The Reckoning: America s Trauma and Finding a Way to Heal

America is suffering from PTSD. The Reckoning diagnoses its core causes and helps begin the healing process.

For four years, Donald J Trump inflicted an onslaught of overlapping and interconnected traumas upon the American people, targeting anyone he perceived as being an ‘other’ or an enemy. Women were discounted and derided, the sick were dismissed as weak and unworthy of help, immigrants and minorities were demonised and discriminated against and money was elevated above all else. In short, he transformed America into a macro version of his malignantly dysfunctional family.

How can Americans make sense of the degree to which their institutions and leaders have let them down? How can they negotiate a world in which all sense of safety and justice seems to have been destroyed? How can they – as individuals and as a nation – confront, process and overcome this loss of trust and the ways they have been forever altered by chaos, division and cruelty? And when the dust finally settles, how can they begin to heal, in the midst of ongoing health and economic crises and the greatest political divide since the Civil War?

Mary L Trump is uniquely positioned to answer these difficult questions. She holds a PhD in clinical psychology specialising in trauma, has herself been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and happens to be Donald J Trump’s only niece. In The Reckoning, she applies her unique expertise to the task of helping Americans confront an all-encompassing trauma, one that has taken an immense toll on their nation’s health and well-being.

A new leader alone cannot fix the situation. Donald J Trump is only the latest symptom of a disease that has existed within the body politic since America’s inception – from the original sin of slavery through its population’s unceasing, organised commitment to inequality. An enormous amount of healing must be done to rebuild the lives of Americans, their faith in leadership and their hope for their nation. It starts with The Reckoning.