What Trump is Doing to Your Colon

Presidential chaos creates anxiety that can affect your gut microbiome.

May 30, 2025

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” —H. L. Mencken

President Trump is wildly unpredictable. The more erratic he is, the more his fans love it. He’s keeping the libs off balance! However, outside of his fandom, people are wondering WTF? How can anyone make plans when the most powerful man in the world is such a rando?

Trump says, “I run the country and the world.” He can ruin lives on a whim, and we have nothing to say about it. Loss of control is a reliable inducer of anxiety. Trump punches down and disapproves of diversity, thus distressing a big chunk of the population. Here are some of the people Trump is afflicting:

If you have cancer, Trump’s large cuts to cancer research are hard to fathom.
If you’re a vet or disabled, you’re facing some extra stress as programs are dismantled.
If you’re a scientist who just lost your grants or got fired by DOGE, you’re screwed.
If you or your family depend on Food Stamps or Medicaid, you should be very worried.
If you’re an executive trying to plan your purchases for the next year, Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs are nerve-wracking.
If you’re an immigrant or a visa holder, you should be anxious about being kidnapped and shipped to El Salvador.
If you’re a judge or a lawyer representing minorities, there’s a target on your back and you’ll need a bodyguard.
If you’re a protester on a college campus, you could be arrested and sent to a detention camp.
If you’re a writer who says something critical about Trump, he could dox you to the Proud Boys. Wait, what?

Trump is stressing a lot of people—including many of those who voted for him. As his chaos craters our ability to plan, some of us have felt it in the pit of our stomach, or more pertinently, our colon. This is hardly surprising, as we often associate stress with a gut disturbance.

There's a good reason for this: There are microbes in your gut, and not just a smattering. We're talking about a couple of pounds or so. About the same weight as your brain. Your colon is the main repository for these microbes. There are trillions of them and they form your very own microbiome, which is not like anyone else's microbiome.

The gut-brain axis

Recent research has shown that there is a direct connection between these microbes and your brain. Amazingly, your microbiome can talk to your brain using neurotransmitters, the same chemicals in your brain that power your thinking and mood. If you feed them what they want, certain microbes can produce feel-good neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. In other words, at least some of the comfort in your comfort food may actually come from your microbes. And, as Trump engages in trade wars with our allies while trading love letters with our enemies, we need comfort food more than ever.

The actual communications route from the gut to the brain is still somewhat mysterious, but part of it involves the vagus nerve that runs from your intestines to your brainstem. Your gut microbes use the vagus to talk to your brain, but it's a dialog: your brain can talk back. And stress can immediately signal your gut to put your immune system on standby.

Evolution has crafted a simple survival circuit: if you are being chased by a lion, you can temporarily ignore your health. Your body needs all the energy it can muster for flight or fight, including all the energy of your immune system. That's totally reasonable when running from a lion. You either escape after a few hairy minutes or you become lunch, so a short downtime is not a big ask for the immune system.

But modern life (and a capricious president) presents you with something that you aren't well adapted for: chronic stress. As Trump changes his mind on an hourly basis, flinging America around like a dog with a chew toy, you are subject to uncertainty and loss of control. This is an excellent way to breed the kind of anxiety that makes you want to fold up into a fetal position.

With all your energy devoted to stress, you may snuff the fires of immunity for long enough that microbial marauders can sneak in. These pathogenic microbes drill through the lining of your gut and pour into your bloodstream, making you septic. This can simmer for months or even years as a low-grade inflammation — or it can flame up in a surprising number of ways, including arthritis, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, IBD, IBS, psoriasis, headaches, fatigue and allergies. The consequences of stress are real and nasty.

What can be done?

Recent research has found that certain bacteria, like those in kraut or yogurt, can improve your mood by competing with pathogens for resources or killing them outright. These good microbes have been dubbed psychobiotics by two Irish scientists, John Cryan and Ted Dinan, who have pioneered this amazing research. If you're looking for a little mental boost, try these fermented foods, but make sure they have active cultures. A little bacterial tang may help you combat an overdose of presidential bombast.

Also try adding some fiber to your diet. Fiber refers to the complex sugars that can make it intact to your colon where they feed your microbial menagerie. These are called prebiotics, and they can do a lot to boost your healthy psychobiotic bacteria.

Finally, get some exercise. Quit doom scrolling and take a good walk, preferably in one of the daily protests that are sprouting around the country. If enough of us do this, we might bring an early retirement to the stressor-in-chief. That’s an empowering thought that can immediately bring some stress relief.

The president seems to get what he wants with his rambling diatribes, namely fame, fortune, and power. But the rest of us are just getting queasy.

References

Riachi, Eve, Juha Holma, and Aarno Laitila. “Psychotherapists’ Perspectives on Loss of Sense of Control.” Brain and Behavior 14, no. 1 (January 6, 2024): e3368. https://doi.org/10.1002/brb3.3368.

Baum, Andrew, Raymond Fleming, and Diane M. Reddy. “Unemployment Stress: Loss of Control, Reactance and Learned Helplessness.” Social Science & Medicine 22, no. 5 (January 1, 1986): 509–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-9536(86)90016-X.