There’s one simple answer to why Donald Trump acts like that | Opinion

Our country’s current system of governance is one of a reality show, rather than an administration. To understand this production, we must understand what the lead actor understands. Donald Trump is running the presidency like a reality TV script. One consistent priority in reality TV is contention and conflict. If there is no conflict, the audience loses attention. Our lead actor craves attention, and thus must create conflict to keep us watching.

Conflict engages the audience’s emotions. The emotions that create the strongest engagement are anger and hate, which are responses to fear. Fear is deeply rooted in our brain’s amygdala. Our amygdala evolved as a strong fight or flight response, because it was necessary for our survival in a dangerous world. Anger and hate require an object or stimulus to fear. If an object is not organically available, Trump creates one. It is important to the lead actor to control the fear messaging. He has to fabricate a fear that he claims will threaten your survival so that you will become angry and engaged in his narrative (or delusions).

Constant reinforcement of fear messaging creates radicalization. This outcome was on display recently in Kansas City at the World War I Museum and Memorial, where a uniformed white supremacist group marched and expounded hate and anger speech.

Understand that anger and hate are rooted in fear. In this case, the fear is of any person that doesn’t look like them: white Caucasian. If people can be convinced to get angry and hate by a fabricated fear, then they have been radicalized. Radicalization leads to extreme views, which results in extreme actions. We witnessed this on Sept. 11, 2001, just as we did and on Jan. 6, 2021.

The bottom line is the audience of Trump’s reality script subscribes to his fabricated contention and conflict, which in fact has no basis in reality. Immigrants are not criminals, rapists and murders released from prisons and mental institutions. Researchers such as Jacob Stowell, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, have found that undocumented immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than natural-born citizens.

A reality show script dictates that the fear must be maintained, whether facts support the narrative or not. Reality TV also requires constant upping the ante in order to maintain and increase the viewing audience. In our present script, this is done by building perceptions about the imagined enemies through stereotyping and false narratives. Facts don’t matter once emotion has been triggered and the brain’s amygdala has been engaged. The amygdala responds to threat, perceived or factual. Fear, hate and anger can be trained, but they always require an object or enemy (such as immigrants).

The training continues with the “America first” slogan, which can be translated as “America against the world.” Again, another perceived enemy is created — the rest of the world. The more triggers and enemies that are created, the more the amygdala is engaged. That engagement leads to a stronger survival response, which increases the potential for radicalization. So given the expansion of enemies, the script must be closely guarded and not contrasted with factual evidence.

If we can reframe the contentious reality script, we can change the paradigm from competitive to cooperative. Evolutionarily speaking, our species is a herding species and not predatory. We do better when everyone is a resource and not a competitor. We do not do well breaking our interactions down to winners and losers. The more people that thrive the more we all thrive. History has shown time and again that we are the victims of the casualties we create.

Reframing the narrative should involve changing “America first” to “global partnering,” and immigrants should be recast as our workforce. Florida recently moved to lower the working age for children because of the loss of its immigrant workers. That would be sacrificing our children to our fear of immigrants. The U.S. sees lower unemployment rates when there is more immigration. Americans do not lose jobs to immigration.

We are not conservative or liberals, or Republicans or Democrats. We are Americans, and we are all resources to further the United States as a global partner. We the people invite all nations to join us, optimizing our human resources to improve the quality of life for everyone.