Huddled masses, yearning for comfort

In Trump's troubled America, we need to protect our capacity for happiness

Imagine the comfort of this sight to generations of immigrants. Where is do we find it now? (Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash)

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Being a guy, you know, I assumed for a long time that I was supposed to be able to fix things. This led to lots of disappointment, especially early in our marriage: I could not, in fact, neatly install a (prefabricated) fence around our first home, as I assumed a new homeowner should, nor change the oil on the used pickup truck I bought to haul manure from our horse’s stall to our garden. On the other hand, I’m quite skilled at punctuation, and I’ve always been told I have a nice singing voice. It took me longer than most folks, probably, to recognize that generous self-acceptance is the currency that compensates for the limits of my skills and, these days, the vicissitudes of aging.

Yet I was even slower to grasp that I was likewise not expected to be the fix-it man for whatever difficult situations life might present to the people I love — a lesson that parenthood finally helped to teach. My wife, a bit younger but a lot wiser than I am, had to remind me repeatedly that it was not my job to wrap up neat solutions to the problems she or our daughter encountered; for instance, she actually didn’t need me to go find the guy who was incompetent at the bank branch and pound him. “Sometimes, we just need to talk about things,” she said, “and your job is to listen.” And maybe say, “There, there,” or some such. People are less eager to be confronted with an agenda than to be comforted with understanding, I finally figured.

This is all because humans crave comfort. It often comes from what’s familiar, like a favorite food from childhood or an old hymn. Psychologists cite what they call the “mere-exposure effect,” which suggests that people draw comfort from what they’ve been exposed to a lot.¹ If an advertising jingle or a show’s theme song last for a long time, it’s probably because market research shows they’ve been absorbed into people’s comfort zone. When a friend showed up for a get-together last summer wearing a frayed and badly stained cap, I offered him the hat I was wearing — I had another almost like it at home — and my pal said, “Naw, I’ve had this for years, and it’s just about right.”

If these early days of the second Trump administration have made nothing else clear, it is that what we’re accustomed to is gone. So no wonder we are experiencing acute discomfort with what’s happening in Washington. Tumult, antagonism, carelessness, viciousness — all that and a lot more are now the reality of the government of the land to which we pledge allegiance. Those of us who care greatly about the essential role of government laid out in our Constitution — that is, to bring us justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for our defense, promote our shared welfare, and secure our liberty — have so far found absolutely nothing to cheer in the presidency of Donald Trump.

That was underscored this week when Trump was unable to execute what should have been a relatively simple task for a president: providing comfort in a moment of national grief. It’s a routine that every president is forced to perform: to give this broad range of 335 million people a sense that we are united in confronting a tragedy, and that we will therefore get through it.

George W. Bush did the task so well after 9/11 that his popularity soared to over 90 percent. Barack Obama took the responsibility to a new height when he sang Amazing Grace at the funeral for a victim of the 2015 church shooting that killed nine black members of a Bible study group in Charleston, S.C. Obama later explained that showing up there was “part of the job,” but that he was so broken-hearted by repeated gun violence that “I feel like I’ve used up all my words.” What he did instead was astonishingly inspirational, and genuine.²

We know by now not to expect any such decency from Trump. So, indeed, hours after the worst domestic air disaster since 2001, even as emergency workers were pulling the first of 67 bodies from the Potomac River, Trump went on camera and, in what his prepared remarks at first rightly noted was “an hour of anguish for our nation,” spewed hatred and poppycock. The crash happened, he suggested, because the federal government’s effort to diversify the workforce had led to lax standards for air traffic controllers, which he said had been put in place by Barack Obama, and reinstituted by Joe Biden after he had raised them during his first term.

Like a lot of what Trump says when he isn’t scripted, it wasn’t true at all. None of it. The Washington Post’s detailed Fact Checker column reviewed precisely what Trump said and awarded it Four Pinocchios — the lowest rating for credibility, reserved for what it calls “whoppers.” ³His disgusting implication that the crash occurred because there wasn’t a white male in the air traffic control tower made it clear that there is nothing that will limit his self-aggrandizement and petulant partisanship. He's making me uncomfortable with that self-acceptance thing; if this is the model for being a white guy in America, I’d like to figure out a way to abstain, thank you.

Trump blather and bluster isn’t anything new, of course, and voters elected him anyway. So you may wonder why this is worth dwelling upon when there’s so much that is distressing about the second Trump term so far: the pause in foreign aid that is cutting off hundreds of thousands of people around the globe from food and lifesaving medicines; the appointment of outrageously unqualified partisans to key positions, and the groveling of senators who know exactly how thoroughly they’re debasing themselves; the breathtaking moves to purge thousands of career government workers considered insufficiently obedient; the withdrawal of the United States from international efforts to combat global warming and disease; the nasty Trump response to Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s scripture-based plea for mercy, and so much more.

Yet the president’s response to the air tragedy is worth noting even in the context of those more consequential matters. That’s because it clarifies that in the coming years, as Trump is rapidly and radically altering the reality of our cherished democracy, we will have to seek comfort elsewhere — and, it turns out, we won’t be able to effectively resist the direction Trump is taking us unless we find a new source of comfort.

