The Reckoning: Our Nation’s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

Get It from  Barnes & Noble * Thrift Books * Goodreads * Amazon

The Reckoning is not as well-known as Too Much and Never Enough. However, I wanted to see if Dr. Mary Trump—who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology—could give us some helpful pointers on how to manage PTSD-like symptoms resulting from January 6^th. As it turns out, The Reckoning is not about January 6^th at all, but about America’s shameful history of slavery. Trump’s argument is that the rift created by slavery never healed after the Civil War, and we are still experiencing the fallout from it.

Trump knows her history—which is somewhat surprising since she is not an academic   historian—but she has obviously done her homework. She recounts the “deal” made in 1877—the first and only time Congress “decided” to award the Presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes following a disputed election. As part of the deal (known as the Compromise of 1877), Hayes agreed to withdraw all federal troops and oversight from former Confederate states. This allowed the still wealthy and powerful plantation class to “reclaim what they believed to be rightly theirs…white supremacist ideals and…a return to an economic system that depended on coerced and uncompensated labor.”  What followed were segregation, Jim Crow laws, and the criminalization of behaviors like vagrancy and loitering, which were subject to selective (i.e., racist) enforcement.

Native Americans and African slaves come from a multiplicity of tribes and cultures. These cultures were homogenized and “racialized” in the name of White unity. Theories of racial supremacy also had the practical effect of justifying the theft of land and labor that impoverished BIPOC populations—poverty which was then bootstrapped into “proof” of inferiority. Trump next gives a brief history of newer forms of “scientific” justification such as IQ measurements and eugenics. Although we often associate eugenics with Hitler, between 1909 and 1979, at least 20,000 people were forcibly sterilized under a California eugenics program (which was referenced by Hitler in his own plans).

Discrimination has never stopped. Trump cites the construction of highways which destroyed previously thriving Black neighborhoods.  The system commits “environmental terrorism” through the placement of toxic materials and activities in poor and Black neighborhoods. Dr. Robert Bullard, who is considered the founder of the environmental justice movement, coined the term “LULUs,” or locally unwanted land uses. Bullard (who is not mentioned in Trump’s book), has decades of publications under his belt, most of which address the racial and economic disparities in the toxicity of neighborhoods because the folks who live there don’t have the political capital and connections to City Hall to fight the placement of LULUs in their back yards. Trump corroborates: “26 percent of all Blacks and 28% of all minorities live within three miles of a Superfund site.”

Racism is more covertly operationalized today through law enforcement practices of “treating relatively minor offenses with previously unheard-of severity” when committed by certain types of persons in certain types of neighborhoods. So-called “broken windows” policing was popularized by Giuliani in 1997. Trump acknowledges that there is some logic behind the broken windows theory: A “well-ordered, intact physical environment can increase a child’s sense of safety and self-worth, which in turn can enhance learning.” Although the theory might have been sound, it was the logistics of enforcement that made it racialized—much harsher and more frequently directed toward neighborhoods that were poorer and Blacker. Trump also cites research on school suspensions showing that 97% of suspensions were discretionary, and Black students were 31% more likely to receive a discretionary suspension.

Trump next covers the “careful engineering” of segregation, which was “structured and enforced by increasingly Byzantine legal and performative measures that were expensive, disruptive, and humiliating to Blacks…” Most White people had no strong opinions about segregation, but it was deployed through a “wide array of government agencies.” The GI Bill, which created the post-WWII American middle class that was the envy of the world, allowed White families to buy homes with low-interest mortgages and receive college educations free from crushing debt. White families were able to build wealth and move up, but Black families were “robbed” of this opportunity.

Trump does not leave the Supreme Court unscathed by her analysis. By way of historical background, Trump describes how a Republican Congress reduced the court by two justices in 1866, fearful that Democrat Andrew Johnson would install justices sympathetic to the south. Ulysses Grant added the two justices back in 1869, and the Supreme Court has had nine justices ever since.

Between America’s founding and 1865, the Supreme Court had struck down only two laws as “unconstitutional.” However, 13 acts of Congress were struck down between 1865 and 1876, often on the argument that such laws “infringed upon states’ rights.” Almost from the beginning, the Court was more solicitous of southern states’ ability to continue racist practices than it was concerned about citizenship rights of newly freed slaves. Trump connects some of this “willful blindness” to modern cases involving affirmative action. She also joins many others in calling for a code of ethics to be applied to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s remarkable how often justices seem to be ignorant of the history of their own institution and blind to the behavior of their colleagues, but it has happened time and time again throughout our history; such ignorance and blindness among the justices appear to be part of the court’s history as well…There’s a growing recognition that the Supreme Court poses a danger to the health and well-being of the nation and even to democracy itself.”

