It’s like we’re in an endless car ride with a drunk at the wheel. No one knows when the pain will stop.  

 
PSYCHOLOGIST DAPHNE DE MARNEFFE, ON OUR CURRENT TRAUMAS

First published January 26, 2021 in Amerikanalys.se, a blog on American politics and society for a Swedish audience. 

The events of the last month or so have gotten me thinking a lot about the issue of closure. Many of us were happy to see 2020 come to an end and anticipate something better for the new year. But the political closure many were looking for in November in the change of presidents from Donald Trump to Joe Biden was deferred by Trump and his supporters’ refusal to acknowledge the election results. Trump’s persistent claims that the election was “rigged” boiled over on January 6 in the riotous storming of the Capitol Building. Trump’s supporters came with their own closure issues, determined to stop the lawful counting of the ballots of the Electoral College, and thereby prevent Trump’s removal from power. 

Biden’s inauguration on January 20 was strangely serene, due in large part to pandemic. The usual crowds were replaced by rows of flags, artfully arranged on the lawn between the Capitol and the Washington Monument. It stood not only as a reminder of the strangeness of this time in our national history, but as a stark contrast from the scene in the same place just a few weeks before, during the insurrection at the Capitol. The inauguration was, in other words, an exercise in closure: an attempt to put a punctuation point on the chaos and trauma not only of January 6, but of 2020 and the entire Trump era. 

If I am in any way representative, the scenes and choreography of the inauguration did offer some respite from what has seemed like the unending distress of the last four years. But have Americans really gotten the closure they need? Is closure really ever possible in the field of politics?

Closure is a classic topic in literary criticism. It refers to the way a poem, story, novel, or film produces that satisfactory feeling of resolution, “the sense of an ending.” It is the “happily ever after” conclusion of a fairy tale or a romance, the dance at the end of a Shakespearean comedy, or the hero’s death in a tragedy.  But it also refers to a psychological need to end pain, ambiguity, or distress. At the very end of last year, pop singer Taylor Swift released a song called “Closure,” sung from the perspective of a lover who refuses to let go of her anger and pain over a failed relationship, who refuses psychological closure. 

The satisfactions of literary closure are, I think, linked to the psychological desire for the resolution to pain or trauma. And between the COVID pandemic, the economic crisis, and the former administration’s various assaults on American democracy, decency, and the very concept of truth, many Americans have indeed experienced enduring, relentless trauma. Literary closure also has a political dimension: a satisfactory ending is often the moment when conflict is resolved, or when a sense of order–moral, political, or otherwise–is restored or justified.  

In this sense, the inauguration now already, one week later, feels like only a pause in the ongoing trauma.  COVID vaccinations are only beginning to roll out, even as new, more contagious strains are emerging. Though Trump said goodbye to Washington on the morning of January 20 with an anticlimactic “Have a good life,” it hardly feels like the national narrative he dominated is in any way concluded.  This is true both for his most fervent supporters and staunchest critics.  

Among his fringiest supporters are followers of the Q Anon conspiracy theory, which imagines a vast cabal of “liberal elites” including politicians, media figures, and various other celebrities, who have bent the apparatus of the state to cover up heinous crimes extending to murder, pedophilia, and cannibalism.  At the center of this unhinged story is Trump, reimagined as a hero who has been plotting with various members of the US military to sweep in and destroy the evil conspiracy.  Q Anon believers often fantasize about violent retribution against the evil-doers: once they have been rounded up, Trump and his allies will hold military tribunals, and enact justice with firing squads and public hangings.  

But however patient the Q Anon believers have been for this cathartic closure, the last four years have been a disappointment.  Some Q Anon supporters were drawn to the Trump rally that led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6 in anticipation that this would be the day when Trump finally unleashed the “storm” that would bring their desired resolution.  Some thought that Trump would start rounding up their enemies in his final hours as president on January 20.  Maybe this lack of satisfying closure was enough for some Q Anon supporters to turn away from this cultic conspiracy theory.  Others, certainly, are still adjusting their narrative, in hopes of getting the closure they have pinned their hopes on for so long.  

For Trump’s opponents–and, they would argue, for the country as a whole– there is a similar desire, and need, for closure to the Trump era, and specifically to his authoritarian assaults on democracy and on the racial and other divisions he actively fomented. But we know how Trump’s story has gone so far.  If the narrative of the Trump era is one of an incompetent and immoral demagogue who finally gets his comeuppance, thereby restoring something like the moral and political order (and a psychological sense of relief) then we have reason to fear disappointment. After all, Trump is the guy who cheated his way into college, bounced back from bankruptcy, fended off 26 separate accusations of sexual misconduct, improbably won a presidential election, and was acquitted of all charges in his first impeachment.  The Trump story so far seems more like a rogues tale of one misadventure after another, with the rogue always landing more or less unscathed.  Will the second impeachment stick? Will his debts and failed businesses finally catch up to him? Will his various accusers finally get their day in court? Will Americans ever get the closure and reconciliation they both need and desire? It’s a cliffhanger:  stay tuned.