Creep of the Week: Trump

As I write this, the State of the Union Address is scheduled to start in a couple of hours. I am not going to watch it. For so many reasons.

For one thing, I already know that the state of the union is VERY BAD. Who besides Kash Patel is having a good time right now? He’s using FBI planes as his personal jets and partying with the U.S. hockey team.

But the rest of us? Things suck. The economy? Sucks. ICE? Sucks. Our country’s international standing? Sucks. The President? Sucks.

Trump’s approval rating gets lower by the day, which won’t surprise anyone who pays even a little attention. He is truly terrible at this job. He was the first time, too. But the first time he had people surrounding him who, though terrible, did provide some semblance of brakes. Now the brakes are off. And most of the country does not like it at all.

But you know what else the country doesn’t like? Democrats. As I watch the dumpster fire that is the second Trump presidency, I fear that Democratic leaders in D.C. are rubbing their hands together, excited by the prospect of winning big in the midterms. And I hope that they do win big. I hope that Democrats win a majority in the U.S. House and Senate. And I hope that they will impeach Trump and hold the members of his administration accountable.

But I am not holding my breath.

By the time you’re reading this, the State of the Union Speech will be over. But I have some guesses about what it will include. He will blame immigrants and transgender people for all of this country’s woes. He will say “transgender for everybody” as if that is even a thing. He’ll say some dipshit thing about Iran. He’ll praise ICE and call anyone who opposes them domestic terrorists. He’ll call the Democrats enemies of the people, and the Democrats will sit there quietly and take it. Maybe they’ll hold up little paddles like last time.

It’s honestly difficult to wrap my brain around the level of corruption and cruelty of the Trump administration. Many days, I find myself wishing I could turn off my empathy switch because the amount of pain and suffering Trump and the Republican Party writ large are causing is breaking my heart every day.

But what also breaks my heart is the fact that Democrats largely are not acting like we are surrounded by emergencies. As I said, it feels like they’re warming their hands at the dumpster fire and waiting for it to go out on its own. But the fuel for the fire is people. It’s immigrants and queer people, especially transgender people. It’s black and brown people. Meanwhile, protesters and constitutional observers who want to put the fire out are being brutalized and killed in the streets.

I feel very grateful that I am represented in the U.S. House by Rashida Tlaib. She calls for abolishing ICE and protecting immigrants.

“We have all watched as ICE agents execute American citizens in broad daylight and detain and deport our immigrant neighbors with no regard for their well-being, right to due process, or the myriad other laws and court orders restricting their illegal operations,” Rep. Tlaib said in a recent statement. “We must organize and use every tool at our disposal to keep ICE out of our neighborhoods. I will continue working hand in hand with advocates to protect our communities from ICE.”

In other words, she gets it. Other Democrats seem to get it, too. But not nearly enough of them.

You know how devastating it was when your parents told you, “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed?” Well, I am both mad and disappointed. And it is exhausting.

And yet, I have to fight through that exhaustion. Because that’s exactly what this administration wants. Trump likes to say that he’s gotten more done in the first year of his presidency than any other president. And you know what? He is probably right. He’s done A LOT. Unfortunately, the things that he’s done are very bad.

Journalist Parker Molloy has an excellent piece in Dame Magazine on the administration’s tactic of “flooding the zone” and how the media is largely failing us all.

“When every day brings a dozen stories framed as urgent, disconnected from each other, stripped of the context that would make them add up to something, the reasonable move is to stop trying to keep up,” Molloy writes. “Fatigue is the point. When people tune out, the administration operates with less scrutiny.”

In this way, Trump is like a magician. Magic is all about deception, after all. He governs by misdirection. Democrats would do well to treat him like the fraud he is.