Donald Trump is a one-in-a-million American president who has detonated long-recognized national standards. Each week brings fresh hell: He’s urged the U.S. military to launch war games in Democratic cities to learn to battle the “enemy from within,” deployed ICE agents to hurl Chicago pedestrians to the ground and zip-tie sobbing children, and he’s called for the arrest of critics such as Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson for no discernible crime other than dissent.
Trump’s administration has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on alleged mortgage fraud after she successfully convicted him of 34 felonies; pounded late-night comedians who mock him; and yanked billions of contractually obligated dollars from “woke” (as opposed to sleeping or dead) universities and states—money approved by Congress, which was granted that funding power by the U.S. Constitution. In addition, the stuck-in-adolescence, name-calling Trump has so very unpresidentially lashed his foes as “scum,” “losers,” “Satan,” “phony,” “dopey,” “fucking negative,” “vermin,” and “crazy”—and lobbed taunts at women like “nasty,” “horseface,” “slob,” “fat pig,” and “dog.”
In Trump’s latest stunt he sported a crown in a faked Truth Social video featuring him piloting a fighter jet to drop tons of shit on throngs of No Kings protesters. It was another appalling new low for an American president, but we were hardly shocked. And that’s a big problem.
This weekend’s protests were inspiring—that they inspired this grotesque reaction from Trump could count as a measure of success. But there is still much work to be done. It remains to be seen if the teeming masses can dent the president’s power—or shake more people from the torpor of the daily news to propel them into a sustained new activism. It’s here at the apex of our exultation that we should pause, take stock, and stay on our guard, because one of the biggest enemies of the sustained momentum the anti-Trump movement needs, it turns out, is human nature.
Amid the now-daily onslaught of Trumpian shock and awe, many of us now just hear, digest, and move on. There’s a familiar feeling of exhaustion and paralysis in the face of the deluge; it’s hard to imagine a substantial response to any one of Trump’s misdeeds when we know that more are on the way. Trump really has to work hard to stun in the way he once did. Many American brains seem to be powering down into a dazed lethargy, benumbed by a relentless onslaught of the outrageous that we cannot entirely shut out.
The researchers who study human behavior are not startled by these reactions. They have warned for decades that our canny adaptability and survival instincts—our species’ special drive to keep on keeping on, persisting through drought, pestilence, famine, warfare, and holocaust, is celebrated. But those same instincts can betray us—and threaten to lead us off a cliff.
“It’s a very strange time to be living in,” Yale professor of cognitive science and philosophy Joshua Knobe told me. He studies human behavior, but he’s not one to hazard a prediction about where we may end up. “Maybe these changes haven’t been frequent long enough to have a major impact on what we increasingly consider normal,” he suggested, referring to Trump’s upheaval. “It’s unclear what will ultimately happen.“
But eight years ago, it was Knobe sounding an alarm at the start of Trump’s first administration. In a New York Times op-ed, Knobe cautioned readers of Trump’s ability to catch us up in a “normalization trap” as the president’s relentlessly outrageous pronouncements and policies—often parroted uncritically by the media—begin to sound less and less shocking.
“The consequences can be serious,” Knobe and Yale psychology student Adam Bear discovered in their research, and warned in the Times. As Trump carried out actions and repeatedly spouted positions that “once would have been regarded as outlandish,” they became increasingly regarded as both more “typical” and “normal,” they wrote. “As a result, they will come to be seen as less worthy of outrage.”
Humans tend to conflate their sense of what is typical with their sense of what is “ideal,” cautioned Knobe and Bear. People “might sometimes be able to separate out the average from the ideal, but they more often make use of a kind of reasoning that blends the two together into a single undifferentiated judgment of normality,” the researchers discovered.
The situation is aided and abetted by another powerful aspect of human nature: our “positive optimistic bias,” which the late Princeton psychologist and behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman characterized as the “most significant” of humans’ cognitive biases, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. The hardwired human trait is another boon to survival—it keeps us moving forward through adversity, and encourages us to take risks that could be beneficial. The other side of the coin, noted Kahneman, is the way these instincts can blind us to lethal risks.
Kahneman once described the 2016 presidential campaign as “unbelievable,” as well as an astounding opportunity to study human judgment.
Without mentioning Trump by name, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in economics said in an interview at a New Yorker event in Manhattan a month before Trump’s first election: “I find it unbelievable, this phenomenon that is happening right now, when you have a 7-year-old running for president—a very big 7-year-old,” Fortune reported.
Kahneman warned then that the human brain “and our impulses” haven’t changed in the last century, presenting risks. “Our intrinsic makeup hasn’t improved, and we’re still vulnerable,” he warned.
“Individuals yield to social pressure,” Kahneman added, citing a continuing human “appeal to strength; this idea that being big and strong is highly valued—and masculine—I might add.” He warned in his book that humans rely on their more primitive “System 1” brains—“fast, intuitive, and emotional thinking”—much more often than “System 2,” which is slower and more logical.
