Trump’s administration has indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James on alleged mortgage fraud after she successfully convicted him of 34 felonies; pounded late-night comedians who mock him; and yanked billions of contractually obligated dollars from “woke” (as opposed to sleeping or dead) universities and states—money approved by Congress, which was granted that funding power by the U.S. Constitution. In addition, the stuck-in-adolescence, name-calling Trump has so very unpresidentially lashed his foes as “scum,” “losers,” “Satan,” “phony,” “dopey,” “fucking negative,” “vermin,” and “crazy”—and lobbed taunts at women like “nasty,” “horseface,” “slob,” “fat pig,” and “dog.”
This weekend’s protests were inspiring—that they inspired this grotesque reaction from Trump could count as a measure of success. But there is still much work to be done. It remains to be seen if the teeming masses can dent the president’s power—or shake more people from the torpor of the daily news to propel them into a sustained new activism. It’s here at the apex of our exultation that we should pause, take stock, and stay on our guard, because one of the biggest enemies of the sustained momentum the anti-Trump movement needs, it turns out, is human nature.
The researchers who study human behavior are not startled by these reactions. They have warned for decades that our canny adaptability and survival instincts—our species’ special drive to keep on keeping on, persisting through drought, pestilence, famine, warfare, and holocaust, is celebrated. But those same instincts can betray us—and threaten to lead us off a cliff.
But eight years ago, it was Knobe sounding an alarm at the start of Trump’s first administration. In a New York Times op-ed, Knobe cautioned readers of Trump’s ability to catch us up in a “normalization trap” as the president’s relentlessly outrageous pronouncements and policies—often parroted uncritically by the media—begin to sound less and less shocking.
Humans tend to conflate their sense of what is typical with their sense of what is “ideal,” cautioned Knobe and Bear. People “might sometimes be able to separate out the average from the ideal, but they more often make use of a kind of reasoning that blends the two together into a single undifferentiated judgment of normality,” the researchers discovered.
Kahneman once described the 2016 presidential campaign as “unbelievable,” as well as an astounding opportunity to study human judgment.
Kahneman warned then that the human brain “and our impulses” haven’t changed in the last century, presenting risks. “Our intrinsic makeup hasn’t improved, and we’re still vulnerable,” he warned.
While “normalization” of deviance may be the most powerful, and insidious, manner of steering a nation off his cliff, Trump has also utilized more obvious and familiar strategies in his battles against thought. Borrowing a familiar political playbook from our earlier ominous history, Trump has relentlessly vilified an “out group” as scapegoats for all the evils of the world while cultivating a separate supportive clique of “in-crowd” humans who imagine themselves both special and put-upon.
Trump also often delivers his warnings with a visceral appeal to our primitive minds by “displaying” in a manner similar to our ape ancestors, primatologist Jane Goodall noted in a 2022 MSNBC interview. Goodall said Trump exhibited “the same sort of behavior as a male chimpanzee will show when he’s competing for dominance with another. They’re upright, they swagger, they project themselves as really more large and aggressive than they may actually be in order to intimidate their rivals,” she said. (Goodall, who died earlier this month, said in a posthumously released interview that she wanted to rocket Trump—and Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin—into outer space, for good.)
The proximate cause of the disaster stemmed from NASA’s critical employees turning their backs on their own safety standards in an insidious example of organizational groupthink, Vaughan noted in her 1996 book, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA. That study has since been cited as a warning for the current political era.
Social “normalization of deviance means that people within an organization become so much accustomed to a deviant behavior that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety,” Vaughan warned in a 2008 interview. A “common pattern” of organizations that slip into “deviance” includes a “long incubation period filled with early warning signs that were either missed or misinterpreted or ignored,” she added.
Here, Knobe cautions against knee-jerk pessimism. While daily events may seem overwhelming—or even enraging—the future is constantly being forged. Knobe emphasizes that humans have made tremendous strides in history, but often over decades—Trump’s may simply be an incendiary presidential administration that’s ultimately a feeble blip in time. He points to revolutionary changes in our perspectives on issues like racism, sexual harassment—and slavery. While these sensibilities are under constant attack, they’ve proven to be enduring values, not easily erased.
He warns that emphasizing polarization and the negativity of the current political landscape could have a backlash, just as Trump’s repeated evocation of a pending apocalypse could actually bring about the violence about which he warns, given the way the human mind works. Knobe points out research that college campaigns to reduce student drinking by emphasizing the problem may have triggered an increase in drinking. Better, he said, to emphasize the number of students not drinking or, in politics, what large numbers of Republicans have traditionally believed in the past to make them appear more recognizable and less oppositional.
“Something dramatic has happened,” Reich said onstage at the University of California-Berkeley after a showing of The Last Class, a documentary about his career in public service and as a university professor. “Something has come out into the open that [makes] a lot of people who are on the edge, a lot of independents, a lot of people who really don’t know their politics … a little bit afraid.… And they’re saying, ‘What, the Texas National Guard is coming into Chicago over the objections of the mayor and the governor of Illinois, and they are coming in there and they are doing what? And the president is saying what?’”
Reich argued that the optics of Trump’s policies are so “awful” that they’ll “activate” Americans, the newspaper noted. They “enable people to see something that is not just political,” he said. “It’s not right versus left, it is not Democrats versus Republicans,” Reich added. “It’s fundamental: democracy versus fascism.”
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