The Demoralizing Reality of Life Under Trump: Every day is the same, but still awful.

[hlthe2b]

Just think how much he steals from each of us every waking moment. And how much sleep he steals too! That’s why I’m up at 3 AM. Tweeting, of all things! He’s the biggest thief of time imaginable. Racking up a debt on which we’ll never collect.--Laurence Tribe

Link to tweet

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/demoralizing-reality-of-life-under-trump.html

It’s boring, at this point, to talk about the cost of living with Donald Trump as president—it’s the water we all swim in now, so it’s neither unique nor new nor surprising. And yet it’s still true, which is why it’s refreshing to read Matt Ford’s excellent piece in the New Republic, “Trump’s Tax on the National Psyche.” Ford’s formulation is a useful way to think about the massive toll, in terms of time and energy stolen from Americans forced to pay attention to inane tweets and half-baked policy, this presidency has had on all of us. As Ford observes, Trump, himself an inveterate squanderer of time, is wasting all of ours: “Trump’s haphazard style of governance,” he writes, “forces journalists, lawyers, and government officials to expend innumerable hours on doomed initiatives and errant tweets. His corrosive effect on American politics forces Americans to devote far more hours of their life to thinking about him than they should.” The problem is that we have no choice but to follow the inane tweets and oppose the half-baked policy. There are serious consequences that follow to transgender soldiers, DACA kids, green card holders, and, of course, families at the border when we don’t.

As Ford further notes, the psychic costs of following and resisting all of this stupidity are not borne equally by all Americans: “A Gallup poll from April found that younger and less affluent Americans felt more daily stress in general. Women reported higher rates than men in the APS survey; black and Hispanic Americans also registered higher levels of anxiety about the future than their white counterparts.” And this stress, in turn, has marked health impacts, again borne unequally by communities with less power. Still, it’s not just that families are ripped apart in immigration raids and that Latina mothers suffer higher rates of miscarriages—everyone following along with the cruelty at home is suffering too. In the spring, Pew polled Americans asking them to describe how Trump’s comments and statements made them feel. The top seven responses, in descending order? They felt concerned (76 percent), confused (70 percent), embarrassed (69 percent), exhausted (67 percent), angry (65 percent), insulted (62 percent), and frightened (56 percent). In the Washington Post, William Wan and Lindsey Bever write that “Researchers have begun to identify correlations between Trump’s election and worsening cardiovascular health, sleep problems, anxiety and stress, especially among Latinos in the United States.” In other words, it’s not just that Trump is wasting our time and mental space; he’s also making us physically ill.

[yonder]

1. "it's the water we all swim in now..."

He's got that right, but I'm not sure it's water and don't think we're swimming.