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Trump Is Gaslighting Us

Growing up I recall watching the old movies "Gaslight" starring among others Ingrid Bergman whose husband is seeking to drive her insane through lies and manipulations. In the movie, the villain is exposed and Bergman's character is rescued.   Fast forward 81 years and we see lies and manipulations from the Felon's regime and Republican enablers in Congress applying gaslighting on a national scale.  Resisting the lies and manipulations is a full time effort, but one that is critical for everyday Americans and the nation as a whole as argued in a piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican.  With the Felon, the lies began the moment he descending the escalator in 2015 and have been non-stop ever since. Sadly, the Republican Party has become an echo chamber filled with lies and disinformation and one has to wonder what it will take for the MAGA base to stop drinking the Kool-Aid. The stock market is crashing, prices will soon be soaring and thousands of federal workers have been fired - something that will soon seep into the private sector as businesses flounder or engage in cut backs to address the growing economic chaos.  True, some who voted for the Felon are shocked that they have lost jobs and are facing slashed benefits, yet the Felon over and over telegraphed what he would do.  No one should be surprised.  Now, the question is how to resist the lies and gaslighting:

The first Trump administration began with a lie.  On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump’s then–press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that Trump had drawn the largest audience to ever witness a presidential inauguration. Photographs clearly showed that the assertion was false; Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, had drawn a much larger crowd at his first inauguration. But it didn’t matter.

In one sense, Spicer’s lie was trivial. But in another sense, it mattered quite a lot, because it was a lie about a demonstrable fact. Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to Trump, memorably defended Spicer by claiming that he was offering “alternative facts,” treating observable reality like hot wax, to be molded at will.

Fast-forward eight years. Trump is once again president. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly included on a private group chat—via Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app—in which Trump-administration officials discussed a planned bombing campaign in Yemen. Goldberg reported on the reckless and devastating breach of national security. But rather than acknowledging the mistake and promising to address it, the Trump administration reflexively followed its standard approach: attack. Smear. Prevaricate.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said on social media, “This entire story was another hoax written by a Trump-hater who is well-known for his sensationalist spin.”

As The Washington Post reported, “The Yemen attack timeline that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted to a Signal chat group would have been so highly classified, under Pentagon guidelines, that the details should have been restricted to a special, compartmented channel with its own code word and with access tightly limited, according to former Defense Department officials.”

[T]he Trump administration once again wants you to believe that two and two make five.

IN THE 1944 FILM GASLIGHT, a young woman, Paula Alquist, falls in love with and marries an older man, Gregory Anton. Over the course of the film, Gregory—cunning, moody, charismatic—deceives Paula into thinking that she is losing her mind. He does so by manipulating her memory, accusing her of hiding paintings and stealing things, isolating her, diminishing her self-worth and confidence, and denying reality. The film’s title refers to Gregory’s trick of secretly dimming and brightening the indoor gas lighting while insisting that Paula is imagining the changes.

The film gave us the term gaslighting, which describes a certain type of psychological manipulation. To succeed, it requires those who are targeted to become so disoriented that they begin to doubt themselves, to become confused, and to question their own perception of reality. Clinical psychologists say that as gaslighting plays out, not only do its victims start to deny reality; they begin to accept the false reality of the person gaslighting them.

Gaslighters are manipulative and controlling, comfortable belittling and insulting others. They are accomplished at denying, lying, and projecting. And sometimes, if they’re lucky enough and skilled enough, they make it to the White House. When they do, the horrors that are usually visited on an individual are instead visited on an entire nation.

At that point, the enormous machinery of the federal government, supported by outside groups and media outlets, becomes part of a massive and relentless disinformation campaign. The aim is to provoke distrust, confusion, and disorientation, which corrodes people’s confidence in institutions and undermines their grasp of reality. The ultimate goal is to divide and weaken civil society, and to undermine its ability to mobilize and cohere.

When there is no objective truth, when everyone gets to make up their own reality, their own script, and their own facts, authoritarians thrive.

AS DISINFORMATION INCREASES, and as more and more individuals and institutions go silent, it becomes ever more important for truth tellers to speak up, if only to assure those who don’t believe the propaganda that they’re not losing their mind.

They need to do for their fellow citizens what the police inspector did for Paula Alquist.

Getting through America’s epistemic crisis—where there’s no agreed-upon reality, where there’s a breakdown of a society’s system for deciding what’s true—won’t be quick or easy, especially because the Trump administration still has more than 1,350 days to go. The task of reconstructing truth is a generational one, and a lot of pieces need to come together.

