BIRTHERISM AND THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE TRUMPIAN MIND-SET

LUBA KESSLER, M.D.

Donald Trump straddles the country’s divide between those who cheer his ascendance to the presidency and those who are greatly disturbed by it. This intensely felt division points to the highly emotional effect he has on the nation. What is it? People have cited a variety of factors. This chapter offers a singular look at Trump’s method of political insinuation through an examination of his embrace and loud propagation of the “birtherism” conspiracy. His use of it as a jumping-off platform to launch his presidential candidacy showed from the start the unmistakable signs of an unabashed bending of reality and a deployment of demagoguery to achieve his political aims.

What is birtherism? Since 2011, Donald Trump was the loudest and most persistent spokesperson for the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a native U.S. citizen. In denying that Obama was a naturally born American, Trump joined the “birtherism” argument espoused by the national far-right political fringe.

It was Trump’s first visible political falsehood, initiating a perversion of the political discourse that ultimately led to his election. A false covenant with the public followed, spawning a multitude of other “alternative” realities.

This brings up disturbing questions. Why did this falsehood take root? And what are the ramifications of a presidency based on it? This chapter attempts to consider this question in light of recent history.

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The first decade of the country’s political history in the twenty-first century saw two profoundly transformative national events. America suffered the first and only foreign attack on its mainland since the War of 1812, on September 11, 2001. And in 2008, it elected a black man as its president, and reelected him for a second term in 2012. One event came from the outside; the other, from developments inside the country. Is there something about this convergence between the shock of the one and the internal ripples of the other? Let us examine.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks shook the country’s sense of invincibility. Ever since then, the United States has been at war in foreign lands, in an effort to recover its sense of security and prowess. Our nation has always been proud of its sovereignty, its expansive Manifest Destiny at home and its voice of authority abroad. The adjustment of its post-9/11 self-image on the national and international stage has been painful. We entered the new millennium with a great deal of self-questioning. American millennials came face-to-face with ethnic and religious Otherness with an urgency unknown to previous generations. On the one hand, it widened their horizons, fueling greater interest in and openness to the world. Yet, on the other hand, life became more unsettled; the breakdown in the social and family sense of security made their entrance into this new world more susceptible to feelings of mistrust and fearfulness. The impulse to “circle the wagons” and turn inward encouraged suspicion of Others: xenophobia.

The election of Barack Obama as the U.S. president also represented a great shift in the nation’s life and psychology, though of a different nature. Blacks have historically carried connotations of Otherness in America, by the difference of their skin color and the circumstances of their arrival on the continent, compared to the majority population, which has led to persistent racism. Certainly, the election of an African American man to the highest office in the land represented a dramatic civic achievement in the country’s history. It gave cause to consider the possibility that the United States may have reached a postracial consciousness.

Yet, the production of the “birtherism” movement, in this historical context, tells a different story. How so?

The questioning of the authenticity of Barack Obama’s native birth is without precedent in the history of the American presidency. No other president, all of whom were white, was ever subjected to the deep offense of such a cruel falsehood. It was as if such an arrogant affront to the dignity of the president, or any man, was permissible because he was black. With such calumny, Donald Trump signaled thinly veiled bigotry. While not expressing directly an outright racist slur, his embrace of birtherism was a “dog whistle,” an unmistakable call to delegitimize a black American citizen as the Other because he aspired to the presidency of the nation.

The American public takes great pride in the fact that any of its native born could become president. It has always been the aspirational ideal of this country’s self-image as a place of freedom and opportunity for all. Both Barack Obama, an African American professor of constitutional law with a record of community service and the audacity of hope, and Donald Trump, a brash real estate developer with no political experience, could succeed in the quest for the highest office in the land on the strength of their appeal to the citizenry.

The bigotry of birtherism set a limit on this national aspiration. It signaled that a black person could not be truly American. Just as the election of Barack Obama thrilled the nation, imbuing us with civic pride in the seeming achievement of a postracial society, birtherism signaled that it was permissible for America, deep in its soul, to continue harboring and nursing the historic racial prejudice. It said that a black president could not be legitimate, and so the factual reality of his very birth on American soil had to be denied. In this willful distortion of fact, Donald Trump showed the essential quality of his personality: the perversion of his relationship to truth. It showed that he could and would distort and deform the truth in his quest to secure any deal he was after. Truth and reality were commodities just like any other—a matter for a transactional sale of a desired acquisition. This appears to be the hallmark of the Trumpian mind-set. Birtherism was its opening political bid.

