This is a heavy topic, so I’ll start on a light note. Donald John Trump (DJT) and I are separated by three degrees from each other. His father, Fred, had a brother, John, who was a professor at MIT from 1935-1970. John’s claim to fame was the medical application of Van De Graff generators: he was a student of Van De Graff’s. John Trump had a student named Jay Forrester. Forrester became an MIT professor himself. He was credited as a co-inventor of magnetic core memory, the predominant form of random-access computer memory from 1955-75. He later applied engineering control theory to non-engineering systems, joining the Sloan School of Management at MIT and founding a field called system dynamics that got international recognition through The Club of Rome and the 1972 book Limits to Growth.

I went to MIT in Fall 1976 and got a management degree. My concentration was System Dynamics, which was used as a tool to design business process improvement and business process reengineering.  Forrester guest lectured in some of my classes, and I had a couple of meetings with him. So the connection is Donald -> John -> Jay -> Me.

DJT is a political savant. He was able to motivate 77 million people to vote for him for a second term after his, uh, less then stellar first term. That’s a tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime level of skill, amplified by an increasingly shallow America.

His motivational skills were able to overcome his considerable shortcomings, and the best efforts of his myriad opponents, great and small. DJT is clearly a deeply wounded person, with very limited social and critical thinking skills. He also has an extremely limited knowledge base. His confidence far exceeds his knowledge. Worst of all, he has no desire to learn, or to seek out people who have more knowledge or experience than he has, much less listen to them. He is not alone in having all of these limitations. His tremendous inherited wealth, however, has allowed him to live his 79 years without growing his skills or knowledge. Still, even among the wealthy he is not unique. There are other people who are similar in all those ways.

How did he get 77 million Americans to vote for him after his terrible first term, during which there were hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths from COVID – a death count as high as Word War II, and only exceeded by the Civil War? The 1918-20 influenza pandemic is the most recent comparable medical death toll. The medicine of the time couldn’t prevent it. COVID was different. How has he gotten the entire GOP establishment, with a few, rare, individual exceptions like Liz Cheney, to accede and acquiesce to his demands, over and over again?

DJT is ultimately a great performing artist. Like any artist – actor, painter, or musician – he connects with his audience emotionally and short-circuits any possible cortical involvement of facts and logic (which can follow later or not) but is irrelevant to the choice at hand. He calls it trusting his gut. His gut (his limbic response, his amygdala hijack) resonates with many people. It preempts higher thought. It’s his superpower. The Star Trek TOS episode “Day of the Dove” (1968) is on my mind a lot when I think of how DJT got elected by triggering so many people.

As a songwriter, I write songs based on my emotional experience.  I have a story behind them. If you have a similar emotional experience to what I’m expressing, odds are that you’ll relate to and like the song, regardless of how closely my story matches any of your stories. So it is with DJT. His lifelong pain, fear, and anxiety leap out of him, unfiltered and relatable. His lyrics, the words he uses, are frequently incoherent and often false. However, that doesn’t matter. He’s emotionally honest in a way that few politicians are. His exaggerated and unwarranted self-confidence helps sell it. Moreover, his feelings that derive from his racism, his misogyny, and his childhood neglect and abandonment are instantly relatable by racists, misogynists, and neglected and abandoned people. He’s typically, though not exclusively, relating to White, male, and/or poor people who have limited social and critical thinking skills. That’s his base. He’s singing songs that make them feel seen and heard. Without that, he wouldn’t have gotten one tenth of the votes he got.

DJT claims to be a genius. He’s not. Even if he were, though, intelligence by itself does nothing. Higher intelligence is just potential for gaining knowledge a little faster and maybe a little deeper than others. Intelligence is great, but gaining knowledge and skills requires effort, and experience is irreplaceable. He hasn’t put in the work or gotten the experience at anything but triggering emotional responses, both for him and against him.

Transcending party politics, a longstanding historical trend is the shallowing of America. Two centuries ago, the vast majority of people were subsistence farmers who lived in the same town most of their lives. They knew their cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, nieces, nephews, and further extended family. They knew their neighbors’ extended families. Their connections were deep. But their lives were narrow.  They hardly knew what was happening in the next county, much less the next state or national. The Star Trek TNG episode “The Game” (1991)  is eerily prescient with our  contemporary addiction to our phones and abandonment of live, in-person calls, video, or actual meetings.

What today we call a nuclear family is a scrap, a sad isolated fragment of what was once a much better-connected complex of molecular families. Compared to two centuries ago, we have an inconceivable breadth to our lives. We can sit at home in our pajamas and see myriad live broadcasts online from around the world. We have hundreds, thousands of online “friends” in our various social networks. However, we still have the same 24 hours in a day that our forebears had. Our finite time is spread much more widely so that our lives are 10,000 miles wide but an inch deep. In addition, a fair amount of our time is spent just running to stay in place, of watching the latest and greatest constantly parade in front of us. As a small example, our phones update their own software now, undocumented and unannounced, so we have to spend time figuring out how to do today in the latest software version what we did yesterday. Cognitive overload is real.

DJT’s superpower is triggering people, of invoking amygdalic responses that bypass all cortical processing. It’s cortical processing that would overwhelmingly demonstrates Democrats’ superior performance for the nation as a whole and for the vast majority of its people for the last century in economic growth, justice for all, and opportunities. His triggering also distracts Democrats from allaying those fearful responses and raising countervailing fears. (See also my page Framing the Conversation.) The shallowing of America has played a role in that bypassing. As a whole, people aren’t thinking as deeply, so they’re more vulnerable to being triggered but not processing. Our mission as Democrats is to stop bringing an intellectual knife to an emotional gunfight. We can get intellectual after we win the emotional gunfight. Completing the circle, it looks like DJT and his followers have raised countervailing fears for us with ICE and the Iran War. Our mission now is to amplify the fears that GOP cravenness and incompetence have raised against their own interests.