Stories

Consider two lists of adjectives:

List 1: forceful, courageous, forthright, open-minded, gregarious, intuitive, insightful, droll, poised

List 2: bullying, posturing, dishonest, bigoted, self-absorbed, uninformed, clueless, clownish, impulsive

Would you believe both describe the same person? They do—our Presidential Stain, Donald J. Trump. Some people would choose List 1, others List 2. We can trace their choice back to the “stories” they’ve heard since childhood.

I use “stories” in the sense Yuval Harari, the historical anthropologist, uses the word. Stories aren’t just fairy tales, fables, and myths. They are anything not grounded in objective reality. What we call fiction is an obvious example. More significantly, all religious writings and derivative musings are stories. All the rationales for value systems; political systems; economic systems; sexual dominance; and caste, racial, and ethnic ranking are stories.

According to Harari, story telling is what differentiates humans from all other life on Earth. It’s the attribute that makes us the dominant species on the planet. The acceptance of told stories is what sorts us into tribes, communities, and nations. Stories are the sources of prodigious achievements and prodigious disasters.

Our brains process stories as as we mature. It seems certain that, whether inspiring or cautionary, they serve to transport values from one generation to the next. As they do this job, our identities form. We admire the protagonists and want to be like them. Mom and Dad and Pastor Adams and Miss Higgins, our English teacher, would certainly like that. Miraculously, we succeed, if not as heroes and heroines at least as sincere knockoffs. We become, at first unwittingly, followers of one stripe or another. There’s no shame in being followers. It’s a hard-wired inevitability.

But let’s bring our discussion down to a more concrete level. What kinds of stories would cause innocent children to become adults who think List 1 describes Trump? I’ll classify them for you. (Note: For now, I won’t investigate this question for people who choose List 2; there are no mental aberrations to discover.)

Biblical lore. The Bible loves to use misdirection in its tales of troubled times. The Jews are led out of bondage by a prince of Egypt. (Say what?) The Jews overcome the Philistines with the help of a kid with a sling. (No way!) God arranges for the salvation of mankind by impregnating the wife of a carpenter. (Please!) So why wouldn’t God drain the American swamp and make the country great again by working His will through a rich sinner? Truly, this is working in mysterious ways.

It’s no coincidence that Trump’s strongest support comes from places where time has stopped and Biblical lore is powerful.

The “Great Man.” Moses, David, and Jesus were Biblical saviors. Since then, we’ve relied on messiahs of a different kind to pull us out of the ditch. Mohammed lit a fire under a people with no coherence or direction. Luther put salvation in our own hands and redefined religion in the West. Napoleon made France great again and redirected European history. History is driven by great men, or so the story goes.

America’s contributions to the great man story are Washington, Lincoln, F.D.R., M.L.K., and perhaps a few others. Whomever we put on the list doesn’t matter much. The key idea is that others will come. At every point in our presidential election cycle, we ask ourselves the same hopeful question: Is he the one, our next great leader? It’s an obsession. (In America, it definitely must be a he. After all, it’s great men we cry out for.)

It therefore behooves every candidate for the presidency to create a sense of crisis and impending collapse, to convince the electorate that America stands at an inflection point, and to sell himself as a great man. A large dollop of preposterous lies makes for an effective pitch.

The “City on a Hill.” This phrase goes back to the Sermon on the Mount. The City on a Hill was Jesus’ flock. Centuries later, the Puritan preacher John Winthrop said it was the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Kennedy and Reagan made it all of America. And finally the Republican Party rolled it up into American Exceptionalism. A City on a Hill is a beacon to the world, an ideal for everyone to wonder at. It must be rich, invincible, and thoroughly admirable—great in every respect. The news that its citizens are being “played for suckers” and seen as a “laughingstock” is intolerable and deserves an angry response!

It isn’t enough, though, to reclaim the respect due us. The existence of a City on a Hill implies the rest of the world is a considerable step down. Many places are even—excuse the expression—shitholes. Their citizens, like rats leaving a sewer, will try to emigrate. We must use any means possible to protect our perfect purity from corruption!

The “Self-Made Man.” Great men will themselves into greatness. They’re like the ant in “The Ant and the Grasshopper”; the work ethic is paramount. They’re like the tortoise in “The Tortoise and the Hare”; slow and steady wins the race. They rely on the help of no one. Unfortunately, they’re often fixated on the prize to the point of ruthlessness and fits of temper. It’s OK, though. It’s the price we pay for a natural-born leader.

Often the self-made man is a rich businessman. America itself is rich, and how did it get that way? Through the entrepreneurial spirit of self-made men. Isn’t it simple logic that the leader of our nation should be a self-made businessman?

The “Man’s Man.” A man’s man is strong. In youth, he may well have been athletic. His will is also strong, like the self-made man’s will. He has a natural aura of authority. He makes his own rules. If he wants something, he takes it, especially if it’s sex. There’s no sin in it; nature simply made him that way. He’s widely envied because he isn’t a prisoner of convention. Even so, other men are flattered by his company and fancy he has extraordinary powers of persuasion.

If you believe America was the last, best hope of earth but for years has been wallowing in a crisis of leadership, if you’re praying a great man, a self-made man, a man’s man will come forward to rescue us—even if his resume says “builder,” “bon vivant,” “TV celebrity,” and “buffoon”—you are primed to accept Donald Trump as your savior.

The problem is, once stories bind you to someone in hope and admiration, a subsequent rejection is impossible without some trauma. It’s much easier to latch onto new stories, however far-fetched, that rationalize any dissonance in your connection. I call these “rescue” stories. Let me tell you about my favorite example…

Early this month, Roseanne Barr, who had transformed herself from a socialist into a Trump rooter, tweeted that Trump has been saving hundreds of children a month from sexual bondage. Out of the sight of the press, he’s been busy breaking up sex trafficking rings!

She got wind of this from 4chan, a group of online message boards. One of the boards, Anonymous, is for users who style themselves as “Anons” and imagine they are functioning as an “anarchic, digitized global brain.” The most celebrated Anon is QAnon. He (or she) boasts a super-exclusive “Q” level security clearance. It was QAnon who broke the story of Trump’s exploits as a savior of kidnapped children.

This is quite a scoop, but wait—it gets much better. QAnon suggested that what we think is going on in Washington is an illusion—Trump has an ambitious agenda and masks it with the persona he’s created in the media! This revelation inspired an ever-mutating fantasy on message boards, YouTube, and Twitter about the reality beneath Trump’s facade. He’s actually a role-playing genius. He’s pretending to be an irascible, ignorant bigot. His Russian contacts are real but a deception to win Putin’s confidence and lead him into a trap. Mueller and Comey are in on Trump’s con and abet it.

The apocalyptic end to this rescue story has yet to be written, but you can be sure the media will be shamed in the final installment, and Trump supporters will be vindicated. Hillary Clinton will descend into hell, and statues of Trump will be erected throughout the South where statues of Confederate generals once stood.

What’s to be done when around a quarter of the American electorate is off its rocker? Shall we put anti-hallucinogens in the drinking water? No, that would require a conspiracy and may have already been predicted on Anonymous. We’ll just have to wait until Trump leaves or is driven from office. Then we can reevaluate the depth of our national psychosis.