How Donald Trump broke the American mind
President Donald Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom is classic Trumpian theater — grandiose destruction packaged as vision. But the stories of the institutions, buildings and legacies that Trump and his team have destroyed aren’t the most disturbing threats our nation faces. What’s truly at risk of collapsing is the country’s cognitive infrastructure.
The real wreckage of Trumpism isn’t political chaos or partisan decay — it’s the slow demolition of the American mind.
Opposition depends not only on organized protests, but on the collective capacity to think through the crisis. Despots, knowing this, endeavor to do everything in their power to shut down our ability to think outside of their established narratives.
The success of any autocrat lies in their ability to mesmerize their supporters and mentally paralyze the resistance. Opposition depends not only on organized protests, but on the collective capacity to think through the crisis. Despots, knowing this, endeavor to do everything in their power to shut down our ability to think outside of their established narratives.
This means that, while turnout for the “No Kings” protests is cause for optimism, effective resistance will require more than clever signs and animated crowds. It will demand careful attention to the cognitive toll of living under an absurd autocracy that claims to defend democracy while simultaneously dismantling it. How can the collective consciousness of pro-democracy Americans withstand the mental assault of Trumpism?
The first step is to understand how these attacks on critical thinking take place.
Trump’s assault on the American mind operates on five fronts, with each one designed to distort perception, drain attention and degrade the nation’s collective reasoning. While it can be easy to think that these are simply incidental habits or stylistic quirks, it is critical to note that they are strategic modes of cognitive domination and they have been on display since well before Trump began his first term as President.
The culture of lies
Feel tired of making sense of Trump’s lies? If that resonates, it’s because mentally processing constant lying wears you down and, over time, becomes hard to resist.
Trump’s politics depend on what psychologists call cognitive overload. He lies so relentlessly that even his detractors become mentally fatigued as the brain’s basic truth-tracking mechanisms begin to short-circuit. Research by psychologists Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand shows that repeated exposure to falsehoods erodes the brain’s resistance: The more often we hear a claim — true or false — the more familiar, and thus believable, it feels.
Consider one of Trump’s repeated falsehoods: That his tariffs on China brought in “billions and billions” of dollars in revenue. Fact-checkers have debunked it hundreds of times, pointing out that tariffs were largely paid by U.S. consumers, not China. Yet repeated lies often become the message. The cognitive labor of constant rebuttal — the fatigue of knowing and re-knowing the same facts — slowly wears down public reasoning.
The real cognitive toll, though, comes in the exhaustion the mind suffers in the constant rebuttal of falsehoods. Each day the administration saturates the public sphere with a constant litany of lies. Psychologists have proven that processing a culture of lies results in cognitive fatigue.
The faulty logic
If Trump’s lies weaken truth, even greater damage is done to our capacity to use reason to make sense of information.
Trumpian rhetoric relies on a rotating arsenal of cognitive traps: Whataboutism to deflect, false equivalence to confuse, red herrings to distract and gaslighting to exhaust. In fact, the Trump administration offers a constant lesson in all of the most common flaws in logical reasoning.
For example, when it emerged that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth discussed classified U.S. military operations using the encrypted messaging application Signal, the faulty logic of the administration was on full display. The same administration that once led chants of “Lock her up!” over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server now dismissed the breach as “no big deal” and a “witch hunt.”
It isn’t just that the Trump team offers an incessant flood of faulty logic. They also create an environment that makes thinking critically exceptionally difficult. As cognitive scientists Keith Stanovich and Richard West have shown, humans possess two systems of thought: One fast and emotional, the other slow and deliberative. Trump keeps the public in the first mode — triggered, reactive, impulsive. Under Trump, critical reasoning collapses from emotional overload.
The threat, then, isn’t just misinformation; it’s misreasoning.
The misrepresentation of opponents
Trump doesn’t argue with opponents; he distorts them. Former President Joe Biden becomes “Crooked Joe.” Journalists become “enemies of the people.” Any prosecutor investigating him is “deranged” or “corrupt.” The point isn’t persuasion — it’s reframing identity. Once the label sticks, the opponent gets mired in defending themselves from the attack, leaving the control of the narrative entirely in Trump’s hands.
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As I have written for Salon, Trump doesn’t just reduce opponents to absurd caricatures; he also creates false versions of their positions, a tactic that destroys the conditions for reasoned debate. By misrepresenting the views of his opponents, Trumpism forces them into a cognitive trap: They get stuck refuting the way they have been misrepresented rather than advancing their ideas.
For those of us watching these manufactured debates, our minds get distracted by the back-and-forth between misrepresentation and defense. The result is that we can risk losing sight of the real issues we need to follow to effectively defend our democracy.
The barrage of spectacle
Trump and his team don’t just lie, twist logic and misrepresent their opponents — they never stop. The chaos is not incidental; it’s the method.
Long before his career in politics, Trump perfected the performance of power and honed his skills at becoming an ongoing source of attention. As Guy Debord warned in “The Society of the Spectacle,” when social life becomes mediated by images, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Trump is that principle embodied. From “The Apprentice” to Truth Social to his daily barrage of inane memes, Trump has turned politics into a show — collapsing governance into entertainment and politics into virality.
Processing an ongoing spectacle simply fries your brain. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains that constant novelty and interruption deplete the brain’s executive functions — the very ones essential for critical thinking and judgment.
The swagger of impunity
If Trump’s lies corrode truth and critical thinking while his spectacle exhausts the mind, it is his swagger of impunity that leaves us in shock. Every smirk that follows a scandal, every boast of getting away with it, threatens to rewire the public’s moral compass.
From claiming that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and [not] lose any voters” to watching his administration violate one norm, regulation and protocol after another, Trump and his team don’t just brag about breaking rules, they get away with it.
Hannah Arendt warned in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that when the absurd becomes normal, thinking itself collapses. Trump’s defiance of norms, laws and political consequences boggles the mind. His followers see his shameless disregard for the law as proof of strength, not guilt. Yet, his critics reel from a growing numbness. Each unpunished act dulls outrage until the mind struggles to believe in effective guardrails to democracy.
If you’ve found yourself burnt out, exhausted, confused, dejected and dismayed as you process the daily onslaught of the Trumpian team, you now know why. And while it might be tempting to allow awareness of these authoritarian tactics to sow depression, that would be playing right into Trump’s hands.
Understanding the power of authoritarian confusion must breed clarity, not despair. The more we grasp how Trumpism corrodes thought, the better equipped we are to defend it — because the fight for democracy always begins in the mind.
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