In praise of not thinking about Donald Trump every day
Can you imagine? Regular thoughts, all day.
For four years, Donald Trump has been the main character of America. He has done his best to drag the country down to his level through bullying tweets and bigoted executive orders, by livetweeting Fox News and picking fights with C-list CNN anchors.
Now his presidency is over, and thank goodness for that. On a policy level, that means we have competent people who care about anything besides themselves in charge of the country. On a more local level, that means that we don’t have to hear about Donald Trump every second of every goddamn day.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but this is truly the greatest gift that I have ever been given.
Donald Trump was, by design, exhausting. It’s just difficult to get outraged about something when there are four more things to get outraged over an hour later. Like, he signed a bill killing safety regulations, and then his Energy Department banned the phrase “Climate Change” from all communications, and then James Comey told him Trump called him personally and asked Comey to “lift the cloud” of the Russia investigation, and then Trump signed a law that let states withhold funding used solely for contraception from local Planned Parenthoods AND THAT WAS ALL IN THREE DAYS (March 28-30, 2017 to be specific).
There’s just no way to really get into the safety regulations, because you hear about how dumb and petty the Energy Department was you just sadly shake your head, and then you get outraged over the base corruption in the Comey story, and then…It all just kinda fades into itself, one everlasting scandal, encompassing minutiae and world-ending calamity alike until the casual viewer can’t tell the difference between the two.
Or, to quote Internet sage Wolfpupy:
And now, all of that’s not our problem anymore.
Donald Trump is still a narcissist, and an idiot, and lazy as fuck, and addicted to Fox News, and amoral, and utterly uninterested in giving a hundredth of a second’s thought to improving the life of anyone not named Donald J Trump (and considering his antipathy towards Don Jr, even that name only gives you a 50/50 shot). But he doesn’t have a microphone anyore. He doesn’t have Twitter. And he doesn’t have the federal government.
There will still be people hanging on his every word, but now you don’t have to be one of them. He can just be one of the millions of awful people in the world whose existence makes no overt mark on your life. There are so many Americans who have awful opinions — some racist, some classist, some anti-scientific, and so many more — but no one gives them a microphone and the duty to speak for all 330 million of us, so they’re just terrible alone, which is basically a best case scenario.
And now Donald Trump is terrible alone. He’s not going to radicalize scores of converts every day just through their constantly being exposed to him. He’s not going to tweet out his opinions. And he’s not going to involve you in The Donald Trump Show, a stillbirth of a TV show that you never wanted anything to do with in the first place.
Every day Trump was on Twitter, if you were also on Twitter you were exposed to him. It doesn’t matter if you had him blocked, or muted, or you just ignored him, someone was going to find a way to make you read some of the worst Trump tweets of the day and shove them in your face, so you could make the same jokes everyone else was already making
There’s a kind of peace to him being gone from social media, and yesterday, the country as a whole started feeling its own small piece of that peace. He’s finally unimportant again, like he should have been a week ago, like he hopefully will be for the rest of his life. Things seem a little less cruel, a little greener. And it can be like this for years now.
We don’t have to think about him. We don’t have to consider his opinions on anything. We don’t have to worry that he’s going to wake up and use the powers of the Presidency to try to subvert democracy. Most of all, though, we don’t have to look at him. We don’t have to constantly face the simple, sad fact that our society created this thing, and it’s a monster.
There will be time for recriminations and reflection later, time to both consider and curse Donald Trump at our leisure, when we can mentally handle using part of our brain capacity on him. For now, though, we trudge on, pushing past Donald Trump, our lives better without him. It’s tough to savor a negative, but in this case, I think we can all do it.