The Gaslighting of America

I've been thinking about writing this post for a couple of weeks now.  It's one that I've really been wanting to write, but just couldn't bring myself to do it until now.  There is no humor in this post, so if that's what you're looking for then you should skip this one.

There have been a few mentions of gaslighting in the news lately, but not as many as I would have expected after a few weeks of the Trump presidency.  Before I dive into what I think is happening to America right now, I think I should explain what gaslighting is (or at least my understanding of it).  The description in quotes below is right out of Wikipedia, which is hardly the ultimate repository of all human knowledge, but probably about as good as anything else we hear these days.

"Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief.

Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim. The term owes its origin to Gas Light, a 1938 play and 1944 film. It has been used in clinical and research literature."

If you've read or watched any credible news sources lately, you've probably been a little surprised at the almost daily challenges to Donald Trump's credibility.  One day he says something and the very next day he says something contradictory.  When challenged, he simply denies the contradiction and claims that whoever challenged him is somehow at fault or has some ulterior motive for the challenge.  News broadcasts regularly play footage of him making a statement about something one day and then denying that he ever made that statement the next day.  When challenged, he redirects the conversation in such a way as to blame the challenger for his obvious contradiction.  Viewers and the challenger are left to wonder if they can believe their own eyes and ears or whether they imagined the whole thing.  Why would anyone deny that they said something when it was recorded and aired on the evening news, right?  It doesn't seem possible that anyone would do that, so it couldn't have actually happened.

Besides the simple denial of facts, Trump also attempts to discredit anyone who challenges him.  At the same time that he denies that some event really happened or a particular statement was made, he aggressively tries to discredit his challengers.  The most evident example of this is his insistence that certain new sources are "fake news" and for that reason no one should believe them.  He does this regularly even when the news source just replays footage of the event.  They're not attempting to editorialize.  They simply replay the taped event just like the replays we see on TV during a football game.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is not normal behavior.  Consult any mental health practitioner, your doctor, a professional journal, or even Dr. Phil and not one of them will tell you that this is normal behavior.  Even more chilling than the prospect of our president engaging in this behavior is the fact that he isn't challenged on it.  We all just watch is amazement and then try to put it out of our minds and move on.

I think this is a dangerous situation for America.  You can form your own opinions, but I think we have a problem and we need to figure out how to address it before irreparable harm is done to our country, it's citizens, and our relationships with other nations.