Fresh on the heels of its scoop about women who cut off their hair to teach Trump a lesson, New York magazine is back with Phase Two in its stirring Stress-and-Grief-Management series, this time with eight therapists dealing with cases of Trump-Based dementia, as afflicting their clients and them. All, it appears, can barely stop sobbing, including the doctors. “Trump’s election was a death of a sort to me and my clients,” said one of them. “I was crying frequently … been VERY careful to restrict my conversations to people who share my political ‘views.'” “I allowed myself to be with my clients, and cry with them,” said another. “I wanted them to know … I was just as scared and anxious as they.” Patients dressed in black, threatened suicide, displayed “agitation and fearfulness,” and regressed in their efforts to tame their addictions. Some clients, doctors reported, indulged in orgies of binging and purging. These patients themselves were regarded as blameless. “I blame the election,” one doctor had said.
When did it become okay (at least among Democrats) for adults to admit, out loud and in public, how weak they all were, how helpless they were, how unable they were to deal with reversals, and how quickly they fold in the clutch? It was not always thus. In the Times of London, Douglas Murray compares an American student who spent a week in the hospital after reading a novel assigned in one of her classes to an answer by the current Countess Mountbatten — “One simply got on with it,” — to a question about how she coped with the IRA bombing that thirty-six years earlier had nearly killed her and had indeed killed her father, one of her children, and one of that child’s friends. Can Americans hope to live up this standard? Thus far, at least, the Republicans have failed to give in to this syndrome. And, contra the student, and vide Countess Mountbatten, we have our two Jackies, and John.
Gently bred Jacqueline Kennedy was 34 when her husband’s head was blown open as he sat beside her; when she walked into the hospital holding his brains in her hand; when she stood in bloody clothes beside his successor; and when, as the people around her were going to pieces, planned and then executed a four-day state funeral, in which on the last day she walked from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, walked across Memorial Bridge to Arlington Cemetery, held a birthday party for her three-year-old son because she thought he deserved it, and stayed in the White House having talks with world leaders until late at night.
Jackie Robinson was six years younger than this when he went to Brooklyn to play for the Dodgers, enduring ferocious abuse from other teams and their players (with not all of his teammates strongly behind him), being forbidden to fight back or even to show signs of anger; the condition of his contract being based on his promise to swear to be calm at all times.
And worse than all these, because of the duration and isolation he suffered, were the five and a half-years of torture John McCain endured in North Vietnamese prisons, having refused early release on at least one occasion, before being finally freed. This, people, is what genuine “stress” looks and feels like, and how grown-ups and patriots try to deal with it. Shun the “safe spaces,” and those who flee to them. Stand with the Countess, the Jackies and John.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