While “normalization” of deviance may be the most powerful, and insidious, manner of steering a nation off his cliff, Trump has also utilized more obvious and familiar strategies in his battles against thought. Borrowing a familiar political playbook from our earlier ominous history, Trump has relentlessly vilified an “out group” as scapegoats for all the evils of the world while cultivating a separate supportive clique of “in-crowd” humans who imagine themselves both special and put-upon.
He also repeatedly exploits fear with lies, including made-up stories about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, and a “burning” Portland, Oregon (with Republicans using protest photos from South America). “Things are terrible here. We won’t have a country left,” he has said in his campaigns. Kahneman and research partner Amos Tversky found that people experience the emotional pain of a loss about twice as strongly as the pleasure of a gain. Trump’s repeated apocalyptic warnings, as well as dwelling on specific gruesome crimes, speak to the primitive brain far more effectively than facts revealing that crime is decreasing and the nation is safer, Kahneman noted.
Trump also often delivers his warnings with a visceral appeal to our primitive minds by “displaying” in a manner similar to our ape ancestors, primatologist Jane Goodall noted in a 2022 MSNBC interview. Goodall said Trump exhibited “the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he’s competing for dominance with another. They’re upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals,” she said. (Goodall, who died earlier this month, said in a posthumously released interview that she wanted to rocket Trump—and Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin—into outer space, for good.)
The term “normalization of deviance” may seem hopelessly academic, but its origins are found in a shared cultural tragedy. The term was initially coined by Columbia University sociology professor Diane Vaughan after repeatedly ignored warnings about a flaw in the O rings of the Challenger space shuttle resulted in its shocking explosion on live TV in 1986, in which all seven astronauts aboard lost their lives as a stunned America watched.
The proximate cause of the disaster stemmed from NASA’s critical employees turning their backs on their own safety standards in an insidious example of organizational groupthink, Vaughan noted in her 1996 book, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA. That study has since been cited as a warning for the current political era.
The horrific accident was not due to a surprise flaw or to bad actors, Vaughan concluded, but instead to a creeping shift in the “culture” of NASA that ultimately shrugged off concerns about the problem with the O rings. The subsequent tragedy was the result of an “incremental” but growing “descent into poor judgment” that emerged from the “banality of organizational life,” Vaughan noted in her book. If that sounds familiar, you’re likely recalling philosopher Hannah Arendt’s own citation of another “banality”—“of evil”—to explain how seemingly decent humans were willing to do Hitler’s bidding.
Social “normalization of deviance means that people within an organization become so much accustomed to a deviant behavior that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety,” Vaughan warned in a 2008 interview. A “common pattern” of organizations that slip into “deviance” includes a “long incubation period filled with early warning signs that were either missed or misinterpreted or ignored,” she added.
What can be done to protect ourselves from Trump’s tool box and our own human nature? Is mere awareness of our tendency to become inured to the unusual and backslide into treating deviance as normal a strong enough beginning?
Here, Knobe cautions against knee-jerk pessimism. While daily events may seem overwhelming—or even enraging—the future is constantly being forged. Knobe emphasizes that humans have made tremendous strides in history, but often over decades—Trump’s may simply be an incendiary presidential administration that’s ultimately a feeble blip in time. He points to revolutionary changes in our perspectives on issues like racism, sexual harassment—and slavery. While these sensibilities are under constant attack, they’ve proven to be enduring values, not easily erased.
“If you lived in 1850 and saw someone with a slave, you might think, ‘How awful,’ but there’s little you could have changed about it, and it was widely viewed as acceptable,” Knobe said. “Now, we would be horrified.”
He warns that emphasizing polarization and the negativity of the current political landscape could have a backlash, just as Trump’s repeated evocation of a pending apocalypse could actually bring about the violence about which he warns, given the way the human mind works. Knobe points out research that college campaigns to reduce student drinking by emphasizing the problem may have triggered an increase in drinking. Better, he said, to emphasize the number of students not drinking or, in politics, what large numbers of Republicans have traditionally believed in the past to make them appear more recognizable and less oppositional.
And Trump’s own antisocial tendencies can still shock us out of our torpor and short-circuit the administration’s desire to normalize all of its aberrance. Robert Reich, former U.S. labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, insisted in a talk on October 9 that Trump’s deployment of federalized National Guard troops into Democratic cities, amid a fantasy of imploding violence, has finally crossed a line for Americans, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“Something dramatic has happened,” Reich said onstage at the University of California-Berkeley after a showing of The Last Class, a documentary about his career in public service and as a university professor. “Something has come out into the open that [makes] a lot of people who are on the edge, a lot of independents, a lot of people who really don’t know their politics … a little bit afraid.… And they’re saying, ‘What, the Texas National Guard is coming into Chicago over the objections of the mayor and the governor of Illinois, and they are coming in there and they are doing what? And the president is saying what?’”
Reich argued that the optics of Trump’s policies are so “awful” that they’ll “activate” Americans, the newspaper noted. They “enable people to see something that is not just political,” he said. “It’s not right versus left, it is not Democrats versus Republicans,” Reich added. “It’s fundamental: democracy versus fascism.”
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