line of Defense, which Chapian had been following for more than a year. It showed a picture of Trump standing at a White House ceremony. Circled in the background were two women, one black and one white.

"President Trump extended an olive branch and invited Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton," the post read. "They thanked him by giving him 'the finger' during the national anthem."

Chapian looked at the photo and nothing about it surprised her. Of course Trump had invited Clinton and Obama to the White House in a generous act of patriotism. Of course the Democrats — or "Demonrats," as Chapian sometimes called them — had acted badly and disrespected America.

"Well, they never did have any class," she wrote.

"Gross. Those women have no respect for themselves," wrote a woman in Fort Washakie, Wyoming. "They deserve to be publicly shunned," said a man in Gainesville, Florida. "Not surprising behavior from such ill bred trash." "Jail them now!!!"

Blair had fooled them. Now came his favorite part, the gotcha.

“OK, taters. Here's your reality check,” he wrote on America's Last Line of Defense, placing his comment prominently alongside the original post. “That is Omarosa and Hope Hicks, not Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton. They wouldn't be caught dead posing for this pseudo-patriotic nationalistic garbage. ... Congratulations, stupid.”

Blair didn't have time to confront each of the several hundred thousand conservatives who followed his Facebook page, so he'd built a community of more than 100 liberals to police the page with him. Together they patrolled the comments, venting their own political anger, shaming conservatives who had been fooled, taunting them, baiting them into making racist comments that could then be reported to Facebook. Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online.

“That's kind of an ironic comment coming from pure trailer trash [Chapian just happens to live in a trailer she painted purple], don't you think? You're a gullible moron who just fell for a fake story on a Liberal satire page. Welcome to the internet. Critical thinking required.”

Chapian saw the comments after her post and wondered as she often did when she was attacked: Who were these people? And what were they talking about? Of course Michelle Obama and Chelsea Clinton had flipped off the president. It was true to what she knew of their character. That was what mattered.

A Muslim woman with her burqa on fire: like. A policeman using a baton to beat a masked antifa protester: like. Hillary Clinton looking gaunt and pale: like. A military helicopter armed with machine guns and headed toward the caravan of immigrants: like.

Instead of responding directly to strangers on America's Last Line of Defense, Chapian wrote on her own Facebook page. “Nasty liberals,” she said, and then she went back to her news feed, each day blending into the next.

That is Trump Psychosis. Ms. Chapian and millions of others on the political right have it.[1] It would be very interesting if the liberal mob that attacks people that Blair tricks would switch to tactics that treat misled people with respect and calmly explain the error and why it arose. Despite Blair's Facebook page stating that everything there is a pack of lies, thousands of people with Trump Psychosis ignore that and believe the lies because they feed the deranged fantasy the psychosis induces. Would calm, non-insulting explanations make any difference? There is no way to know. Mr. Blair and his army of gotcha minions would need to agree to try the experiment.

From what this observer can tell, this kind of mental disease was not possible until (1) the rise of social media, and (2) the rise of a tribal national leader like Trump who holds truth and sound reason in open contempt. Journalists and researchers have noticed the tribal, emotional contagion that Trump spreads and it seems that social media is the perfect vector for this tribal disease.

The social media basis for Trump Psychosis raises the question of what is the balance of social good to social bad of social media. Is it about 50:50? Or, could social media be more bad than good, say, about 40% good and about 60% bad? Maybe over time an answer to that might become clearer. Just how much deeper the disease will spread into American society is unknowable, so the matter of cost-benefit cannot be assessed.

Poor Ms. Chapian. She has been deceived and used by tribal Trump, tribal conservatism, tribal populism and a tribal republican party that can no longer accept or deal with reality, facts and reason. How much is she to blame for her disease? About 50:50? Or, is she about about 60% responsible and her tribe about 40% responsible? What responsibility, if any, do Mr. Blair and his attacking gotcha minions bear for anything? It is all based on constitutionally protected free speech. Some people make a living by posting empty brain candy online for political tribe members to mindlessly enjoy.

Finally, if Trump Psychosis isn't a real disease, then what is it? Is this really within the scope of what is considered normal mental functioning for adult Americans? Does it matter that people like this can vote?

Footnote:
1. Trump psychosis exists on the political left. Millions of Americans trust sources that pander to leftist political tribalism. Sites that defend Russia and spread anti-American and anti-European Union lies and propaganda influence many people.

B&B orig: 12/10/18