Harder to discern is the connection between America’s racist history and the election of Trump’s uncle, Donald J. Trump (who hereafter will be referred to as DJT to avoid confusion).  Most of us know that DJT was able to successfully tap into White backlash (from the election of Barack Obama) and grievance in his rise to power. Trump has some interesting commentary about her uncle’s Presidential administration, but here the connection to racism becomes somewhat harder to follow.

Trump briefly covers some of the political gamesmanship during Vietnam and then moves into her uncle’s 2016 Presidential campaign. She blames the media for doing practically nothing to expose DJT’s ignorance of “the basic foundational document of the country he sought to lead” as well as basic civics. “Donald wasn’t just incompetent, laughable, and cruel—although he was all of those—he was actively laying the groundwork, through his rhetoric, his policies, and his perversion of democratic norms and institutions, for autocracy.”

Returning to post-Civil War history, Trump alleges that the United States Department of Justice was created in 1870 primarily to “protect freedmen and freedwomen from potential abuses after the Civil War,” Trump lays out how DJT attempted to control the DOJ to do his bidding—first through Jeff Sessions and then through the appointment of William Barr. Trump alleges Barr had “no interest in investigating claims of voter suppression,” and also “ignored the increasing threat of white supremacist domestic terrorism.”

Trump skewers the much-ballyhooed 2017 tax cuts, which essentially “gifted corporations with billions of dollars,” which were then used for stock buybacks (to increase shareholder wealth) and not for investments in businesses, jobs, and workers. Although there were suggestions that this was more the result of DJT’s “incompetence,” Trump alleges that there is “plenty of evidence that it was all done on purpose.”

DJT is next skewered for “maliciously willful ineptitude” in his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although, “in all likelihood, nobody could have prevented the pandemic from starting,” DJT was willing to sacrifice American lives on the altar of the almighty economy—which obviously also implicated his re-election prospects.

In May of 2020, DJT began replacing scientists at the CDC with cronies who were more willing to promote favorable propaganda, ordering all public data about the virus to be “rerouted” through HHS (which was now run by a crony), denying timely information to researchers and health officials who were trying to learn about the novel virus and respond to it. “Other public servants were harassed, threatened, and forced to resign just when we needed them most.”

After this interesting (but not surprising to most of us) political digression, Trump returns to her anti-racist arguments. “From the beginning, the goal for whites was the control not just of Black bodies but of Black agency.” Trump visits research which has found a connection between institutionalized racism and multigenerational trauma. “The field of epigenetics suggests that trauma can so profoundly affect our bodies that genetic markers are placed on our DNA.”

Toward the end of the book, Trump addresses the subject of her expertise—trauma—and its connection to racism. Trump discusses the research of Dr. Joy Degroy on “post-traumatic slave syndrome,” where descendants of slaves have been found to have high levels of stress, self-doubt, aggression and anger due to thwarted ambition and not being able to fully integrate into society.

Trump suggests that the following actions could have gone a long way toward healing the past trauma of slavery. Following the Civil War, the North should have made the South pay for the damage it had done to the nation by trying the leaders of the Confederacy as traitors. The North also should have done more to dedicate sufficient resources to help the newly freed slaves integrate into society and not caved to a deal in the interest of political expediency. More recently, the benefits of the New Deal and GI Bill—which helped to create the great American middle class between 1945 and 1975—should have been extended to Blacks.

Trump quotes Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative:  “…the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude and forced labor. The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it.” Which sounds a lot like the argument made about the Vietnam war in M. Scott Peck’s 1983 People of the Lie. The post-event denials and justifications are a greater “sin” than the bad act itself because they prevent people from true repentance and atonement—which means no one (neither perpetrators nor victims) ever really heals.

Here, Trump alludes to the trauma caused by DJT himself—his malicious bullying, his acts of stochastic terrorism, his callous disregard of public health during the pandemic (above and beyond his obvious incompetence). She also suggests that some of the trauma created by DJT could have been alleviated if Republican party leaders had found the cojones to condemn DJT’s “big lie,” and/or convicted DJT in the second impeachment.

“While it’s true that we snatched democracy from the jaws of autocracy, there is still a gun pointed at democracy’s head…the real damage…was done by the Republican Party’s failure to hold Donald accountable after his first impeachment.”

Trump excoriates Republicans like Jeff Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Mitch McConnell, who she alleges knew how “bad” DJT was for America, yet they continued to “enable and cover” for him.  “As much as Donald was a symptom of a long-worsening disease in the body of the Republican Party, one of his unique contributions was the laying bare of incivility. People like Cruz and Hawley were free to be as horrible publicly as they’ve always reportedly been privately.”

Trump makes the argument that “the two tenets that have shaped America: white supremacy and the infallibility of power” were behind the election of DJT. She parses DJT’s base into (1) unrepentant fascists and unreconstructed white supremacists like the Proud Boys, (2) the “low-information, knee-jerk Republicans,” who vote solely according to party affiliation (without regard to the merits of an actual candidate), (3) the “I’ve got mine” voters who are motivated solely by self-interest, and (4) single-issue voters who focus solely on abortion or tax breaks. In essence, type #1 actually wants a racist, misogynist autocrat, type #2 is indifferent, and types #3 and #4 can ignore the bad stuff so long as they get what they want.

