Being around people with mental problems is a disorienting, anxiety-producing encounter that often leaves witnesses to mental instability, anxiety, and anger for weeks.
This is what’s happening to Americans who are constantly bombarded by Trump’s apparent mental breaks on national media as he says illogical, fantasy-laden descriptions of unconnected events in public speeches and interviews.
This is a source of a higher level of national anxiety, and it may also be an unintentional strategy that’s part of Trump’s political persona. It keeps his followers close while raising their anger and hatred levels. This helps explain why Trump followers threaten officials who disagree or threaten Trump’s control over them. Trump is the anxiety source that perversely keeps them going.
A study by the American Psychiatric Association found that anxiety among Americans rose from 37% to 43% in 2024, and almost three-quarters (73%) said the election was the main factor for their higher anxiety. The American Psychological Association found similar psychic disruptions in which “close to half of U.S. adults say politics is a significant source of stress, citing problems such as lost sleep, shortened tempers, and obsessive thoughts.”
Rising anxiety tied to the current volatile political environment causes workplace conflicts, lost time, lower morale, and broken relationships. This has been a hallmark of Trump’s political career, making him a national and polarizing symbol now part of his brand. If you want divisiveness in any social setting today, mention Trump and his politics compared to what the Democratic candidate offers.
Psychiatrists cannot diagnose Trump because professional ethics require any clinical evaluation to be done in person. Patient confidentiality also prevents those results from being made public.
Trump’s Mental Illness is Part of His Brand
Still, being around someone with mental problems and irrational statements is disorienting and traumatic, even if that encounter is made via cable TV, social media, or at a Trump rally. This can include emotions such as anxiety, anger, frustration, or sadness, as well as feelings of being overwhelmed, grief and loss, and being fearful of the future. Trump’s key message is built on being afraid of the future. This is why his dystopian rants, ranging from immigrants eating cats and dogs to alerts that rapists and terrorists on massing along the Mexican border, just fuel more anxiety in what his original mental illness spawned in the first place.
This makes Trump an anxiety-producing machine that exactly fits his political message. In Trump’s perverse mind, he says, “The anxiety that you, the voters, feel is real because I am causing it. Now, because you have this searing anxiety, I am the only person who can rid you of this feeling if you vote for me. I am your healer and Messiah since I can eliminate the anxiety if elected.”
His irrationality, anti-social, and criminal behavior add to his anxiety-raising abilities, just like watching someone who is foaming at the mouth and walking around a shopping mall. But he gets away with it at his rallies, as his followers revel or never hear the lies and irrationality. Ignoring this reality creates its alternative reality, bolstered when these like-minded people share their conspiracy theories and political fantasies.
Trump’s mental illness also sends out psychic signals to others who are mentally unstable. This includes people who operate on the fringes of society and want to be stimulated by more fantasies and the dopamine of anxiety. This includes people from QAnon, white-Christinan nationalists, religious fanatics, and even would-be assassins.
What Trump fails to tell his voters is that if he is re-elected, he will unleash a new level of terror and high anxiety as he rounds up immigrants in cities, uses federal police to replace city police, and implements Project 2025, which is a version of fascism.
This is anxiety on steroids, and it is how Trump controls his MAGA crowd.
To Trump, anxiety is good. Anxiety destabilizes individuals and the electorate, and if he can raise the anxiety level through public displays of his mental illness, it only benefits his campaign at the expense of his MAGA followers. To see mental illness on display, tune into a Trump rally or interview. Did men go to the moon? Is the earth flat? Can vaccines control pandemics? Do doctors know medicine and lawyers the law? To Trump followers, all of these are open to debate.
It’s diabolical, but Trump’s actual mental illness is an integral part of his political persona. It’s how he captures and controls his followers.
