By a year in, it no longer would have surprised me about Trump doing these things; but I feel like I was blind to the reality that those in power who were trusted to stop such things would either prove entirely ineffectual or would willingly support/promote his behavior.
I don't consider it a huge victory for democracy and its structures in this country; I feel like it is simply the ineptness of Trump and followers that prevented a much larger catastrophe. (Viewing it through process/architectural lenses and systems analyst eyes. Humans are the weak link; we can simply choose to violate the processes and structures that were laid down to prevent this kind of thing. SO many of our checks-and-balances folks were actually complicit here.)
I would agree with this. I knew it would be bad, but I did not anticipate how resilient to facts and reality Trump voters and Republican congressional leaders would be. There was this constantly feeling over the past 5 years of the goals posts constantly moving, of what I thought any rational person would consider, "Ok, this is too much" constantly blown past.
This feeling is still persistent with me. It's ONLY now, with the attempted coup, that I am *finally* starting to see some pushback, some refusal to believe everything right-wing media is telling them and them reacting as I use to think people thought and felt before before 2016, but even then it's not total. I still have relatives, friends, and people I come into contact with on a regular basis who STILL believe in the illegitimacy of the election, of who STILL think antifa was behind the coup (or otherwise engage in whataboutism when the topic of the coup comes up) and that's something that while I wish I was totally numb too, I'm just not. It still hurts. It still bothers me enormously.
Pretty much any lengthy description of gaslighting mentions the consequent sense of "unreality" that it gives people. It's like feeling stunned, like what's happening can't really be happening - it is, yet the mind can't quite reconcile the fact that it's happening with all the rules of reality that previously felt safe to take for granted. It's different from depersonalization because in depersonalization the sense of detachment is typically about something that's routine and possible, it just doesn't feel like it's actually happening to the person experiencing it. But the detachment that happens with unreality is the product of confusion about something even being possible changing suddenly and drastically. A person gets stuck in "
What? Wait.....
what?!" mode.
There was a feeling of unreality that set in the first year of his term, where he was getting away with bold-faced lying. It started out
almost innocuously, with the Bowling Green Massacre or windmill cancer type stuff, and then by the time it progressed to something far more sinister I think the general feeling of unreality had become the default for a lot of people. So I wouldn't say I was surprised about anything that happened after the first year - because I was too confused to be surprised, if that makes sense - but I was as 'surprised' as someone can be about the progression. I definitely felt outrage though, which is difficult enough to process in a responsible way (without taking it out on others, throwing vitriolic pejoratives at the people even remotely enabling it/being complicit, instead of trying to understand, etc) let alone in the throes of overwhelming unreality.
It's like, if all the sudden, porcelain stopped adhering to the law of gravity - cups, plates, whatever, just started flying off tables and out of cupboards, shooting directly into outer space (due to the Earth spinning and whatnot). We'd collectively get stuck in "
What? Wait.....
what?!" mode, while trying to reconcile this new impossibility with what we already know. And then when his behavior progressed into clear malignant narcissist territory and Christians were treating him like the second coming of Christ? It was like suddenly one more thing stopped adhering to gravity - as if suddenly aluminum started flying off the planet and jettisoning into space - instead of being surprising, it was more like "must be Thursday." Or when all the alleged "checks and balances" that were supposed to prevent Trump actually started enabling him: that's toothpaste flying off the planet into space, so it must be Thursday again. It's not like I anticipated the progression (of how bad things would get with Trump), but the first stuff was so disorienting that henceforth all bets were off.
Less than three days to go.
