As Trump returns to power and to an office in which - sometimes - he is held accountable for his actions, he’s quickly becoming frustrated.
We know, from past experience, that that’s not good.
I don’t see the President through the eyes of a psychiatrist or therapist because I’m not one. I can only guess what they see as they observe him.
I see President Trump through the eyes of a slightly more crotchety, much more imperious, and hopefully much, much more emotionally immature fictional iteration of myself - a version of myself that I could have allowed myself to become, which is to say (confess may be the better word) he is far more relatable than I’d like to admit.
This horrid Trump-adjacent version of myself is not so distant that it’s beyond my imagination or understanding.
“The world would be a much better and far safer place all around if even just 20% more men had the vocabulary needed to describe their feelings and could express them in words to someone else.”
When I watched the side-by-side stream of his reaction to the words of Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde during Tuesday’s Service of National Prayer, I could almost feel what he seemed to be feeling as she called him to behave as President consistent with the threshold, bare bones level of humanity and decency we expect of anyone who’s not a sociopath.
“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country. We’re scared now. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.” - Excerpt from the Sermon, delivered by Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, during the National Service of Prayer for the Nation, January 22, 2025.
Hearing her words while watching Trump get restless, I thought of the car ride with my daughter, visiting from out of town, to the Christmas Eve service at our new church home in Louisville. I was offering a commentary on the traffic signal timing and, later, my frustration with a vehicle ahead of me, prompting her to remind me of things I know quite well, thank you, without being reminded that intersections need to account for pedestrian traffic and other vehicles are allowed to turn in directions that I don’t anticipate them turning.
To my ears it felt like a ten minute lecture delivered over a six minute car ride (that - between us - should have been four minutes, if the traffic signals and other drivers were optimized for me).
I know better. I could do better. I heard words that I fully understood but they hit hard because hearing someone else say those words to me felt like my intelligence was being insulted.
“I know all of that!” I might have screeched.
“Do you think I don’t know all of these things you’re saying?” I might have lashed out.
And, to be clear, I fully understood in that moment that she had observed and listened to me before drawing the reasonable conclusion that I did not have any clue about the things she was saying about cities being designed for vehicles as if people are not the top priority of planners.
I felt frustrated that she didn’t know me better.
I felt ashamed that my actions had given her reasons to think I didn’t know better.
I also felt hurried to get to the worship service, and I realized that I had let that stressor wrestle away my better self such that my time sensitivity was driving my choices and maybe even my car.
“We end up vomiting violence, rage, and anger over not being equipped to process what we feel.”
I heard her out because nothing she said was wrong. Nor was she wrong to say it, even though I knew that I have long known all about what she was saying.
There have been times where I behaved worse than I did this past Christmas Eve, where I did screech and felt wronged by her reasonable assessments of my outward expressions and actions. Those are the times where I feel like my emotional maturity skewed closer to Trump than I plan to get into here. My point here is not so much that I feel as though I know Trump because I was once like him, so much as it’s that I’m not at all like him and I understand, from personal experience, some of what goes into being less like him when I stood at the crossroads where I could have easily become more like him.
A good bit of this self-awareness of the bullet that I dodged, I believe, is my tardy development of a vocabulary about my own feelings. Coming to this late in life, I may appreciate just how much power this holds better than most.
It could transform everything.
I firmly believe the world would be a much better and far safer place all around if even just 20% more men had the vocabulary needed to describe their feelings and could express them in words to someone else.
I am 100% serious.
We have many crises to confront right now. One of them is a crisis of a vocabulary deficit related to the full sweep of human emotions.
I think of this a lot. I could point to any number of news stories to go along with this thought.
I could confess any number of my own transgressions to go along with this thought.
If we could just be better at naming how we feel, we'd probably do a better job of figuring out what to do with those feelings. Instead, we don't know what to do with what we don't understand so - frustrated by all of this unknown stuff roiling somewhere within us - wherever we’ve tried to shove it and cram it inside as if we can keep compacting our trash to get rid of it, we end up vomiting violence, rage, and anger over not being equipped to process what we feel.
We reach inside our emotions trash compactor, grab the first primal impulse we gather up, and throw it out into the void for others to deal with.
This plan of action is bad enough for me to rely on as a husband, a father, a co-worker or neighbor, but it gets geometrically worse - for all of us - when that’s how world leaders roll.
While a discomfited Trump, perturbed that his post-inaugural photo op would be desecrated by his own name in the mouth of an Episcopal bishop, and outraged that the Bishop should summon him - and not just God1 - to be merciful, is hardly alone among powerful leaders who are poorly equipped to name (setting aside his capacity to actually wrestle and reckon with) his emotions, this deficit in someone of his rank and station in life is the inevitable manifestation of an endemic emotional vocabulary deficit that is particularly hard-hitting among boys and men in America.
We could focus on the lies, the incompetency, the gas-lighting, and even the cruelty that Trump and his handlers are laying bare for our nation and even the world, but I cannot ignore how so much of the harm that is flowing from all of this has, at its roots, a vocabulary deficit that blocks the paths to alternative courses of action - and alternative courses of human history.
This deficit is not something that gets fixed in Trump alone and gets resolved simple simon.
Even if President Trump were to seek counseling this evening and work earnestly to develop some basic emotional maturity that’s befitting of the president of a homeowner’s association, the trouble with this vocabulary deficit rests with a general population that is similarly afflicted, making the nation easily incited to violence, fearful of implicitly admitting to its own inadequacies should we try to do better, hyper-defensive about its consuming ignorance, and intractably fixated on the first, most primal reactions that come to mind as solutions to our most complex problems.
Ultimately, this deficit begins with how we raise our children.
Far-right, Christian Nationalist fringe groups, like Moms for Liberty, are fighting Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and they curiously object to children becoming adept at “empathy.” Parents who themselves have been deprived of emotional vocabulary are not likely to be the teachers that children can depend on to develop that vocabulary.
Groups that depend on sound bytes and calls to action that are fueled by primal reactions are going to resist efforts to promote a more complex emotional vocabulary that will shift votes away from a form of populism that is highly reactive to fear-mongering and animated by a sense of shame that’s “resolved” with violence and vengeance.
We need to stop them because their opposition to personal growth makes me so farkin’ furious I just want to go berserk.
Bishop Budde’s Opening Acclamation for the Service of Prayer for the Nation (page 4) began with the words “O God, be merciful to us and bless us,” which means her sermon was later calling Trump to do nothing less than what she had dared to ask of God minutes before; yet, in the eyes of all too many people, it was somehow more presumptuous of her, in her pulpit, to seek mercifulness from a man.