The Feral Passion Of A Trump Hater And The Perils Of True Belief - The Saga Of The Madwoman Of Bethesda

'I hate him', said Vicki Carter to her closest friend, Hanna Blinker, referring to Donald Trump. 'He is vile, horrendous person, and I shudder whenever I think about him'. 

'Well, don't', replied the much more recondite and reserved friend; but she knew that any temperance, moderation, or objectivity on the part of Vicki was impossible.  The woman's hatred for Trump had become a part of her, an integral piece of her personality and character, as indivisible and strong as any. 

Vicki began to cry and hated herself for it. Just like a woman, she said to herself, fighting back the tears and choking sobs which wracked her.  'What's a person to do?'. 

There is a bell curve for political belief, just as there is for intelligence, height, and weight.  Some people are uninterested, others diffident, still others concerned, and finally those for whom politics is the be-all and end-all of their lives. 

 

For Vicki hating Donald Trump wasn't just political animus - a normal reaction when one watched the man's deliberate dismissal of the principles of democratic liberalism, international adventurism, and racist attempts to restore white privilege and consign the black man to yet another generation of segregation, isolation, and prejudice.  Vicki's hatred was a defining, existential element.  It was what made her bounce out of bed in the morning, pursue every possible avenue of legal sedition and insurrection during the day, and retire only when the clock struck midnight. 

Political belief so framed her perceptions that she could only live within a circle of equally passionate  believers.  One by one she cancelled her Vassar classmates for apostasy, having the temerity to sympathize with conservatism.  First went Wendy Barker, wife of a former chairman of the Republican Party and Ambassador to the Holy See.  She and Wendy had gone arm and arm down the Senior Path, loved each other like a couple, and had the same aspirations for life; but now, Wendy was of no value. 

Vicki had known Wendy long before Vassar.  They had grown up in the same neighborhood of Bryn Mawr, tony WASP redoubt on the Philadelphia Main Line.  They had gone to Miss Porter's, a finishing school-cum-college preparatory feed to the Seven Sisters, had roomed together, and were both frilly and girly and studious together. They were inseparable and thought that this was a lifetime friendship. 

But now the years of friendship were annulled.  It was as if Wendy had never existed.  Anyone who believed what she did, conservative to the core, could not be trusted.  Despite a natural affinity, she was the sworn enemy, the devil in disguise, an obstruction. 

So now Vicki lived only with her own - a safe space of commonality, an indissoluble group of true believers, women who had dedicated their lives to undoing evil and ridding the country of the scourge of Pennsylvania Avenue and would die trying. 

Everything about the President rankled Vicki - his hair, his voice, his slathered on fake tan, his cruel and dismissive retorts to responsible journalists, his mockery, and of course his politics.

Yet with all her Sturm und Drang and that of her colleagues, nothing seemed to budge the man.  He kept up his drumbeat of faux American patriotism to couch his capitalist greed and autocratic ambitions.  He had been successful in sending back tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, sent bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razed the government bureaucracy, the only stalwart against conservative intent.  He opened the oil fields, sent oil gushing through formerly closed pipelines, authorized new, polluting refineries, and restarted the nuclear energy program. 

His first year was a juggernaut of fulfilled promises, and loyal progressives had nothing in the wings, nothing to counter his counter-revolutionary agenda except howls of indignity. 

'We must never give up, never, never', she said, her voice trailing off in the summer breeze.  More and more she found herself talking to herself, sitting alone on her suburban patio watching the cardinals and the robins and smiling at the antics of the squirrels.  There was a strange new penumbra around familiar things - the Ficus took on a glow, a kind of angelic, beatific light; the hum of the refrigerator was in tune with the B-Minor fugue; and the sunlight coming in the bay window was celestial. 

Her friends noticed the changes in her - the faraway looks, the unhinged outbursts, and the animal look in her eyes.  When asked, she replied that all was good with her.  She never felt more complete, in control, and on the path destined for her. 

'Yes', she thought as she watched a Spring robin peck for worms ('I must reseed this year'), 'it is a question of destiny' by which she meant an anointed path.  It wasn't just by chance that she was put on earth at this time, maturing politically at just this moment of history.  Fate could be capricious, but at times there is a holy order to its choices, and she was the beneficiary of this particular turn of the screw. 

She jumped up quickly from her chaise longue, upsetting her gin-and-tonic, leaving the mess for the maid. 'I've things to do', and so she ran past the musical refrigerator, the glowing Ficus, and the luminescent bay window to the phone.  'Marge', she yelled into the old fashioned graphite receiver - land lines were less easily hacked - 'we must do something, we absolutely must'. 

'But sweetheart, what on earth do you mean?' said the lady on the other end of the line, Mrs. Helander, the florist whom Vicki in her confusion dialed by mistake. 'I sent you the zinnias last week'. 

Vicki stumbled over profuse apologies, angry at herself for such a blundering mistake, recovered quickly but forgot why she was on the telephone in the first place. 

'This happens', wrote Arnold Israel, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology at Brandeis, 'in not a few cases.  Ironically the offhanded political swipe at the President's hectoring accusers - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is not too far off the mark.  The virulent, passionate hatred experienced by many in today's political climate can have far-reaching psychological effects'. 

The progression from concern, to extreme agitation, to downright, unsupported hatred in the political advocate parallels certain classic psychological disorders - a kind of early schizophrenic response triggered by exogenous, environmental forces but resonating from deep within the psyche of the disturbed individual. 

Was the professor implying that there was something of group hysteria in Trump hatred?  A certain psychotic personality that many progressives shared; and sensing this commonality grouped together in a kind of psycho-traumatic cabal?

'We have studied only individual cases', the professor went on, 'and while there might be an emergence of classic group hysteria, we have no hard evidence to date'. 

Meanwhile back in Bethesda, Vicki was going around a final bend. She began hallucinating, seeing Donald Trump in her bedroom, drinking her Pouilly Fume before the fireplace, peeing in the rose garden, and leaving muddy tracks on her Kashmiri dhurrie. 

Luckily her mental 'disruption' was caught before she did any harm to herself.  She was stopped by local police responding to a call about a woman walking down the center line of Montgomery Avenue, seen by a staff psychologist, and admitted to the psychiatric wing of Suburban Hospital. 

Now, God forbid that this should happen to anyone, regardless of political affiliation; but it also serves as good counsel if not warning.  'Eating too many donuts is not good for you', said Professor Israel, 'and neither is gorging on political belief'.