We are living in a time of great demographic, economic, social, and political transformation at home and abroad. What it means is that the pressures from outside the national realm resonate with those within it. America’s unrivaled democratic diversity, as seen in its immigrant descendants continues to evolve, just as its standing in the global transformation is adjusting anew to evolving realities, global terrorism among them. This stretches the psychological resources of the nation, and its resilience. The American citizenry meets its moment of truth under conditions of shaken security and changing identity. It becomes a matter of paramount importance to the well-being of the country, therefore, that it withstand and manage these pressures with a calm resolve based on a moral sense of decency and reason.

At such times, the nation looks to its leader to uphold its vital interests and values. It is for this reason that we celebrate those presidents who showed the capacity to meet the challenging realities of their moment in history with dignity, and appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” This is the reason that Lincoln stands in the American presidential pantheon with George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each of these men lifted the nation not with partisan transaction but with vision and moral purpose.

Donald Trump’s appeal has just the opposite effect. It debases civic discourse and corrodes national unity.

Birtherism shows the essential characteristics of Donald Trump’s mind-set: A self-professed ultimate dealmaker first and foremost, he pursued the presidency in an entirely transactional manner. He did not hesitate to make up falsehoods or wink at bigotry to win. In a manner similar to exploiting every available tax loophole; every feasible advantage over his debtors, contractors, and workers; every opportunity to have “special” relationships advance his deal-making aims, he made an unerring political calculation to seize the transitional moment of national insecurity. His business acumen worked brilliantly, against all odds. But his transactional win represents a profound danger to the nation because it sells out the most essential qualities of democratic values, of moral integrity, and of true inventiveness. What binds us together is the shared reality of our country’s history and its present: E pluribus unum. “Out of many, one.” The country’s cherished motto cannot hold when truth is open to transactional competition from “alternative facts.”

We are left with the question about what made the American public receptive to Donald Trump’s promissory bid despite his falsehoods. Yes, our country is ever open to enterprising inventiveness and grand boldness. But it is not naïve. There has been too much toil, hardship, and strong civic pride in building this nation for its citizenry to surrender the habits of common sense and clearheaded pragmatism. However, this does not make America immune to the lingering effects of its own historical legacy of slavery and racism. Without a full reconciliation between that legacy and the nation’s founding ideals, the significant fault line between the two will open up in times of increased strain. The startling fabrication of the birtherism movement offers a window into just such a fault line.

It does not require particular professional schooling to recognize that birtherism was a telltale sign of a preoccupation with Otherness. It is easy to grasp the sense of threat from the foreign Other in the age of terrorism and massive global migration. It is more difficult to acknowledge the persistent fear and lingering mistrust of the black Other at home in America.

We want to believe in our postracial integration and equality. We are proud of the progress we have made. The election of Barack Obama is its rightful proof. It is a lot more difficult to recognize the prejudices of an inborn and ingrown kind of stereotyping. The fact that Donald Trump could successfully use the myth of birtherism as an under-the-radar deployment of bigotry attests to its subterranean persistence.

This is not an indictment of American society. It is a call for recognition of America’s historical conditions. We associate the settling of the country with white colonists. We grow up with those lessons of our history and culture. Although the labor of the Blacks was indispensable to the fledgling American economy, slavery denied them the recognition and rights of equal participation. The result was persistent discrimination, which further disenfranchised them from full civic participation, with each perpetuating the other. White and black cultural traditions came to develop their own idioms, furthering the racial divide.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider the myriad ways in which racism continues to plague our national realities. It remains our challenge to right the political, civic, and interpersonal relations needed for the mutual benefit of the present and future American generations: white, black, and any Other. In order to rise to the challenge, we need the courage of truth and awareness. We need to question rationalized public policies that maintain segregation and inequality, be it at the voting booth or in judicial or police protection. We need to tune into and question habits of prejudice and bigotry. We need to probe better the stereotypes of our culture and of ourselves. Such an examination will inoculate our civic consciousness against the lies masquerading as truth. We will choose worthy leaders aware of their responsibility to represent the integrity of the nation’s essential values. Birtherism shows Donald Trump not only as unworthy but as dangerous to the nation’s central tenet: E pluribus unum. It is not negotiable.

Luba Kessler, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice. Born in the post-Holocaust displacement in the Ural Mountains, she has lived and received her education in the Soviet Union, Poland, Italy, and the United States. That journey included essential lessons in history, geography, culture, art, and politics. Postgraduate training and faculty appointments followed, in psychiatry at Hillside Hospital on Long Island, and in psychoanalysis at NYU Psychoanalytic Institute (now the Institute for Psychoanalytic Education, affiliated with NYU Medical School). She is editor of Issues in Education for The American Psychoanalyst of the American Psychoanalytic Association.