President Trump’s 5 Stages of Grief
Whether we realize it or not, we all use psychological concepts to deduce things about the people around us. Marketing, socializing and co-operating all require attention to the inner workings of the psyche (translates to “soul”) of others. One of the most prevalent psychological constructs is the five stages of grief: Denial (Stage 1), Anger (Stage 2), Bargaining (Stage 3), Depression(Stage 4), and Acceptance (Stage 5). However, individuality means that everyone processes grief differently, and not following the chronological order is expected. As I looked at President Donald J. Trump’s tweets, it was striking that he went through all of them, sometimes bouncing back and forth between stages and merging some as well.
The saga started with the second stage of grief — anger as the gap between him and president-elect Biden began to close.
(Screenshot added due to Twitter’s new sharing policy regarding false election information).
Then we see a shift to denial wherein he denies the legitimacy of the addition of counted mail-in ballots from the previous day. This continued to the next day when he tweeted “STOP THE COUNT!”, a tweet defended by his team referring to the addition of new absentee votes (which were later set aside separately in Philadelphia).
A few minutes later, Trump’s tone changed once again to realize the true effect that mail-in ballots had on the election. While many see this as another rhetorical question posed by Trump, his usage of the word “destruction” before undermining the legitimacy is an accurate representation of the depression stage.
Then, we see the tweet that set the tone for the Republican Party’s to-do list for the next several weeks. In disbelief of the rising poll numbers, Trump vowed in the first statement since the start of the election to investigate voter fraud and take the case to the Supreme Court, a declaration of the bargaining stage.
While researching for this article, I continuously referred to psychological journals to distinguish Trump’s presidential optimism from clear-cut denial. Many of his tweets I could chalk up to him being merely hoping for a win. Still, there are egregious tweets like the following, dated November 7th, the morning the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Biden.
Trump’s anger manifested in several ways; the most interesting was his scorn of the news coverage that called Arizona as a democrat win. On November 12th, he name-dropped Fox News, a network that has promoted Trump relentlessly throughout his campaign. Ironically this tweet was followed seven minutes later by a tweet sponsoring a story broken by Sean Hannity, a Fox News Anchor…
November 13th is when the tables start to shift ever so slightly. “I will not go — this administration will not be going to a lockdown. Hopefully the, the uh, whatever happens in the future, who knows which administration it will be, I guess time will tell…”, Trump says in a press conference before changing the topic to his new vaccine. The sentence's stutter and reformulation show that this response was not rehearsed and genuinely shows uncertainty, which is a stark comparison to the attitude he had weeks before this. This is the first real statement that hints at acceptance.
Continuing on the acceptance tide-change is this tweet dated November 15th. It marks the first time when President Donald Trump openly states that Joe Biden has won the election (despite going on to yell “fraud,” simply admitting this fact shows a growth he had not exhibited before this day on his Twitter page).
All-in-all, Trump’s emotional state has been extremely erratic since November 3rd, but Trump’s fight seems to be dying down. The Trump Administration has lost all lawsuits except one, that did not turn out to be of a large enough scale to flip the vote. Despite having a stellar legal and PR team, Trump is realizing that he’s digging his grave deeper and deeper. The loss of the case for Pennsylvania in the Supreme Court, in my opinion, served as the greatest eye-opener for the president as this was the state that declared Joe Biden president-elect.
Hopefully, he will reach the acceptance stage before too much damage to national affairs is caused. I say “too much” because the longer Trump stalls his official declaration, the longer Biden is unable to attend presidential conferences and access federal agencies.
Slowly but surely, Trump is realizing that letting go of the race, just as his opponents did in 2016, is the best path forward for America.
