According to medical researchers and experts consulted by the Atlantic's Jennifer Senior, the reelection of Donald Trump in 2024 could plunge the country into an unabated downward spiral of stress and anxiety with major mental and physical health implications.
Seeking answers about the "psychic toll" a second Trump term would have on the American public, Senior wrote that she personally descended into a state of panic during Trump's first term that seemed to have disappeared after Joe Biden became president, with the columnist writing, "Say what you want about Joe Biden: He’s allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he’s there."
But now, with the former president likely to be the GOP nominee in 2024, she suggested a second Trump presidency could have a widespread impact on public health.
"What will happen to the American psyche if he wins again?" she asked rhetorically. "What will happen if we have to live in fight-or-flight mode for four more years, and possibly far beyond? Our bodies are not designed to handle chronic stress. Neuroscientists have a term for the tipping-point moment when we capitulate to it—allostatic overload—and the result is almost always sickness in one form or another, whether it’s a mood disorder, substance abuse, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or ulcers."
According to stress expert Robert Sapolsky when asked about Trump, "Increase your blood pressure for a few minutes to evade a lion—a good thing ... increase your blood pressure every time you’re in the vicinity of the alpha male—you begin to get cardiovascular disease.”
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Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span, warned about "technostress,” which Senior applied to, "the obsessive checking of—and interruptions from, and passing around of—news, which Trump made with destructive rapidity. Human brains are not designed to handle such a helter-skelter onslaught; effective multitasking, according to Mark, is in fact a complete myth (there’s always a cost to our productivity)."
The report notes an American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey that revealed that "68 percent of Americans reported that the 2020 election was a significant source of strain."
Clinical psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman warns that society could be plagued by a mass attack of “learned helplessness on a population-level scale" by a second Trump presidency, with Senior writing, "Such an epidemic would be terrible, especially for the young; we’d have a generation of nihilists on our hands, with all future efforts to #Resist potentially melting under the waffle iron of its own hashtag."
Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist at MIT, suggested the current state of politics in the country lends itself to a deep psychological response no matter who is elected, explaining, "In such a polarized society, everyone is always living with a lot of hate and fear and suspicion,” adding that whoever wins, “may change who bears the burden every four or eight years, but not the burden itself.”
