Jim Acosta on Post-Trump Stress Disorder: 'Donald Trump will never change but we need to change with times'
When Donald Trump was in office, America’s media had a different ball game altogether. Without a break, the maverick Republican locked horns with the media (first the mainstream and later the social media as well) with a few exceptions on every second issue. Both sides kept on firing, making the environment more stressful and toxic for journalists. Have things changed after Trump’s only tenure came to an end this January? How are the reporters coping with the new administration led by President Joe Biden which has vowed to project itself as an antithesis to that of the businessman-politician?
On Sunday, April 3, CNN’s Brian Stelter asked a couple of DC journalists about adjusting to the Biden era. The ‘Reliable Sources’ host spoke to Jim Acosta, one of the most vocal journalists that Trump’s press meets witnessed, and Annie Karni to know how they are feeling in the post-Trump days. Acosta, who is now the network’s chief domestic correspondent and an anchor, told Stelter: “I think we’re all dealing with some post-Trump stress disorder.”
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“We did cover the news before Donald Trump came along and we did it pretty well. And there is going to be plenty of stuff in the news out there and it doesn’t have to have Donald Trump in the headlines for us to continue to exist. Especially, when he is putting out these statements. You know, when he was president, he was doing things that were beneath the office of the presidency, now he is doing things beneath the office of the post-presidency. He is not going to change but we need to change with the times,” Acosta, 49, said.
To Karni, Stelter asked: “What it is like for you? Is it possible to cover Biden every day without mentioning the ex-president?” To that, she said: “I think it definitely is and it’s fading quite quickly I think. I think that Biden actually benefited in some ways at the beginning from a comparison with Trump, especially during the impeachment trial. It showed the ex-president at his worst. That wasn’t bad for people to remember why they voted for Biden that they won it and returned to normalcy. But now, I think they have really moved away.” She said the Biden White House is not as factionalized or as personality-driven like the previous one. She said the current administration is more disciplined than that of Trump and that makes it more challenging to penetrate it.
'Our nation must recover from its national case of PTSD'
Former Rear Admiral Tom Jurkowsky, who is the author of the book ‘The Secret Sauce for Organizational Success’, wrote in a piece for the Capital Gazette in January, just days after Biden was sworn in as the president: “Our nation must recover from its national case of PTSD — Post Trump Stress Disorder. The images we saw of insurrectionists were disturbing and are not credentials of democracy. We are a country that has had its democratic framework kicked, punched and battered. Biden, his leadership team and our Congress must be able to apply the balm that restores who we are as a nation.”
He added: “The PTSD that our service members suffer after returning from battle is a long and difficult process to recover from. But unfortunately, if we are to move forward as a nation, the PTSD our nation suffers from after Donald Trump’s presidency must be treated immediately.”
However, while journalists like Acosta, who had once faced the wrath of the Trump White House after confronting the president, feel the media needs to change with the times unlike Trump, it is also undeniable a fact that the networks who capitalized on Trump’s theatrics over the last four years have found their graphs plummeting in the recent weeks. CNN, for example, saw its viewership nosediving after Trump left the office following a brief post-Election Day surge.
Veteran British-American broadcast journalist Ted Koppel had mocked Stelter when Trump was in office, telling him that “CNN’s ratings would be in the toilet without Donald Trump”. While Stelter didn’t agree with Koppel then, time has shown that his observation was not incorrect.
The term 'Post Trump Stress Disorder' was in discussion in 2016
The term ‘PTSD’ isn’t being discussed for the first time now and it encompassed not just the field of journalism but the American society as a whole. In November 2016, a couple of days after Trump won the presidential election that year, Dr Joseph M. Pierre, a health sciences clinical professor, wrote in a piece on Psychology Today: “By the time we all got to work and back to our daily lives, some of my psychiatric colleagues had already coined the phrase “Post-Trump Stress Disorder” to describe how they, many of their friends, and many of their patients were feeling. So much winning for Trump and Trump supporters, so much losing for the rest of us.”
“A big part of the let-down was due to the fact that few of us saw it coming. We knew it was theoretically possible, but we were buoyed by wishful confidence and ultimately betrayed by the pundits and polls that had consistently reported a comfortable if slim lead for Hillary Clinton going into Election Day.”
Trump may have gone (we don’t know whether he will be back again one day) but he has definitely changed America’s psyche forever. The impact is still being felt, even when the media today is dealing with another president who is more of an establishment politician.