Millions of Americans are feeling deep distress about what’s going on in Washington. It’s not just affecting people who are engaged in politics or have connections to vulnerable groups targeted by Trump — like immigrants, LGBTQ citizens and the poor. A therapist told me a few weeks ago that every one of his clients had expressed greater anxiety since the election.

When we feel fear or sadness, psychologists note, we tend to withdraw into ourselves. Minimizing external stimuli provides temporary relief from emotional distress.⁴ That might explain why so many people these days say they are turning away from the news. In the weeks just after the election, MSNBC’s prime-time viewership dropped by 54 percent, while CNN’s fell by 45 percent, according to Nielsen data.⁵ I can’t count the number of people who have told me that unlike their experience during Trump’s first term, they’re not ready right now to engage with the Trump resistance.

Quite the opposite happens when people are feeling secure and happy. Not only do people behave differently, but their activity better prepares them for what might follow, and equips them with the capacity to grow.

The social psychologist Barbara Frederickson, who has for 30 years been a leading scholar in the study of human emotions, has put forward what’s known as the “broaden-and-build theory.” It suggests that positive emotions lead to more engagement and to expansive behavior, and that over time lays the foundation for more knowledge and better social relationships. There’s a physical benefit to positive emotions, too: They can also undo some of the harm that comes from negative emotions, including heart damage and the impact of higher blood sugar.⁶

That is, doing things that make you feel happy doesn’t just yield a fleeting better emotion; it is foundation-building: By situating ourselves where we find joy and happiness, we develop the capacity to grow. Frederickson’s research has found that positive emotions change the boundaries of our minds and our outlook on our environments. “People come up with more ideas of what they might do next when they're experiencing a positive emotion relative to when they're experiencing neutral states or negative emotions,” she explained in a talk a few years ago.

What does this mean for our beleaguered community of concerned Americans? It seems to suggest that we need to give ourselves doses of joy whenever we can, not just because it makes us feel better, but because it is only from that strong foundation that we can shape a valid response to Trumpism. With the disillusionment and discomfort that Trump is causing depleting our capacity, and with no comfort available from the traditional notion that America’s government is good, we need to find sources that can give us positive emotions.

It may be that something familiar can provide that comfort — a sport or pastime, a hobby, music from our youth, a favorite TV show. (Over the past few days, I’ve found myself watching early episodes of The West Wing, remembering how secure we felt during the Bartlet administration.) Perhaps our joy can come from spending time with loved ones or a dog, hiking in the winter woods, or volunteering in a community role.

Importantly, in the context of the broaden-and-build theory, we might benefit just now from making sure that our distress at Trump’s return to power doesn’t lead us to cheat ourselves out of the benefits of happiness. Our capacity to grow and to be able to engage actively in our future may depend upon it. It’s not that we should withdraw from the active pursuit of a better America; it’s that our preparation for that fight requires that we take care of ourselves, and retain our capacity for joy.

Comfort, after all, has come to people throughout our history who have confronted great distress. Consider the immigrant waves of the late-19^th and early-20^th centuries, and what must have compelled them toward these shores. Imagine their emotion upon entering New York Harbor.

The Statue of Liberty, which was erected in 1886, was originally envisioned as a monument to self-governance and the principles of citizenship. But when its pedestal was inscribed with “The New Colossus,” a sonnet by Emma Lazarus, the statue was transformed into what one historian called “a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world.”⁷

Countless shiploads of immigrants passed near the plaque bearing the words that schoolchildren still memorize: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ the wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Historians say great cheers would arise from the passengers as the statue came within view: comfort was at hand, at last, on the American shore.

It is unsurprising, perhaps, that a key aide in Trump’s first administration, Ken Cuccinelli, insisted that the Lazarus poem ought to be rewritten for the 21^st century: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge,” he wrote, later suggesting that the “huddled masses” should be European. It was Cuccinelli who wrote the sections on immigration and homeland security for Project 2025, providing the blueprint for the 47^th presidency.⁸

There is no comfort to be found in Donald Trump’s Washington these days. So it is essential that we who can still imagine a better day be good to ourselves — that we find comfort where we can, and undertake its pursuit energetically — so that we will be able to imagine a future in which we reclaim America’s promise, and have both the will and the skill to eventually accomplish the task.⁹

1. https://dictionary.apa.org/mere-exposure-effect

2. https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/540717-obama-discusses-singing-amazing-grace-after-charleston-shooting/

3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/30/faa-dei-trump-fact-checker/

4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763418306146

5. https://www.axios.com/2024/12/26/politics-cable-news-ratings-trump-ap-poll

6. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1693418/

7. Auster, Paul (2005), "NYC = USA", Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaborations with Artists, Picador, p. 508, ISBN 0-312-42468-X.

8. https://project2025admin.com/personnel/ken-cuccinelli/

9. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-do-we-seek-comfort-familiar-ep-445-stephen-dubner/

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MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

IF YOU’D LIKE TO HEAR MORE from Rex Smith, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay.

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-Rex Smith