Let us name this feeling: Trump’s presidency was trauma

For the last five years, Donald Trump has lived in my body.

He moved in during the debates, when he stalked behind Hillary Clinton, giving off the scent of rape culture. My body flinched at the sight. That moment alone should have forfeited his ascendency, yet it quickly became absorbed, normalized and even celebrated in an ongoing pattern of disorder.

I felt him — his recklessness, his indecency — in my neck and forehead, a low pulsing, like a heavy key played, over and over, on some dark organ.

Mainly, he lived in my chest.

During his presidency, there was a chronic tightness, a silvery, watery fear that turned me both hypersensitive and numb. These feelings — helplessness, grief, confusion — were nearly always centered in the middle of my chest.

In the middle of me. Since his campaign, many of us have carried in our bodies alternating currents of fear-anger, which is why, Wednesday morning at 11:49, as Joe Biden’s hand touched down on that large family Bible, our bodies changed. They became lighter. Our chests opened. The dark organ paused. Kamala Harris’s smile alone was enough, yet there was a long parade of micro-healings: a generous Garth Brooks, graceful Amy Klobuchar, stately Roy Blunt, soaring Lady Gaga and — best for last — unforgettable Amanda Gorman.

That morning, many of us became deeply emotional. Ordinary Chattanoogans cried in relief. Conservative columnist David Brooks admitted on PBS that he, too, nearly wept.

“I broke down sobbing,” one well-known conservative Christian told Peter Wehner in the New York Times. “It’s been a long five-and-a-half years. “

“I never thought I would be moved to tears watching a Democratic president get sworn in, but I was,” one Presbyterian minister told Wehner. “It just felt so good to hear someone who understands and loves this country and Constitution, and is an honorable person, take the oath.”

These are not die-hard Biden fans, but Americans who’ve been living with the black flies of chronic stress for five of the longest years. This feeling has a name. It is called trauma. Donald Trump’s presidency was traumatic.

Donald Trump’s presidency during a pandemic was traumatic.

Donald Trump’s presidency during a pandemic while he encouraged white supremacists and Christian nationalists to overthrow the Capitol interrupting the peaceful transfer of power was traumatic.

What is trauma?

Ask your body. “Trauma always happens in the body,” writes Resmaa Menakem. “It is a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further [or future] potential damage.”

Menakem’s book “My Grandmother’s Hands” has been a North Star for me understanding trauma, especially as a white man. (More on this in future columns).

“Trauma is the body’s protective response to an event — or a series of events that it perceives as potentially dangerous,” he writes.

If we can descend from our thinking minds into our bodies — going from upstairs to downstairs, as my meditation teacher puts it — what would we find?

How did your body experience Trump’s presidency?

How did your body experience the Capitol insurrection?

How has your body experienced the pandemic?

What would happen in our city if we were able to name and acknowledge our trauma?

Trauma is deeply personal yet also universal. The story of an Asian-American veteran’s trauma is different than a Black activist’s or white single father’s, yet all trauma is bound together by a shared felt experience of fear or overwhelming.

I saw my own chronic fears, often new to me, were normalized to others. For some, the organ only changes tune.

How did the female body experience the Trump presidency? The gay body? The Black or brown or Jewish or Muslim body?

“Welcome,” one friend said recently. “This is how we feel every day.”

I think of first responders. Of police officers, teachers, evicted families, even the trauma of the far-right and Trump himself, whose early life — portrayed in his niece Mary Trump’s biography “Too Much and Never Enough” — was vastly cruel.

“Love meant nothing to him,” she wrote of Trump’s father. “He expected obedience, that was all.”

I do not rejoice over such suffering. Trauma often begets trauma; I wonder all that might be different had Trump’s own trauma been interrupted, if his own chest was open and spacious, his organ playing some other song.