It starts by asking the right questions, such as the one recently posed by Kristin Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University: “How do we as citizens participate in a democracy when disinformation is so prevalent, and when so many seem so willing to believe the lies and ignore the reality that is right in front of us? When so many are willing to abandon all values to choose their side, every single time?”

People who feel more and more powerless have asked me a version of this question: “What can I do practically as a citizen, apart from vote and call my representative, to help preserve American democracy against Trump’s assault against our institutions and truth itself?”

Experts in the field of misinformation say that we know a lot about different kinds of misinformation, who is targeted and why, and the means to spread it. . . . . Figuring out how to scale up trust and truth is a central challenge of our time. It will take individuals and groups working together to insist on seeing the world as it actually is. Think of it as a dissident movement, an American Solidarity movement.

I HAVE A HUNCH, OR AT LEAST A HOPE. As Donald Trump’s malevolence intertwines with his incompetence, public disenchantment will grow. We’re already seeing signs of that as public fury at Elon Musk is being directed at Tesla. We’ve also seen it in town halls in red districts, where Republican members of Congress are being met not just with anxiety but also with anger. Republicans are being told to stop holding in-person town halls with constituents. And we see it in the rising panic caused by the stock-market collapse, the result of Trump’s carelessly destructive tariff policy, which is destabilizing the world’s trading system and shattering the American-led world order.

If disenchantment with Trump and Musk and the rest of this freak show leads to mass protests, it could be an inflection point, not just against Trump’s policies but also against the vertigo-inducing disinformation he promotes during almost every one of his waking hours.

I’ve long wondered how long it will take Americans to stop tolerating the unrelenting conflict and antipathy, which divides not just citizens but also families, that is endemic to life in the Trump era. The answer may be that they will stop tolerating it at the point when the quality of their life is degraded, when preventable diseases spread, when car prices and egg prices skyrocket, when 401(k) accounts start losing significant value. At that point, Trump-style nihilism may lose its appeal; his disinformation campaign may begin to blow apart, and people may be reminded that living in truth is better than living within lies.

The drama has a long way to go, but the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

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American Life Expectancy Falls Compared to Europe

For over a decade now, life expectancy in America has been falling and now the wealthiest middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. have roughly the same likelihood of dying over a 12-year period as the poorest adults in northern and western Europe. And this doesn't factor in the horrific damage being done to medical research and health care agencies being done by DOGE and RFK, Jr.  Expect things to get even worse, particularly among the MAGA white working class base in which many rely on Medicaid for health coverage that is targeted for large cuts in the tax and spend cuts bill being pushed through Congress by Republicans. Meanwhile, the measles outbreak in Texas is worsening and a second child has died thanks to anti-vaccine extremists- including RFK, Jr.  - who have revived a disease that not that long ago had been deemed eradicated. All of this shows that America is exceptional, but in a very  negative way that literally killing citizens prematurely.  Sadly, things will likely worsen under the Felon's regime as consumer costs soar and  social safety net programs are gutted.  Those who will suffer most?  MAGA poor and working class voters and their families. A piece at NBC News looks at the troubling problem that ought to be a national embarrassment: 

Today, the wealthiest middle-aged and older adults in the U.S. have roughly the same likelihood of dying over a 12-year period as the poorest adults in northern and western Europe, according to a study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. 

Some medical and health policy experts say the trend is a sign of deep-seated issues not just within the U.S. health care system, but with the typical American lifestyle of overconsuming junk food, not getting enough exercise and facing loneliness or financial stress.

The study looked at the relationship between wealth and mortality among nearly 74,000 adults from 2010 to 2022. More than 19,000 of the adults were in the U.S., and roughly 54,000 were spread across 16 countries in Europe. All were ages 50 to 85.

The researchers divided the participants into four groups based on their overall assets (not including their homes). In both Europe and the U.S., the group with the most assets — the wealthiest — had a 40% lower mortality rate than the poorest group.

The poorest people in the U.S. had the highest mortality rate of any group, which is consistent with previous research showing that health outcomes are worse in America. 

“We were expecting to find greater inequity in the U.S. But what was surprising was how the richest in the U.S. compared to the richest in Europe,” said Irene Papanicolas, the study’s lead author, who directs the Center for Health System Sustainability at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

The wealthiest group in northern and western Europe had mortality rates about 35% lower than the wealthiest group in the U.S., she said.

Poor health outcomes in the U.S. are often attributed, in part, to a lack of access to affordable health care, which can result in high out-of-pocket costs for medication or procedures — or in some cases, not seeing a doctor at all. 

