If you lead people, Trump is your business.

Not because you have to share your politics at work, but because the people you manage live in a civic environment that shapes their moods, agency, fear, and fatigue. If you want to motivate or simply understand them, attunement to forces beyond office walls counts.

I say this as someone with direct leadership experience, and now as a therapist. For me, America itself has been one of those “internal objects” — familiar, authoritative, trusted, even when fraught (sorry for the psychoanalytic-speak, new habits…).

In 1994, packing boxes for Hong Kong, I read a New York Times article on income inequality. A faint alarm sounded but I pushed it aside.

By 2003, from China, I watched the U.S. prepare to invade Iraq, based on what felt like lies I thought we couldn’t tolerate. But we did. Distance dulled my sensitivity to rupture.

It wasn’t until I returned in 2016 amid Trump’s election that I fully grasped how far the unraveling had gone: the erosion of shared facts, the fraying of civic trust, the surge of tribalized fear.

This week’s Supreme Court decision limiting universal injunctions — ostensibly procedural — felt like another widening crack. It’s part of a larger pattern: weakened constraints on executive power, a fractured Congress, ideological courts, and splintered epistemic reality.

These shifts don’t stay abstract. They reach into the workplace, into your team, into you. I’ve seen it: flattened motivation, deep anxiety, communal mistrust. People unsure what’s real, or what’s worth committing to.

And yet, that’s not just a human issue. It’s also a leadership opportunity, almost a call to inspirational arms.

I’m not ready to watch this country become a ghost, something hollow where something living used to be. Not while some voices still speak with clarity and courage. Not while leadership, in teams large and small, can still show accountability, justice, mutuality, and reciprocity.

Whether your team is two people or two hundred, presence matters. In my work as an analyst, I try to create a “holding environment,” safe enough for people to play with ideas, test feelings, imagine different outcomes.

That’s not unlike what good managers do. These moments don’t always announce themselves. They happen at the conference table, in a tense evaluation meeting, in the pause after someone says something riskier than usual in a brainstorm. They happen when someone makes a mistake and braces for judgment but gets curiosity instead. When a manager stays present — steady, receptive, human — they become more than a task-giver. They become a container for trust.

And trust, in turn, gives rise to energy, engagement, and resilience.

What happens to democracy shows up everywhere. If you lead people, you’re already holding it, whether you name it or not.