Anxiety following the presidential debate shook the souls of most viewers. Biden’s first signs of cognitive slippage triggered the tension. Seconds later, it spiked as Trump spewed lies exceeding the human capacity for imagination. In case you missed the key panicky moments, or if you wish to feel icy cold blood running through your veins, here are some key excerpts.
The most severe evidence of Biden’s cognitive decline emerged when he said:
We have a thousand trillionaires in America, I mean billionaires. And, what’s happening? If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised 500 millions dollars—billion dollars, I should say—in a ten-year period. We’d be able to wipe out his [Trump’s] debt.
Stumbling along, Biden added:
We’d be … making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the COVID – excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with... Look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
Unless you’re a Biden hater with no conscience, the pain at watching this lifetime American senator, vice president, statesman, and now president struggle with words and concepts was intense. The pauses. The mistakes. The flat, confused-looking facial expressions.
It was awful.
Trump’s cognition appeared intact, but he evaded every question asked of him, preferring to rant per usual instead. He failed to offer policies regarding the climate, child care, immigration, taxes, the debt, or, frankly, anything. His knack to powerfully project outright lies and exaggerations is unparalleled. For example, Trump said he wanted to ask Biden:
Why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.
We certainly have a border problem, but Trump’s question has a patently false premise. No evidence exists of immigrants escaping from prisons or psychiatric hospitals to seek asylum here. He continued to display his unique combination of psychopathy and malignant narcissism as his rant rambled on:
This man is going to single-handedly destroy Social Security … He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare.
All completely untrue, and then Trump blabbed more:
We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world – And he [Biden] opened it up, and these killers are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women … they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.
More outrageous lies, intended to inflame the uneducated. Regarding abortion, Trump added:
… they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth – after birth.
Nothing in Biden’s policies, or anyone’s for that matter, advocates for killing full-term infants. But, again, those persons prone to accepting untruths, who perhaps think Hilary Clinton runs a pedophile ring through a Pizza Hut, might believe it.
Denying his culpability and his indictment for multiple crimes, Trump proclaimed:
One other thing, the unselect committee, which is basically two horrible Republicans that are all gone now, out of office, and all Democrats, they destroyed and deleted all of the information they found, because they found out we were right. I did nothing wrong. We have a system that was rigged and disgusting.
We Americans face a tortuous choice between two aging politicians—one with clear signs of dementia and the other all but overtly promising dictatorship.
Those who watched without reaction live in a state of psychotic denial. How could one not feel fear when faced with a choice between a cognitively incompetent person and a psychopathic idiot?
How do we cope?
As noted, many unconsciously choose paths of outright dissociation. They think Biden can handle the job, that his debate performance represented a “bad day.” Those supporting Trump ignore his malignant narcissism or psychopathy (criminal mind) and his absurd claims of a “rigged system.” He is unfit to run a 7-11 store let alone a nation. Those unable to perceive the reality of these two aging men are psychologically blind.
Those viewers capable of critical thinking cannot help but feel afraid. Their anxiety makes perfect sense.
If in support of Biden, they might cope through wishing that he will step down, that he will take massive amounts of psycho-stimulants to prop up his cognition, or that his team of advisors will make decisions for him. Or, perhaps they will pray that Trump gets sentenced on July 11th or that another indictment or conviction will sway public opinion against him.
If wanting another Trump presidency, they likely hope that Biden’s dementia progresses, that Trump’s lies and exaggerations will be ignored, or that his complaints of an unfair justice system persecuting him will be believed.
Both these classes of persons hold onto a wish for the future. They may find help though in the idea that:
It is the hope that kills.
In other words, they forget that, for example, when imprisoned and expecting a prison break, inmates wince with pain when the rescue never happens.
In the final analysis, American voters capable of seeing reality cannot not feel terror for the future of our country, and for the future of a fragile democracy. Their fear is rational. Consider an analogy to aerophobia. On the one hand, those fearful of flying on airplanes suffer from their imaginations. They entertain fantasies of planes crashing in balls of fire. They cannot ingest information to the contrary—like the decades-long safety record of international air travel.
On the other hand, airline passengers terrified when witnessing an engine engulfed in flames, a wing drop off, or a dive towards the ground below them — these persons are not phobic. Their fear is real. They experience a genetically based, psychophysiological fear of a painful death.
Jacques Lacan (1988) proposes we humans perceive reality through three registers: The Symbolic includes all that can be understood through language or signs. The Imaginary consists of fantasies, daydreams, and information relayed through animated media like Disney movies. The Real contains the rest. The Real is the realm of trauma, of perceptions we can neither comprehend through language nor through fantasy. The Real resides outside these two registers. The Real dominates. Lacan describes the Real as occurring when people are:
faced with [experiences in] which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence. (p. 164)
In terms of the rapidly approaching November elections, we Americans live mostly in the realm of the Real. We live immersed in “anxiety par excellence.” We live in a period in which words fail, categories vanish, and we peer into the depths of the unknown and, worse, the unknowable. We must tolerate feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and fear. It is too late to make financial contributions, to volunteer your time, or to run for office. We are faced with a painful reality in which, for complex reasons, both parties promoted presidential candidates with fatal flaws.
Anger joins the panoply of emotional reactions as well, perhaps equaling the terror. It, too, emerges from exposure to the trauma of the Real. The naive may think other countries suffer corruption, but we Americans have our own well-honed version. Billionaires on each side of the pending election prepare their tens or hundreds of millions to contribute. The same logic goes for lobbyists for massive corporations, like those working for petrochemical companies that continue to hide truths about global warming.
These entities can persuade. They can influence. Their corrosive power is outrageous, and it is enraging. How can a truly democratic system allow for such power imbalances? Because it allows for too many loopholes, imbalances, and corrupt influences.
Meanwhile, the rest of us have little choice but to passively wait—as the weeks and months pass by—that some solution to dementia versus psychopathy in our national leaders emerges.
We shall what happens.
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References
Lacan, J. (1988). The Seminar. Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. J. Forrester. New York: Norton.