“Certainly health care must have something to do with it, but it cannot be even a dominant part of the story if we’re seeing wealthier Americans having similar or worse outcomes than poor individuals in other wealthy countries.”

In addition to universal health care, many European countries offer free or heavily subsidized higher education and more comprehensive unemployment benefits compared with the U.S. 

“A lot of these countries have social welfare programs that don’t prevent people from losing their jobs or experiencing poverty, but when they go through those tough times, it doesn’t threaten their health,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine.

Woolf said the Trump administration’s recent gutting of federal health agencies and termination of research grants puts the U.S. on the wrong trajectory when it comes to lowering risk factors for mortality. 

“The thing that’s alarming us so much in the health and medicine world is that the policies that are now being pursued in a pretty muscular way are the opposite of what you would want to do to make America healthy again,” he said, referring to Kennedy’s agenda. 

“In all likelihood, my prediction will be that the gap in health between Americans and people in other countries is now going to widen even more dramatically,” Woolf said.

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A Con Man President Is Destroying the Economy

In not even three months the Felon and his circle of "yes men" and sycophants have wreaked havoc on America's economy - actual much of the world's economy - through insane tariffs against literally every country in the world save Russia, North Korea and Iran. Since its high point earlier in the year, the stock market has lost roughly 6000 points (3900 in the last two days) and the nation's supply chain has been put into turmoil.   Meanwhile federal agencies that provide vital weather, health and economic support for millions of Americans are being gutted and destroyed, promising more disease, sickness and death and even more damaging natural disasters.  One has to wonder when the MAGA base will realize that "owning the libs" and new forms of white supremacy do not make up for economic pain and ruin.  Surely, rising consumer prices, an economy moving towards recession, and cuts to Medicaid and social programs most used by poor and working class whites at some point make these mindless and bigoted voters wake up.  Ditto for congressional Republicans who have cast the interests of their constituents aside in order to prostitute themselves to the Felon.  The most confounding thing is that all of this damage and destruction is deliberate and the work of a malignant narcissist who cares nothing about anything but his ego, settling perceived past slights and playing a Mafia like crime boss role.  The number of articles looking at the wrongfulness of  the Felon's actions and the harm being done to average Americans and the U.S. economy are many.  Here are highlights from a piece by a Nobel prize winning economist that looks at the damage being wrought:

The truth is that most of the time you should evaluate economic policies based on what they actually do, not with speculation about how you imagine they will affect confidence.

But this isn’t most of the time. This is the third year of the second Trump presidency — OK, it’s actually only part way through the third month, but it feels like years. And Trump is in the process of showing that a sufficiently chaotic and incompetent government can, in fact, do enough damage to confidence to inflict serious economic harm.

Standard economic analysis says that tariffs strengthen a nation’s currency. If the United States puts taxes on imports, this discourages businesses and consumers from buying foreign goods, which reduces the supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market and should drive the value of the dollar up.

But the dollar fell once investors began to see Trump policy in action. Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.

Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment?

Wait, it gets worse. You might have expected a lot of careful thought to go into the biggest change in U.S. trade policy since the republic was founded . . . . But since Trump delivered his Rose Garden remarks, we’ve had a series of revelations about how slapdash and amateurish an operation this was. . . . Trump’s tariffs were, instead, determined by a crude, and, well, stupid formula that made no economic sense. It’s still an open question whether that formula was determined by some junior staffer or derived from ChatGPT and Grok. . . . . the biggest trade policy change in history, hastily and sloppily thrown together at the last minute.

It’s no wonder, then, that confidence has taken a big hit. If you ask me, however, I’d say that confidence is still too high: business still hasn’t grasped how bad things are. For while tariffs are dominating the news right now, they’re part of a broader pattern of malignant stupidity. It may take a while before we see the effects of DOGE’s destruction of the government’s administrative capacity, or RFK Jr.’s destruction of health policy, but we will see those effects eventually.

And Republicans have just confirmed Dr. Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid. What could go wrong?

Personally, I’m feeling very confident. That is, I have high confidence in predicting that we’re heading for multiple policy train wrecks, inflicting damage like you’ve never seen before.

Similar sentiments are laid out in a piece in The Atlantic that looks at how the Felon's tariffs will have the opposite impact of what the Felon and his yes men and women are saying.  Here are highlights: 

According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.

The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.

In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.

But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.

The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers.

Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself.

The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet. . . .To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods.

The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me.

Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.”

If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.

Trump seems to welcome that possibility. . . . . the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.

About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.

The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.

What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.

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