There's a phrase that's sometimes used to insult others, like me, who spend too much time thinking about or discussing Donald Trump: “You let Trump live in your head for free.”
I hate.
This insult hit home because it happened to be true. I spend an enormous amount of time thinking, reading, and writing about the former president.
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It wasn't always this way. In fact, years ago, I was at some event or other in New York City when I noticed Trump casually approach and start chatting with Ice-T. At the time, Trump was just a vulgar asshole making the rounds at New York City parties. Don't ask me what they talked about, I wasn't interested enough to eavesdrop. I remember the incident because I found a photo of the two of them that I'd secretly taken to commemorate the oddness of the pairing (I've failed to find a photo to accompany this article).
During The Apprentice, I didn't think about Trump at all. If he occupied my mind at all, I devoted about the same amount of time to him as I did to the old Bit O' Honey candy. Not quite, but pretty close.
That all changed in 2015 when they hired a group of actors to applaud as Trump descended the escalator to announce his candidacy for the US presidency. From that moment on, my thoughts turned to the man who would soon become our narcissistic president.
It wasn't that I cared about Trump as a person. As far as I was concerned, he was the same stupid loser he always was. What had changed for me was the country. Well, maybe “changed” is the wrong word. Maybe I should say that Trump, of all the presidential candidates I've seen, revealed the country to me in the way that it did.
As that disastrous election campaign dragged on, I experienced what people in the UFO community call an “ontological shock,” a sudden and fundamental shift in worldview. I couldn't believe that so many Americans not only supported his cruel, exclusionary policies, but had adopted them as their own beliefs. At last, they seemed to think, someone had given us permission and blessing for all of our worst human impulses.
It's as if the Karen people have been waiting for decades to finally be let loose.
Here I use another overused phrase: “We thought we were better. We really were.”
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I thought that the heat of the past half century of progress had finally cooled and been cemented in the national consciousness. But that wasn't the case. It turns out that a significant portion of the population still believed we had progressed as far as they would have liked. Maybe we really need to take a few steps back.
I made the classic mistake of assuming that just because all of my friends support fundamental ideas like same-sex marriage, equal pay for equal work, electoral districts that represent the people who live there, and separation of church and state, the rest of the country fundamentally agrees with them, even if they only grudgingly agree from time to time.
Sure, I thought there would always be some lunatics on the far right clamoring to repeal Roe v. Wade, but as every judicial candidate has answered since at least 1973, abortion access was established law. I thought so, but as the saying goes, I'm an idiot.
When Trump was elected president, I predicted that he would be one of the worst presidents. But the actual experience of his administration was horrific, not just in terms of incompetence but also in terms of misconduct. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of misconduct, but it would have been a lot worse if Trump hadn't been so incompetent.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the line between incompetence and misconduct became blurred and indistinguishable, with the results for all to see.
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Anyone want to go through that again? Apparently so. Trump currently has a slight lead or is tied in most polls.
So I truly am allowing Trump to live rent-free in my own mind. To evict him now would be to turn a blind eye to the threat this man's movement poses to the country and the world.
He gets to live there for free, but it certainly takes a toll on me having to spend all my time thinking about him. But my philosophy is simple: pay now or pay later. I choose to pay now, before the costs get even higher.
Like it or not, I'm going to let Donald Trump continue to live there rent-free for a little while longer, and then if he loses the election again, I can finally kick him out for good. With any luck, he'll end up living somewhere else for free, probably a prison cell.
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