The Gaslighting of Elizabeth Warren  By Stephen Wise

What is Gaslighting? How is it used by Trump?

A Huffington Post headline reads: “Trump Resurrects ‘Pocahontas’ Dig Against Elizabeth Warren.” Is this really happening?  Since when does a sitting President slur a U.S. Senator with nothing to provoke it? (Warren was just minding her own business that day.  She was busy calling out people who had lied to the U.S. Senate.)

Trump was pursuing a strategy called “gaslighting,” so-named after the 1944 movie "Gaslight" with Ingrid Bergman. This movie is about a husband who controls his wife emotionally by manipulating gaslights and other events to make her doubt her sanity.  It is not until the story’s hero validates her reality that she recovers her sanity and breaks off the abusive relationship.

Gaslighting is "withholding factual information from, and/or providing false information to, the victim - having the gradual effect of making them anxious, confused, and less able to trust their own memory and perception.” (Urbandictionary.com)

Trump’s comments that bully others and disregard evident facts, combined with the authority of his office, are enough to make us question our sanity and make us think we are crazy when our worldview conflicts with his alt-reality.  It seems to be working, people are accepting his idiocy (privately-held worldview) and doubting what they previously took as self-evident.  (“Idiot” comes from the Greek word idios meaning private.  If our view of the world is private, not shared by others, we could literally go crazy, or at the least "feel like an idiot.") 

Alternative realities created by Trump and validated by Republicans make us think that we are idiots, that our beliefs are private and unreal.  The "shock and awe" of the executive order rollout created a disorienting gaslight effect.  Eventually we are gaslighted- either going insane (you have to see the movie) or being assimilated into the “Borg” of an alt-reality collective consciousness. We could instead fight for what is real for ourselves and others, as Sen. Warren did in last week’s Senate hearings. Her persistence, despite McConnell's wrath, shows us what to do when we are gaslighted. Her courageous stand validates the worldview of those who don’t live in alt-reality.

Debate in a Gas-lit Alt-universe

The alt-reality that Trump operates in assumes that alt-facts and gerrymandered reasoning are normal and desirable and that language is only meant to express personal fiction that can be changed at will.  (As opposed to language pointing to something that exists apart from our own private reality).  Kellyanne Conway is the poster girl for alt-speak, a dialect of double-speak.

Debate (and thus peaceful resolution of issues) is impossible in this alt-reality.  We are already seeing how rational people like Warren are shut down in debate because their words aren't taken as evidence to be measured against reality but, as in Warren’s case, become merely the stimuli for McConnell's subjective (private) experience of insult.

Trumpians like McConnell see Warren as way out in left field because they live in the irrational gas-lit alt-universe that has become the political center.  Under the gaslight of this alt-reality, facts, reasons, and rational debate appear strange and threatening, particularly coming from a well-educated woman marshaling evidence with a commanding intellectual authority. Senator Warren literally threatens their sanity.  They must stop her from speaking or at least stop us from listening to her.  (She tortures their alt-reality sensibility almost as much as Obama tortured them for 8 years just by being an unflappably rational Black man.)

If Trumpians don’t get others to collude with their private reality, they will also lose their sanity. This gives them a compelling personal interest in rejecting any truth that exists outside their private reality. They can’t be reasoned with.  Debate then being impossible, only might makes right.  And so our law-based democracy became a totalitarian autocracy in spirit while keeping the structures of democracy. (Already in the last 8 years we hardly functioned as a democracy due to Republicans' determination to annul Obama's presidency by not playing their part in government.)

Coming out of the Gaslight

It's not just your imagination, Trump really is playing with our minds, bullying us like the husband did in "Gaslight."  One example of this is that we are beginning to doubt our expectation that politicians respect facts, and this is leading to our acceptance of alt-facts.  Gaslighting is difficult to resist because it attacks our core senses of self and reality.  This leads to discouragement, confusion, feeling disenfranchised, and consequent low voter turnout among those who still resist the alt-reality.  The gaslighting effect grows in the shadows.  We must be armed with full awareness of the gaslighting as we intentionally defend ourselves against it.  For this we need the validation of courageous leaders with a firm grasp on reality such as Senator Warren.

Two polar opposite worldviews in politics today stand in stark contrast.  One is based on reality, evidence, reasoning, and the rule of law.  The other is based on “might makes right” where the party with fewer votes wins anyway, and sees this as a mandate to do whatever it wants, as soon as it can be done, even at the sacrifice of much-needed deliberation.

The way out of this morass is to allow ourselves to be guided by the pure, simple voice of impartial reason inside all of us that doesn't seek personal or partisan gain but moves us to stand up for what is loving and truthful, on behalf of all creatures, not just our own tribe. Standing together in the light we will see clearly, the gloomy gas-lit nights behind us.