America Has Collective Pandemic Trauma. And It Helps Explain Our Politics.
The pandemic worsened America's pre-existing conditions of distrust, division, and disinformation in ways we haven't fully reckoned with. Trump exploited these fractures to regain power.
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In September, I was with Democratic canvassers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I gave an anti-disinformation lecture to volunteers and spoke to voters. One encounter I had with a Trump supporter shifted my perspective. I’ll never forget it.
A canvasser and I knocked on the door of an 80-year-old man who appeared to live alone. He was furious before we even got a word out. Luckily, the awesome woman I was at the door with was as committed to remaining calm as I was while this man unleashed an avalanche of right-wing conspiracy theories. He pointed at us, yelling, “You Democrats are ruining this country!” among other things.
I tried to de-escalate the situation because I felt that immediately walking away would only further trigger him. His energy gave the impression he might follow us. As we heard him out, something remarkable happened. He began to rage about President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and said, “I’m a veteran.” Tears began to fill his eyes. He talked about how he felt this country had failed people like him. His fury was a mask for his sadness.
At that moment, I felt a surge of empathy. I realized that underneath all of his conspiracism was unprocessed pain manifesting itself in misdirected anger - anger that was being exploited by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
Since then, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how that lonely, angry man was a microcosm of unaddressed pain within America. Like any unhealed trauma, if avoided, it will manifest itself in destructive ways.
After Trump’s win, I thought back to that moment and began ruminating about how something feels fundamentally off in the way many Americans have been behaving in recent years, especially online. Empathy feels like a rarity, assumptions of bad faith from others appear to be the norm, and nuance is almost impossible to capture in discussions.
Earlier this week, I sent out a post that read, “I really think the collective trauma of the pandemic broke a lot of Americans in a way we haven’t fully reckoned with.” To my surprise, this simple message popped off on Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky, garnering about 850k views and thousands of people agreeing with the sentiment.
Given how profoundly that post resonated with people, I thought I’d examine this theory more closely.
Over 1 million Americans have died of COVID-19, and we have no national COVID Memorial Day where we mourn the dead as a country. After the shutdowns and intense period of collective isolation ended, we were all just expected to get back to “normal.” Adults had their lives put on pause, and many haven’t been able to rebuild. Children lost key education and socialization time. And, of course, there are the literal costs that rose due to inflation amid the pandemic recovery. Meanwhile, conspiracy theories about the pandemic, egged on by the former president who mismanaged the pandemic in the first place, sought to sow distrust in our institutions and each other.
Couple these pandemic developments with the racial justice protests of the Summer of 2020 and the Trump Administration’s cruel response, and you have a year riddled with trauma.
Have we fully reckoned with this? I don’t think so.
Of course, simply stating the pandemic alone is to blame for how broken society feels would be overly simplistic. The psychological and physiological trauma of the pandemic merely worsened the pre-existing conditions of the American psyche.
In the post-9/11 era, we live in a world plagued by the consequences of President W. Bush’s unjustified invasion of Iraq based on a lie. Americans justifiably lost trust in the federal government. That war destabilized a region, killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and led to a mass migration that altered the politics of countries around the world. Then, the 2008 financial crisis further deepened that mistrust and damaged the lives of Americans economically. Trump rose amid the ashes of those events, and the racial backlash of the election of Barack Obama, and then came the pandemic.
After the pandemic, we've seen higher levels of distrust, isolation, and fear - the data backs this up. This created an environment where disinformation and polarization have continued to flourish. Trump, who has a unique talent for identifying flaws in society, shamelessly exploited and deepened these conditions.
Let’s dive into the psychological impact of the pandemic, how it’s increased the spread of disinformation and deepened polarization, and how Donald Trump has taken advantage of this to regain power - even though he’s partly to blame for why we’re here in the first place.
The Pandemic’s Psychological Impact
The pandemic has had a deeper psychological impact on Americans than we fully realize.
