Trump Exhaustion

News of impending justice used to excite me. No more. And that's the saddest part of it all.

The more you wrote about him, even attacked him, the more powerful he became. This is what demagoguery is all about. The hope is eventually you catch up with the truth, but meanwhile the devastation that takes place last a long time.”

(Joseph Wershba, See It Now Reporter, on Joseph McCarthy)

I used to be a news junkie. Partly, that was because of what I was writing about. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, throughout the primary and general, and then in the first few Trump years, I had to turn on Morning Joe every morning at six a.m. and follow events throughout every day because I was working on books that required I know what was happening and collect every relevant “receipt.”

But also: I genuinely believed that significant things could happen, things that could change the course we seemed to be on. I grew up, along with others of my generation, with actual memories of Watergate and, even if we were too young to view it ourselves, a narrative about the bringing-down of Josephy McCarthy that shaped our imaginations about the possibilities—even inevitability—that the arc of the moral universe did indeed bend toward justice. There were grim realities, but there also were dramatic moments that changed everything:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.… Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer's Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” 

The 2016 election was a devastating blow. But for a long time afterward, we held out hope for our own Joseph Welch or Watergate moment, waited for the bend in the arc which would send the edifice of authoritarianism crashing down—or expose a President’s corruption, as we had witnessed during the televised final six days of the House Judicial Committee’s deliberations over Nixon’s impeachment. When the Committee brought three articles of impeachment against Nixon and the House voted to have the entire impeachment trial televised, Nixon resigned in a prime-time television address, and we cheered.

At one point, we thought Robert Mueller might provide our Joseph Welch moment. We waited and waited, and enjoyed a clever video in which Mr. Prosecutor Mueller, like some modern-day Elliot Ness, collared all the crooks from Flynn to Trump. What a relic it seems like now!

Our pulses quickened and our hearts gladdened when we heard The Report was about to be released. But Mueller, bless him, thought history was still written with a quill pen. He actually expected Americans to read 400 pages of dense prose and do the right thing by it. He didn’t “get” television at all. But disastrously, Donald Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr, following the Roger Ailes playbook, did. Trump and Barr understood that the phrase “No Collusion,” said often enough before a viewing audience, could easily defeat evidence and argument. 

Watching Bill Barr replace Mueller’s painstakingly prepared, factually impeccable report with televised lies was a turning point for those of us who had harbored the fantasy of a politically disruptive report delivered by a hero who, in a devastating moment of televised honesty and courage, would save us from our increasingly surreal “normalcy.” TV, as we were growing up, was full of transforming moments like that, both fictional and “real.” We weren’t ready for the possibility that the same televisual world that helped end a war via images of burning monks and fallen student protestors would also give us Donald Trump. 

In 2023, it may be difficult to resurrect the memories of how hopeful we were. We’ve become…“jaded” is way too pale, for my part “crushed” is more like it, “depairing” is more like it. My husband and I have periodic disagreements about this. He thinks everyone, including Trump’s supporters, are bored by him, and that boredom (ironically, as it’s been cultivated by the tv culture that brought us Trump) is going to bring him down politically, even if there’s no Joseph Welch moment. My brain shuts down whenever he says things like that. I could produce counter-arguments, but really, what’s the point? Rational analysis just doesn’t cut it anymore. I’m amazed that other writers, who like me have spent most of their lives analyzing, are still writing prognosticating books about where we are and we we are heading. I myself have no fucking idea. I usually end these discussions with Edward saying something like “I hope you’re right.” 

The first indictments were for the most pathetically mundane of all the crimes Trump had committed—and tailor-made for Republican talking points. They are so brilliant at turning the bullet back against us. As in: “When Bill Clinton lied about his sex life, you didn’t call for him to be jailed!” (Forgetting, of course, that many of his enemies did want him—and later his wife—locked up for even less.) The false equivalence between lying about sex and covering up a campaign-coordinated hush payment was too subtle for most people to follow—or care about. And by now, the 24-hour-news-cycle being what it is, I’m guessing most people have even forgotten about those indictments.

Now, these far more serious indictments are coming down. And while my husband, who has more faith in just about everything than I do, is excited, and the commentators on Morning Joe are going on about how ‘historic” it is, how “sad a day” it is (sad? WTF?), how “unprecedented”—the words of Joe and guests have so little purchase on my pulse that I may as well be 16 years old and sitting in a high-school assembly. I’ve heard every phrase, from every “expert,” time and time and time again. I have no impulse to pick up a pencil and take any notes. I know the inevitable GOP machinery for bending the arc in the opposite direction of truth and justice is whirring away, and soon the commentators will be talking about that with the same astonishment—really?—since Barr deformed the Mueller Report. Although I always have tons to criticize about media coverage I have no interest in analyzing any of it beyond this little morning rant.

What I’m doing instead is wondering if the air quality will be good enough for me to sit on the deck of this vacation house overlooking the water. Thinking about what I want to say about “The Diplomat” in the substack I’m currently working on. Feeling vaguely guilty, and not-so-vaguely weird about the fact that I’m so uninvested in what any of the broadcasters are saying. A little sick to my stomach. Perhaps the fried clams I had last night. But also, sad-sickness. Not because this is such a “sad day for America”—an absurd phrase that, like so many of their mantras, they pull without thought from their floating, meaningless dictionary of broadcaster-talk—but sad that I’ve come so far from caring passionately to hoping for nothing.

I’ll still stayed tuned in—it’s too old a habit to abandon entirely—but I’m no longer waiting for Joseph Welch. I haven’t been for some time.

What are your feelings? Please do share, either right here or in my chatroom.