By Kathleen P. Allen
Since Trump’s first administration, there has been an uptick in bad adult behavior that seems to have influenced America’s collective behavior including some of our youngest citizens. While it’s hard to draw a straight line from his bad behavior in the White House, to what we see happening in the world of adolescence, there is a line, a curvy one, but one, nevertheless. We’ll start with one of his most obnoxious displays.
On June 5, 2025, America had a front row seat to social drama of grand proportions. On that day, Donald Trump and Elon Musk exchanged an embarrassing set of immature tit-for-tats over social media. It was a public display of a petty conflict, unbecoming to any adult, let alone them. It was just another one of Donald’s cringey, embarrassing moments where he proved how little substance he has.
Donald Trump is a showman. He proved it during ‘The Apprentice’ where he got to act powerful and strong when it was really scripted and fake. The show made me cringe. I changed the channel when it came on, but most did not. He raked in millions during the show, which was successful by even his standards. He got famous and it paid very well.
America loves reality TV. It’s entertaining, and even though it’s not real, we don’t seem to care. Some of it is full of awful behaviors that we would hopefully condemn if it weren’t fake. That’s the paradox. We know it’s not real, but we accept it as a genre that we call reality. And the more we consume this non-real reality, the more we lose our bearings and mix the two together.
Trump has brought reality TV to the Oval Office. There and in his speeches, he dishes meanness, cruelty, and incivility. He targets women, people who aren’t white, people with disabilities, and of late, anyone who disagrees with him. He also lies and makes things up.
So what is the connection between Trump’s full-on White House reality TV show and the social drama that he and Musk performed for us on June 5th?
Years ago I started out to do research on bullying among adolescents, but ended up learning about a behavior called “drama.” I ultimately defined social drama as an upsetting interaction characterized by overreaction, too much emotion, about something trivial, that pulled in extraneous individuals and lasted only as long as someone was benefiting from the performance.
Social drama and personal conflict are like siblings, and bullying is their cousin, but my participants insisted that drama was its own thing, and that it could mushroom into either in the time it took to hit send on a text.
It seemed like a good idea to write a book about adolescent social drama, but by the time it was half written, Donald Trump and all his charisma had taken hold of America, and I had to stop writing. It didn’t seem fair to chastise teens for doing social drama when we had a president who did nothing but drama. So I tossed half of what I had written and started writing about bad adult behavior, i.e. adult social drama. And when I started looking into the research on adult social drama, it seemed like it was crawling out of the woodwork everywhere.
It would be hard to say that social drama is increasing because we don’t have any way to measure it, but it is clear that interactions that take place in the public square are getting more hostile, aggressive, angry, and uncivil. By the public square, I mean media of all sorts, but especially screen media. TV and social media are the worst offenders, with social media taking the cake.
The world of two-way screens is reality TV on steroids, complete with some of the worst human behavior imaginable, and adults and youth consume a great deal of it. Kids copy what they see adults doing. The bar for how we treat each other has fallen very low, and some of this can be attributed to Donald Trump.
When it comes to our children, there has been a shift in certain types of behaviors, especially comments that boys make about girls that suggest that Trump’s misogyny has trickled down. As our public discourse has become more misogynistic (and racist, homophobic, transphobic, anti-immigrant, etc.) some young people have adopted these attitudes and their attendant behaviors. Kids are generating their own social drama based on adult bad behaviors.
I’m worried. As a life-long educator, a mother, a grandmother, and an activist, I struggle every day to listen to the news and read newspapers. Our polarization and social fracturing are diminishing our humanity. We are metaphorically eating each other. Most social drama of the adolescent sort is just part of developing an identity, but when adults do drama of the current magnitude, we are coming apart as a society.
We need a reset. We need to get out of our screens, talk to each other civilly, object to our society being turned into a reality TV show, and restore our relationships. It’s time for us to be grown-ups.
Kathleen P. Allen is a graduate of the University of Rochester, Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, Rochester, NY. A lifelong educator, she worked with the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention at the University at Buffalo, SUNY from 2012 to 2023. Dr. Allen is a program evaluator, researcher, educator, writer, parent, and grandparent. She has published several articles on adolescent social drama. ‘Stuck in Our Screens’ is her first book.