In 2023, the American Psychological Association (APA) sought to quantify how the pandemic affected the mental health of Americans. They published a survey titled Stress in America 2023: A Nation Recovering from Collective Trauma, which I’ve found to be the most significant poll analyzing the collective trauma of post-pandemic America.
It had a pretty sizable sample size of 3,185 respondents compared directly to their survey from 2019, so you could see results from both before and after the pandemic began.
APA’s CEO Arthur C. Evans Jr. said of the survey, “The COVID-19 pandemic created a collective experience among Americans. While the early-pandemic lockdowns may seem like the distant past, the aftermath remains.”
Key findings from the survey laid out exactly how stress, chronic illness, and mental health diagnoses worsened across demographics:
“When reviewing this year’s survey data, APA psychologists widely agreed there is mounting evidence that our society is experiencing the psychological impacts of a collective trauma…
The data suggests the long-term stress sustained since the Covid-19 pandemic began has had a significant impact on well-being, evidenced by an increase in chronic illnesses—especially among those between the ages of 35 and 44, which increased from 48% reported in 2019 to 58% in 2023. Adults ages 35 to 44 also experienced the highest increase in mental health diagnoses—from 31% reported in 2019 to 45% in 2023—though adults ages 18 to 34 still reported the highest rate of mental illnesses at 50% in 2023.”
The APA found clear increases in stress across almost all ages:
But when drilling down further, it’s clear young people are suffering from debilitating stress the most:
The consistency of these spikes in stress, mental illness, and chronic illness clearly indicates a collective trauma. The aftermath of that trauma is playing out right now.
In an interview on The Ezra Klien Show, PTSD expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk discussed how trauma leaves imprints on the brain and shapes how we view the world:
“We have these meaning making system that come on top of that, starting with the larger limbic system that has a more complex way of organizing your perceptions about reality. So basically, your limbic system is the part of your brain that forms a map inside of the world outside of you. And so your brain gets programmed by experience to know what to expect and what sort of reactions people will have to certain behaviors. And so early experiences very much shape your perceptions of the world.”
Think about this in the context of the pandemic.
Americans were already traumatized and more likely to distrust our institutions after 9/11 and the Iraq War lies. The pandemic hits, and conspiracy theories run rampant.
People were afraid and looking for answers. So, nefarious conspiracy theorists gave them false ones.
The Pandemic Worsened The Disinformation Age
These psychological shifts have made Americans more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns and fueled deeper political polarization.
When people are in distress, they are more susceptible to manipulation. It’s why cult leaders prey on the vulnerable. You’ll often find that cult survivors will relay stories about how they were trying to find their purpose or just went through a really hard time before joining a cult. We see this happening a lot online and in our politics as our information ecosystem feeds people deception when they’re simply seeking community.
In my article about how journalists should cover the Trump administration, I discussed how this disinformation age came to be.
Even before COVID-19, our media consumption had become fragmented, and there were no longer universally agreed-upon facts. Our social media feeds are at the whim of corporate-engineered personalized algorithms that are designed to reinforce our preexisting biases and capture our attention at all costs - even if that cost is the truth.
Gone are the days of the dominant Big Three networks - ABC, NBC, and CBS - and major newspapers delivering centralized news in the mid-1900s. Americans now receive their news from a wide array of sources, from podcasters to social media creators. The gatekeepers are gone. While this has created great opportunities for honest independent media to rise, the incentive structure of an internet dominated by the attention economy encourages shameless, lying grifters as well.
Biologist Edward O. Wilson once said, “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” The human brain isn’t built to consume this onslaught of information and hasn’t yet evolved to adapt to this unrelenting pace of technological advancement.
Marshall McLuhan, known as the father of modern media studies, often discussed how he viewed all forms of media and technology, especially digital media like television and computers, as essentially outward extensions of our central nervous system.
Journalist Sean Illing discussed this in a 2022 podcast appearance on The Ezra Klein Show:
“Tools like the wheel or the hammer are used instrumentally. Those are extensions of our feet and hands, extensions of our physical capabilities. But McLuhan insisted that electronic media is an extension of our nervous system. So our ability to experience what is happening isn’t limited by our bodies. We can know what’s happening anywhere, everywhere, all the time.
