While deep anxiety about mass shootings, falling standards of living, inadequate pay, and lack of healthcare long predate the Trump era, a survey by the American Psychological Association (APA) published on Tuesday found that President Donald Trump—with his bumbling incompetence, immense cruelty, and plutocratic economic agenda—has intensified the stress Americans feel about their financial situation, the U.S. political system, the climate crisis, and a variety of other issues facing the nation and the world.
Flying directly in the face of Trump’s celebration of the supposed “economic miracle” his administration has produced and the president’s jingoistic “make America great again” mantra, the APA’s survey found that issues related to money and work continue to top the list of stressors among American adults overall.
As the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations rake in obscene profits thanks to Trump’s $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, the APA found that “nearly two-thirds of adults (64 percent) reported money and work each to be a stressor.”
Personal debt, housing instability, discrimination, and hunger were among the specific sources of stress reported by a sizeable percentage of Americans.
Though these stessors are hardly new, Trump and the Republican Party’s efforts to hike rents on poor Americans, encourage discrimination against minorities and the LGBTQ community, and take food stamps from millions have likely contributed to Americans’ growing anxiety.
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Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams where this was originally published. Follow him on Twitter: @johnsonjakep.
Perhaps we should consider that this “stressing out” by a flood of identity politics issues and ludicrous reality show politics is a psyop of gigantic proportions, deliberately manufactured by coordination between foundations, think tanks, the rotten corporate media, our rotten political duopoly and government propaganda to distract the public and destroy citizen solidarity while the corporate coup d’état and warfare state goes on unimpeded. Paranoia? I don’t think so.