May 14, 2019--Checked Out

A week into our Maine season one thing I noticed is that hardly anyone wants to talk politics. Not even many of the people we know who are Democrats and hate the idea that Trump is our president.

Mention Trump, mention Mueller, mention Mitch McConnell, and people avert their eyes and quickly change the subject. 

Mention Biden, mention the Green New Deal, mention Bernie and people want to talk about all the rain we're having.

I get it.

Everyone's exhausted, including me. Everyone is frustrated, everyone wants distractions. I'm embarrassed to admit that we've become obsessed with "Jeopardy" and the current superstar contestant, James Holzhauer, who has won almost $2.0 million. 

Many of the people I talk with want to ignore what's going on in Washington and the wider world. It's too depressing. I feel the same way.

I haven't watched "Morning Joe" since arriving. Never-mind Rachael

This is making me nervous. It's one thing if there's Trump Fatigue. One recovers from that. He wears you out, you take a step backward to recharge, lay low, and after a few days get back to exposing his lies, his dangerous moves, and you reengage in the struggle to find a Democratic challenger who can take him on and win in 2020.

On the other hand, what has me really worried is that he may be more than wearing us out but could be winning.

That his will to survive, his manic energy is a force of nature that some may feel is fundamentally irresistible. Perhaps transformative.

If I'm right about this, if I'm reading these vibes correctly, we need to make the effort to rouse ourselves and get back into the struggle. The consequences of allowing ourselves to be beaten down, of relenting, are too cataclysmic, too consequential to justify checking out. If only for a few weeks.

Then there is the good news--we have more than a year to get done what needs to get done. The polls suggest that some Trump supporters are experiencing their own version of Trump Fatigue. In this case, from their perspective, it is even more perilous because they have nowhere to go but with Trump. If they run out of interest and patience with him there is no one to replace them. Politically, they are the soft underbelly of his followers. They aren't making any more of themselves. Their's is a small pool that has no capacity for replenishment.

The bottom line, though, is that we had better keep our act together and pace ourselves for the long haul. After November 3, 2020 there will be time to rest and recoup. And hopefully celebrate.

July 19, 2017--Trump Fatigue

I try to write five of these a week. One a day Monday through Friday. I've been doing this for 12 years, from August 2005, and have thus far posted 3,158.

For nearly two years more than half my pieces have been about the 2016 election; the emergence of Donald Trump; his election; and, for six months, his presidency. On occasional weeks all five, one way or the other, have been about Trump. Such has been my obsession.

During the weekend, when not posting, I try to come up with two or three subjects to write about for the upcoming week. To get ahead of the relentless pressure to produce five. Sometimes it feels as if I am physically "producing" them.

This is not a complaint. I love doing this. I like the discipline, the motivation to think things through and to approach issues in hopefully fresh ways, and especially hearing from readers who half the time like what I've been writing. The rest of the time, especially the last year and a half when my pieces have been disproportionately about Trump, I've received a lot of criticism that by taking him seriously, by attempting to write about him dispassionately, I'm "normalizing" him, and by so doing have been helping to position him in the mainstream of American presidential history. Not as an incompetent and dangerous pretender.

So, this past weekend, with Republicans in the Senate once more trying to ram viscous changes in healthcare policy through the system while seemingly every day there was another bombshell story about Donald Trump, Jr. eager to hear what "dirt" Russian operatives were pitching to spread around to sabotage Hillary and elect Trump, what with reports of this and infighting in the West Wing and stories about our raging president talking back to the TV, one would think I'd have seven things to write about, not my usual five.

But, if you've read this far, you are catching me writing about not any longer feeling I have things to write about.

If I can make the comparison, Seinfeld-like--writing about not writing.

I did manage to come up with an idea for Monday for a piece about Trump in Paris for Bastille Day and the monarchal ambitions of the new French president. And for Tuesday squeezed out something about John McCain and the now possibly doomed Republican health care plan.

But this lethargy that is the result of feeling overwhelmed, I am thinking, may be the point of Trump's brilliant strategy for governing. (There I go again calling it "brilliant.")

So overload the system that we no longer can remember all the outrageous things he did during the campaign, since entering the White House, and even last week. This cascade of outrageousness elicits so much frustration and anger that our circuits are blown.

I don't know about you, but this is the way I've been feeling.

Chipped away at I am wanting to give up and return to my cocoon and my distractions. I noticed over the past weekend that I was watching a lot of television. Not cable news but tennis and the Yankees-Red Sox series. I even surfed around looking for Seinfeld reruns. Caught the one with Elaine at Yankee Stadium!

Having confessed this, tomorrow I'll be reposting something I wrote in February during five days that I called "A Week Without Trump."

Tomorrow, I hope you will take a look to see how I did.