I write about day-to-day politics less frequently than I used to, and certainly less often than I did during the first six months of the second Trump administration. The primary reason is disgust. Disgust is different than outrage. When Trump appeared to be doing things I judged to be truly alarming during those initial months, and then when he did so again during the protests against ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis last winter, I devoted multiple posts to current events. Those were often posts written from a place of outrage.
But since around the time we went to war against Iran—six months ago today, if you can believe it—I’ve fallen into a different kind of posting rhythm. The president’s behavior and statements, and those of his obsequious enablers and mindless cheerleaders, have been so nonsensical and self-subversive that I can’t muster the motivation to write about them regularly. So I turn my attention to topics less liable to inspire a reaction of disgust—disgust at Trump himself, but equally so at those enablers and cheerleaders, but perhaps most of all at the 77.3 million Americans who voted for this corrupt and malicious moron when they possessed far more than enough information about him to realize that doing so would be a monumental mistake risking national (and maybe geopolitical) disaster.
That multilayered sensation of disgust might be warranted, but it also feels bad. I don’t want to marinade in it and keep feeling bad. I’d rather think about other things—while, of course, never disconnecting entirely from the news cycle. My position as a newsletter scribe with a specialty in political analysis and commentary precludes anything like such disconnection. So I observe, silently, with exasperated tweets serving as the only outlet for the slowly rising disgust—until, that is, the tweets can no longer contain it. That’s when—on average, every 3 to 4 weeks—I resolve to write a Trump-focused post for you, my long-suffering subscribers. Though the honest truth is that it’s also for me, since I just can’t keep my rage bottled up any longer.
