There are multitudes of reasons why so many are angry at President Trump. You can hear it on just about any liberal media outlet. Even some conservative television and print media sites are critical of his crazy start. I predicted his presidency would be riddled with errors—even potentially dangerous ones. His year-and-a-half campaign was revealing enough. In fact, my intention was to write an ongoing HuffPost piece cataloging a chronology of his missteps—and updating it each time he said or did something to demonstrate his buffoonery. Then it hit me that this updating and buffoonery would be so frequent that it would consume my time. Looking back, I was right—so I’m glad I didn’t do the piece. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with his mistakes and I already have a full-time job. But why should we be critical of Trump if so many of us expected this?
Displaced Aggression—Psychologists use the term displaced aggression to refer to “taking out one’s frustrations on some less threatening or more available target” (Ciccarelli and White). Similar, but slightly different is the Trump dynamic. If we elected him, shouldn’t our anger be directed to the voters? Trump is a “more available target” than the voters are. It’s true that Trump didn’t win the popular vote, but the fact that he could even “eek out” an electoral victory is mind-boggling. It appears to me that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Electing Trump tells us more about ourselves than it does him.
Lack of Critical Thinking—So what’s the root cause of electing Donald Trump as President of the United States? Our voting system is fair, but that doesn’t mean the voters possess the critical thinking skills necessary to make wise voting choices. Some critical thinking textbooks like to use “just because” exercises (How to Think About Weird Things by Schick and Vaughn) to illustrate the point. For example, just because you hear a noise outside your house doesn’t mean it’s a good reason to conclude it’s a would-be intruder. Similarly:
- Just because Trump is a billionaire businessman, doesn’t mean he will fix the economy.
- Just because Trump was a reality TV star is not a good reason to vote for him.
- Just because Trump is has name recognition, doesn’t mean he will be a good President.
By the way, just because someone writes a critical article surrounding President Trump, doesn’t mean the author is a Democrat. It would be easy to make this erroneous assumption. I’m not a Republican either (in this day and age, I don’t see the sensibility in aligning with either extreme party). I’m registered as an Independent. So I’m not “anti-Republican”—I’m anti-buffoon. So be clear that this is not an article in support of Hilary Clinton. Just as Trump is a buffoon, so too is Hilary corrupt. Therefore evidence for our lack of critical thinking skills exists on both sides. There are self-serving, narcissistic people (like Trump) all over the U.S., and there are corrupt people (like Clinton) all over the U.S. - but the fact that we hoisted Trump and Clinton to the top of their respective parties, again, tells us more about us than it does them. Bernie Sanders was right there for us—and we passed on him. Sixteen other Republican candidates were right there for us—and we passed on them. I’ll give the voters a pass on Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson since he didn’t know what Allepo was. That was a deal-killer for me as well (but I like him).
Having said all this, Trump is a talented person. I’m hoping he can muster a successful presidency.
But—careful what we wish for. We think Trump’s presidential missteps are his fault? I don’t think so.
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[Dr. Bryan Farha, Professor, is editor of the critical thinking text, Pseudoscience and Deception: The Smoke and Mirrors of Paranormal Claims. He is also the author of the critical thinking website, PARANORMALinquest.net]
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