Trump’s Victory Feels Like a Diagnosis

Opinion|I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now.

For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future.

As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is forgetful. She misplaces things all the time. It would turn up, I was sure.

When I woke up the morning after Donald Trump had been swept back to the presidency by a slim but decisive margin, I was seized by a sudden, cold panic with the thought ‘Where is Mom’s passport?’ What if Trump’s administration made good on its deportation promises and she suddenly needed to prove that she is, indeed, a naturalized citizen of this country? Did my frail, 73-year-old mother have her papers in order should the knock come on her door?

This feeling caught me completely by surprise, much more so than Trump’s victory, which, after all, was a very likely possibility. I am not given to panic. I think catastrophic thinking is almost always overblown. Panic and alarm: These are feelings that a lifetime of observing the world from a sanguine, journalistic remove, always taking the long view, had taught me to extinguish the moment they flared. What good can come from such strong emotion?

After all, we’ve been here before, haven’t we? Trump was president once before, and even though he managed to enact a great deal of cruelty and bungle a pandemic, most of us survived, didn’t we? He was never that popular with voters, but even an uninspiring candidate like Joe Biden managed to defeat him soundly at the ballot box.

Yet as I’ve tried to summon that sanguine self over the past two weeks, she has stubbornly refused to show up. I have a sense that many other people are feeling similarly abandoned by their more resilient selves, instead finding a new, excruciating sense of vulnerability. The sensation has only deepened as Trump’s preposterous cabinet announcements have rolled out and his cruel policy plans for grotesque campaigns of deportation, vengeful prosecution and heedless budget slashing come into view. Despite myself, I am panicking.