Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
After Donald Trump was elected—and even before then (during the non-stop drama of his reality-TV campaign and election)—I was an avid consumer of political news. On cable TV, I followed Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Anderson Cooper, Bill Maher, Joe Scarborough with Mika Brzezinski, and even, for as long as I could take them, Fox and Friends. I also read online articles from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Huffington Post, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and The Nation. I tried to maintain of balanced point-of-view by getting information from both sides of the political spectrum, but it got to be too much. I started suffering from sensory, and then disgust, overload.
The Stormy Daniels payoff, the William Barr confirmation hearings, Brett Kavanaugh’s checkered past, Russian interference in the 2016 election, the unveiling of the Mueller Report, and more—oh so much more—comprised just the tip of the great informational iceberg lying dead ahead. It seemed as if all these incidents, all these stories, coming one on top of the other as they did, were auguries of a great tragedy—which in a sense, they are—and that, like a natural disaster, would engulf us no matter what we did; avoiding this iceberg was so impossible, I felt helpless.
Simply being informed about these incidents didn’t do any good. Knowing they existed didn’t solve them, even if I had the ability to do so, and no one else in power seemed able, or willing, to do anything about them. Cries of outrage, the rending of garments, and communal keening became the only outlet for our outrage and anger and pain. But you can only vent for so long before you lose your breath.
Like a new parent who finds himself constantly comforting a crying baby or defusing a toddler’s temper tantrums, I became exhausted. The constant onslaught of allegations, accusations, lawsuits, and retorts got to be too much. I needed a break from Baby Trump and his playmates Kellyanne, Rudy, Mike, Mooch, and all his other little friends (at least the ones he hadn’t gotten rid of yet).
And I wasn’t alone. According to a survey done by Pew Research last spring, more than 7 in 10 Americans felt “fatigued” by the amount of news available, numbers very similar to survey participants expressing the same sort of exhaustion during the 2016 presidential election.
Surprisingly, according to the survey, those who watch the news less often have been feeling more fatigued than those who watch it more frequently. A majority of Americans, about 65%, watch the news consistently, while only about 35% watch when they perceive something important is going on. Also, those who have less favorable opinions toward the media also seem to be more easily worn out by the coverage. One might conclude that those less disposed to watch the news—possibly because they are distrustful of it—are the ones most likely to turn it off. This, perhaps not coincidentally, echoes the sentiment of President Trump’s disparagement of the media. How often have we heard the President braying about “fake news” or berating “the dishonest and corrupt media” to the cheers of the hard-core followers at his rallies?
As this presidency wears on and we wear down, and tune out, we need to ask ourselves what the cost of alienation might be. If we turn our backs on the corruption and lies and payoffs and evasions and criminality seeping from this swamp, aren’t we running the risk of strengthening the power base of Trump and his minions? To those Republicans in the legislature who might, just maybe, be feeling qualms of conscience about the leader of their party and the direction he is leading them, would our apathy be reason enough for them to shrug away their doubts?
I’ve heard speculation that the bombardment of the media with asinine presidential tweets, disparagements, insults, and grandstanding is part of a master strategy, that by distracting our attention with his clown car of an administration, Trump has been able to quietly implement policies, usually by bypassing the legislature through executive orders.
These orders include attempting to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, suspending entry of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, loosening federal environmental regulations, lifting federal protections of federal monuments, and—ironically—creating a commission to examine voter fraud. Some of these directives have been overturned in appeals court, but the fact that many have been slipped under the door while we listened wearily to another Kellyanne Conway fabrication may lend credence to the idea that the sound and fury of this administration could be a saturation strategy signifying something.
Trump’s probably not that smart, but, even if this strategy is a happy accident for him, we still have to be sure to keep our heads up. It’s tiring, it’s stupid, it’s disgusting, and it’s asinine. I’m sick of it. But the moment we turn away, the moment we walk out will be the moment that Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys will have won. I don’t believe we can trust our politicians to do the right thing anymore. We might feel helpless, but we still have to stay alert.
America, exhausted as it is, still has a conscience and we are it.