Donald Trump was never the problem. He was the catalyst. He was the mirror. He reflected back to us the one thing we historically do not want to face: our fears.
Since day one of his campaign, he fed on that fear. As someone who uses fear to get his way, he sensed how bountiful the fear was here in the USA. It is the biggest surplus in this country. We have so many fears and we are too scared to acknowledge them. We doubt our fears. We fear our fears. We deny our fears. That was Trump’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He chose the things that were easy targets to spin to his advantage. He took our fears of other people, our fears of the unknown, our fears of lack, and our fears of loss. Those fed him and he fed us. He made the unknown known, and this allowed us to step up.
Mainstream media feeds our fears so it doesn’t help much. It focuses on the negative, fear-based stories in greater detail rather than on stories that could ease our fears. It’s like Chinese water torture. Drip by drip came down on us on an hourly basis. Eventually, we gave in because the torture had done its job and the pain became unbearable. We then saw someone in a position of power (he was a celebrity before he became president) verbalize our fears, acknowledge and verify them, and say he has a plan to eliminate them altogether. We believed him because of his position of power.
He would verbalize our fears and yet receive no repercussions from speaking out. This gave us hope. Now we could share our fears as well and not suffer any consequences, just like him. We could now speak our minds and be liberated of these fears, regardless of who was impacted by these actions.
Every time we doubted our beliefs that he was wrong, he would deflect to an invisible enemy, distracting us from our own doubts and laying our fears onto something else. It was easier to see the invisible enemy Trump was pointing at rather than our own fears. However, these fears are now coupled with the fear that we chose wrongly. Denial kicks in and with the easier target of someone else to focus on, we don’t have to face any of our fears. They are now projected onto someone else. And this is verified by a person who is in a position of power and does not have to pay any consequences for what he says or does. We bypassed our own values so as to feel connected with a group. If everyone else thinks this way, it’s okay for me to feel the same way.
When marginalized populations aligned themselves with Trump, the fear that fueled this was the fear of being rejected by the greater majority. We hear the words “minority” or even “persons of color” and are scared. Does that make us different from anyone else? Does this make us less-than? We fear our marginalization instead of embracing it. Well, if I join the Trump bandwagon, they will accept anyone--right? As long as I agree with them, I will be okay. I will be safe. It’s a passive rejection of who we are to be part of what is greater in number and more socially accepted.
We don’t think highly enough about ourselves, so we align with that which we perceive is powerful to shelter us from the hate we fear we will get from others, yet it's the self hate that is really the problem. We have not dealt with our self-worth at even its basic level. We are asleep to our experience. We bypass a true sense of identity for one that will make us just like everyone else. We bypass our own discomfort to belong to something we perceive to be greater than ourselves.
He mirrored our own perceived or unrecognized ugliness and made it okay to be ugly. Ugly became the norm and, to some extent, acceptable. Even heinous acts became so desensitized, we stopped caring. We were numb to overt atrocities.
We thought he cared about us. We wanted him to care about us because we now became the very thing we fear, yet we thought it’s who we wanted to be all along. We left behind those who truly cared about us to feel more powerful and less fearful.
This wasn’t about education.
This wasn’t about race.
This wasn’t about sexual orientation.
This wasn’t about gender identity.
This wasn’t about marginalized populations.
This wasn’t about politics.
This was about our unacknowledged fears, doubts, and shame. Trump was never the problem. We were.