The Inescapability of Trump
We were talking recently about basketball, maybe the NCAA tournament or the NBA playoffs. And somehow, the talk changed direction and became a conversation about illegal deportations.
We are having drinks at a local coffee shop and when we pause for a moment, we re-start by discussing tariffs and how the shrinking dollar is going to make our European trip more expensive.
While watching television, an old sitcom, we suddenly remark on the similarities between our current situation and the Vietnam War protests and how we all should be doing more.
When getting together for dinner, we promise not to discuss politics, not to mention his name or his policies or his outrages, and each time we fail. Each time, we end up angry, exasperated, frustrated, fixated.
It’s by no means the worst thing about Trump and his administration, but it may be the most viscerally annoying: how he has invaded all our conversations, how he has dominated all our thoughts, how he is the first thing we read online in the morning and the last thing we hear about before we go to bed at night. It doesn’t matter if what we’re thinking or talking about has any relation to these last 100 days; the last 100 days just worm themselves in.
His inevitability is even the subject of a recent Onion headline: “Happy Monday, Everyone,” it read over an imaginary post from the president. “Looking Forward to Another Week of Infecting Every Aspect of Your Daily Lives!”
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera, who lived under a totalitarian Communist regime, wrote how through the manipulation of history, memory and personal identity, totalitarianism invades every part of life, including thought and emotion. Autocrats don’t just control through force; they control through dominating not just our public lives, but our private ones, too.
In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” Kundera writes that the totalitarian “wants to fuse everything into one; the individual and the crowd, the private and public, man and woman.”
We are not yet a totalitarian state. The “Hands-Off” demonstrations of the last several weeks, along with resistance by disparate actors like Cory Booker, Harvard University, some judges and some major law firms, attests to that.
But Trump and his cronies and policies have infiltrated our daily lives and thoughts and conversations in a way no one has done in my lifetime. They are dominating the present and re-writing the past. They are in our thoughts all the time, on the news all the time. I counted, the other day, 14 separate headlines and stories on the digital front page of The New York Times that referenced Trump or his policies. There was almost no room for Spelling Bee or recipes.
Yes, he is indeed everywhere! His impact impacts us all, all the time, even for white, mostly middle class, older people, who may not—so far—have been directly affected by these last hundred days. Indeed, as Steve Bannon promised, they are flooding the zone with shit—and all of us are at least a little shit-faced.
How do we get out from under? How do we still focus on what he’s doing and what we must do in response but still, occasionally, turn our attention to the baseball season or the movie we just saw or wondering where the next season of “The White Lotus” will be set? How do we have conversations that don’t inexorably lead to a discussion of our endangered IRAs or the madness at the Department of Defense or the insanity of treating measles with cod liver oil?
I wish I had some answers. Maybe I’ll watch a basketball game tonight and see if I can submerge myself.