In one of the more interesting parts of the book, Trump turns to her expertise to explain the thinking process and motivations of DJT’s supporters, as well as DJT’s methodology of controlling them. DJT is assisted by media outlets like Fox and Newsmax, which play on the base emotion of fear: fear of immigrants, crime (code for “Blacks”), demographic changes (White replacement), socialism, universal health care, etc. Fearful people are more susceptible to conspiracy theories and are also more likely to “vote against their own interests.”

DJT was able to stoke white grievance and rage, which “matched their belief in the delusion that is white supremacy….They don’t just tolerate the barbarity, they revel in it. And they were willing to murder the vice president of the United State to advance their white supremacist, antidemocratic agenda.”

Trump then introduces (from psychologist Robert Jay Lifton) the concept of “malignant normality.” She describes how DJT perpetrated a number of “microaggressions” against his own supporters, abandoning them in freezing rain or blistering heat, demanding that they pack into venues (often without masks) during the pandemic. As the base increasingly “begins to see their lives and culture through the lens of the person in power…their experience and understanding of the world become unmoored from reality and cohere around …a narrative that is both self-serving (to the leader) and destructive (to the followers).”

Trump says in 2020, “I knew we were going to be looking at a mental health crisis the likes of which this country would be woefully unprepared for, even at the best of times…Trauma can never be outrun, but it is a human impulse to try…Being trapped in the place which you’re being traumatized is its own version of hell.”

It is human nature to want to move on from trauma. “As soon as the dust clears, the people in power tell us everything is fine; there is no need to look back.” We are encouraged to “forget,” but this almost inevitably ensures that we will never heal. Trump analogizes this dynamic to public unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of war, professing the heroism of soldiers while refusing to listen to their stories.

“That kind of neglect or cultural interdiction against speaking about one’s traumatic experiences itself causes trauma. When people are gratuitously subjected to traumatizing experiences by the people who are responsible for public welfare and in a position to  mitigate the trauma, the “resulting sense of betrayal can feel similar to torture.”

“But if we want to heal, it’s important to resist calls to look to the future, not the past. The past is what shaped us. Trauma is enervating and it is entirely natural to want to move beyond it. But trauma changes us at the cellular level….The impact of unacknowledged trauma can be catastrophic—at both the personal and the societal levels……to dismiss your own pain is to postpone your freedom from it.”

Trump also argues the flip side of trauma, which is belittling or failing to acknowledge the importance of kindness. During four years of DJT, we were bombarded with “sociopathic” messages that our need for comfort and reassurance was a sign of weakness and unworthiness. “For four years the performative cruelty of the Trump administration and its message that we need to be tough and vindictive and punitive wore away at the fabric of our society.”

“The pandemic revealed the impact of decades worth of inequality and racism in the immense toll it’s taken on communities of color.” Although the “original sin” of slavery was not our fault, it remains our burden, and our continuing responsibility to examine and root out the failure of white supremacy. Because America has failed to grapple with the pain of its early history, we are, as a nation, perpetually divided and angry.

“Working class whites are victims of the system too. If you are white in America and feel you’ve been left behind and shut out of the prosperity afforded to others, it’s not because of Black people and immigrants. It’s because the politicians you continue to vote for stoke your bigotry and sense of grievance while exploiting your ignorance in order to keep you exactly where you are—disempowered, angry and fearful.”

“The United States engages in its own form of toxic positivity—a series of deep denials that perpetuates our two-tiered system, maintains double standards, and keeps our wounds from healing. This recurring urge to move on, this impatience with doing the hard work of atonement, of accountability, of tearing down the structures of oppression and rebuilding new ones that work for everybody, traps us in the same cycle of privilege and denial of privilege that keeps us separate, hostile, and suspicious.”

Trump’s main argument is that we end our denial of the collective trauma created by racism—whether it resulted in slavery, the forced migration of  Native Americans, or the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Trump recommends that we give up “unearned privilege and power” and acknowledge the fiction of white superiority. At the same time she also argues that “the problem with white privilege is that you can’t give it up even if you wanted to.”

Trump wrote The Reckoning at the same time a lot of anti-racism books were coming out following the murder of George Floyd. I would not place it in the category of an anti-racism “classic,” but Trump adds a unique perspective as the niece of the President who almost (or may actually end up doing) destroyed American democracy and what progress we have made in race relations over the past 100 years. She also adds her professional expertise on the effects of collective trauma. I would have liked to have more practical suggestions on how we go about healing—both as individuals who were traumatized specifically by DJT and as a nation traumatized by our history.