Whether or not the Trump administration was ever competent enough to consciously implement a shock and awe strategy against the U.S. government and the American people, as Steve Bannon dreamed, a sense of being overwhelmed in ever-fresh and perilous ways has been our lot ever since a certain special someone took the oath of office back in January of 2017. The volume and depth of offenses against our common morality, democracy, and safety have made us feel like we’re constantly scrambling on at least two fundamental levels: simply keeping up with the news, and trying to find a stable place of perspective to put it all together and understand its larger meaning.
These universal challenges come together every time I think about what I want to write about. How to prioritize?, is the fundamental question. Probably like a lot of writers, I let my personal interests guide me, both because a) why write otherwise? and b) it resolves the prioritization conundrum (to get anywhere, you have to start somewhere, as some ancient folk saying undoubtedly says). But this isn’t a cure for the sense of being overwhelmed; it’s just how I cope.
These past few weeks, I’ve been feeling acutely overwhelmed, as the number of unsettling stories and their dark implications for our country have seemed to escalate. Dig into it, and any single outrage contains multitudes of perfidy and stupidity; try to take a step back to find some perspective, and you reel with the thought that our mechanisms for addressing such levels of craziness are at best exceedingly slow-working, and at worst, broken. Scandals that would wreck any ordinary presidency explode like fireworks, not firebombs. Their sheer number seems to work in the president’s favor, with the stories seeming to cancel each other out or to fade away given the implications of even larger offenses. Why fret about the travel spending of cabinet officials when the president might be a Russian patsy, right? And the sheer outrageousness also seems to provide cover to this administration. The spy novel amazingness of a president blackmailed or otherwise indebted to a hostile foreign power is only the grandest of our threads. What about the news that Jared Kushner may have encouraged U.S. backing of a war against Qatar as revenge for that country refusing to provide financial backing to the Kushner family? The deeds are so vile that even opponents of the Trump regime are taken aback. THIS is our reality now?
Grappling with all this, I keep coming back to a counter-intuitive point that doesn’t even totally make sense to me. As much as many millions of Americans are paying attention, and are angry and motivated to fight for change, I keep thinking that we are having difficulty comprehending the depth of the depravity and the scale of the response that’s required. Yes, the amount of energy we see going into Democratic and progressive efforts to re-take the House and Senate in 2018 seems to be hitting historical levels; in the face of an anti-democratic president, millions of Americans are doubling down on our institutions and the electoral process. This is very good news.
But playing by the rules and norms of our democracy isn’t how Donald Trump got elected. He got elected by — at a minimum — accepting the assistance of a hostile foreign power; by mainstreaming racist and white nationalist sentiments; by denying his sexual predation against numerous women; by blaming immigrants for every problem under the sun. Beyond this, he benefitted from a media that amplified nonsense attacks about Hillary Clinton’s email use and an FBI head who broke protocol by announcing a re-opened investigation against Clinton days before the election. Trump broke the rules, but so did other major players in our national power structure.
For all the energized opposition, it too often feels like the initiative remains with Donald Trump. We all wait for the next blow to fall: Will he fire Robert Mueller? Will he start a trade war? Which African-American woman will he insult next? I know there are real structural reasons for his ability to maintain this initiative — he is, after all, the president — but there must be ways to blunt this advantage. Taking Trump and what he represents seriously means figuring out a way to take back control of our national conversation. Maybe what I’m getting at is this: to fully grasp how dangerous and destructive this administration is, we also need to more fully articulate and fight for what we actually want than ever before.
