Donald Trump is breaking America — our children will suffer worst
Last month, a Quinnipiac University poll asked voters to identify their biggest concerns six months into the second Trump presidency. The pollsters asked about nine specific issues, ranging from the health of democracy to President Trump’s performance on immigration, the economy, climate change and crime.
However, the most important issue wasn’t on the list. It’s the impact Trump is having on our children. Studies show they are more influenced by his example than we might think.
We have been amply warned about Trump. His former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, famously called the president “the most flawed person” he has ever known. He correctly predicted that Trump’s second term “would be chaotic because he’d continually be trying to exceed his authority, but the sycophants would go along with it.”
A month before the 2024 election, 200 mental health professionals signed an open letter published by the anti-Trump Anti-Psychopath PAC describing him as a “malignant narcissist” with an untreatable personality disorder. They cited his “lifetime pattern of ‘failure to conform to social norms and laws,’ ‘repeated lying,’ ‘reckless disregard for the safety of others,’ ‘irritability,’ ‘impulsivity,’ ‘irresponsibility,’ and ‘lack of remorse.’”
A new book by James Kimmel, a Yale psychiatrist, calls Trump a “revenge addict” who feels victimized, nurses perceived grievances, ruminates about retaliation, and has a compulsive and potentially violent desire for retribution.
We are witnessing these and other malignant behaviors.
The news media have been generous in calling Trump a transactional president. He doesn’t transact — he extorts. “President Donald Trump prides himself on being a dealmaker, but his negotiating style is more ultimatum than compromise,” an AP dispatch explains. “For Trump, a deal isn’t necessarily an agreement in which two sides compromise. It’s an opportunity to bend others to his will.”
His punitive trade tariffs, exorbitant lawsuits and unlawful freezes on congressionally appropriated funds are all examples. And Trump explodes with juvenile insults to disparage people he doesn’t like.
Trump’s policies and behaviors affect America’s reputation at home and abroad, but they may have the most lasting effect on children. He dominates the daily news cycles with bad behavior. Our children notice.
Margaret Hagerman, a sociologist at Mississippi State University, told an interviewer last year, “It would be great to see kids motivated by the Trump presidency, to join together and create a new era of civil rights. But I’m actually more worried about the opposite being true.” At recess, she said, some children were playing ICE agents and pretending to shoot kids playing immigrants. Others were taunting Latino children with chants of “build a wall.”
“Listening to young children, ages 11, 12, and 13, express dehumanizing, racist ideas and think it’s fine and normal — that’s really concerning to me,” she said.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Trump’s platform was “producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported. … Teachers have noted an increase in bullying, harassment, and intimidation of students whose races, religions, or nationalities have been the verbal targets of candidates on the campaign trail.”
One in four students in America’s K-12 classrooms are children of foreign-born parents.
Southern Poverty Law Center education expert Marueen Costello quoted a middle-school teacher who said, “My students are terrified of Donald Trump. They think that if he’s elected, all black people will get sent back to Africa. … In North Carolina, a high school teacher says she has ‘Latino students who carry their birth certificates and Social Security cards to school because they are afraid they will be deported.’”
“In state after state, teachers report similar fears among minority children,” Costello continued. “The gains made by years of anti-bullying work in schools have been rolled back in a few short months.”
Trump’s policies are creating physical as well as psychological damage to children. Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned they “will have ramifications for the next generation, and many of these policy moves will disproportionately harm young children” — especially those in low-income families and non-white communities.
Trump is setting children up for a dystopian future by allowing climate change to go unabated and allowing more pollutants that are “particularly harmful to babies and children from before birth to age eight because their bodily systems are still developing…”
Nelson Mandela said, “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Today, through his pollution and psychological influence on them, we are virtually letting Trump abuse ours.
William S. Becker is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, named by the journal Nature as one of the five best science books of 2023. He previously served as a senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice and is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.