And I think his point was that our brains weren’t equipped to deal with this much stimuli, this much information.”
McLuhan died before the modern internet age, but if we apply his insights to our current technological landscape, one has to ask what happens when the entire world is accessible via technology. What happens to our nervous system? How does that impact our anxiety levels? The answers can be found in the surges of depression, stress, and anxiety among those who use social media - particularly among teenage girls on Instagram.
Compound the fact our brains are not evolved to handle this level of information with the trauma of the pandemic, and you have a recipe for mass manipulation via disinformation.
During the pandemic, disinformation surged. Conspiracy theories targeting scientists ruled the internet and largely landed along party lines. Right-wing figures pushed anti-vaccine nonsense until vaccine mandates became politically toxic among Republican voters. Issues of public health became polarized, and we’re still dealing with that fallout today.
Trump’s Exploitation Of America’s Pandemic Trauma
As I’ve often outlined, Trump’s primary talent has always come down to his ability to identify and shamelessly exploit the weaknesses in people, cultures, and systems. From his fraudulent business career to his presidency, Trump tapped into the darkest corners of the American psyche and brought them out to the forefront. Like the pandemic itself, Trump didn’t simply break America; he took advantage of its existing fractures and deepened them. Trump served as a mirror the country could peer into and see its flaws laid bare.
The American people’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories and disinformation has noticeably increased since 2020. Trump has exploited this phenomenon by using fear-mongering lies and chaos to his advantage, turning post-pandemic fears into political fuel.
Trump also utilized the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia in America - which has been a problem since America’s founding. He fear-mongered about migrants, specifically migrants of color, using dehumanizing language, trying to depict them all as criminals and animals. Trump and his allies used blatantly racist and sexist language to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
This was the culmination of the modern Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, which has, since Richard Nixon, scapegoated minorities for the problems the white working class faces while doing nothing to solve them.
While the founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, appealed to America’s better angels, the distorter of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, has appealed to America’s inner demons.
Of course, this was not the primary motivation of all Trump supporters, and I’m far from saying all Trump supporters are racist and sexist. I grew up in Virginia with many of them who are fundamentally good people. But it’s hard to overlook this factor as motivating many of them, as we saw Trump supporters in Madison Square Garden cheer the avalanche of bigotry that exuded from that stage.
Trump has clearly channeled the very real distrust and fear many Americans have about their future and given them false answers. Now, we are on the cusp of a second Trump term.
How do we move forward? Just like processing childhood trauma in individual therapy can explain seemingly inexplicable adult behavior, so can processing the historical traumas within America’s recent and distant past.
We can’t avoid what has happened. We have to face it head-on, with grace and empathy. Only then can we move forward together. Unfortunately, it appears we might have more division before we move to a place of unity.
But division doesn’t have to be our future. Addressing collective trauma is tough and will require both systemic and individual efforts. We can’t do much systemically at the moment, but individually, we have to try and embrace empathy—not just as a personal virtue, but as a political necessity—to bridge divides and rebuild our shared humanity.
I don’t have all the answers about how we solve this, but I do know we can’t lose hope.
Wow what an insightful article and literally everything you wrote about makes sense!! I am still so horrified and worried about what the next 4 years will bring for our country but I have to admit that as a 56 year old woman in an interracial B/W Lesbian marriage and we are both Federal Government employees I am just so incredibly tired of seeing all of the hate and bigotry in this country. I never thought I would say this and feel a bit embarrassed but if my wife and I could pick up right now and leave this country and never come back we would be gone in a heartbeat. We are just tired of having a target on our backs again being in a Red state Indiana and just want to live somewhere where we don’t have to worry about people that want to unalive us just for the fact we are a Black/White Lesbian couple. At this stage in my life with only 2 years until a Federal Pension I want the rest of my time on this earth living in peace and enjoying my retirement years without having to be fearful. I just feel so sad still.