Looking back on the Trump era

It’s been almost exactly nine years since Donald Trump announced he was running for president.

This post is an attempt to step back and take a broader view of what has happened since then.

For pretty much all of the remainder of 2015, Trump had a big lead in all the polls of the massive GOP candidate field, while almost everybody treated his campaign as some sort of basically trivial publicity stunt.

Then January 2016 rolled around, and for the first time it began to dawn on many Very Serious People that Donald Trump — yes that Donald Trump, the washed up 1980s celebrity rebooted as the star of a particularly idiotic “reality” TV show — could actually become the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

This realization was met by horror for almost all establishment Republicans, not because it was throwing a grim light on what their party was becoming, but for the same reason it evoked glee among almost all Democrats: Because there was no way he could actually become president, should he get the nomination. Because of course that couldn’t happen. I mean be serious.

So over the next six months Trump rolls to the nomination, just destroying the entire field, and then gives an almost openly fascistic acceptance speech at the GOP convention. Only then do some VSP begin, for the first time, to think, wait a minute, this could actually happen. And then something like hope mixed with panic begins to set in among GOP establishment types, while pure panic begins to hit liberals and progressives. Not radical centrists though. They remain perfectly calm, because guardrails, both sides, white privilege, 401(k), really good weed I guess.

October is a completely surreal month: Access Hollywood tape, wikileaks, Comey letter, probably another huge thing or two I’m just repressing at this point.

Then he gets elected. Only then, I think, does what has happened — what we have done as a country — begin to actually sink in for basically everyone, very much including Donald Trump himself.

Once the initial shock has worn off, there are lots of predictions about how things won’t be that bad, after all he’s just doing schtick, he’ll normalize, the grownups will be in the room, he will grow into the office (remember “this is the day Donald Trump became president?”), plus plenty of people pointing out that the real fault lies with all those elitist liberals who made simple country folk in diners across the land feel bad about their Heritage etc.

Well it turns out those predictions are totally wrong, because Trump turns out to be every bit as bad as his worst critics predicted he’d be, if not worse. He’s a complete catastrophe of a president, because jesus fucking christ America what did you THINK was going to happen?

Then on top of that the worst pandemic in more than a century hits just as the 2020 presidential campaign is revving up, and surely this is it, right? Shirley there’s no possible way America can have looked at the last four years and said, you know, maybe we should give Donald Trump another four years to be president again. I mean sure the 27% are going to think that because they’re crazy. Ok maybe the 35%. Look it’s possible it might be 40% but more than that is just so absurd . . . So next thing you know the election turns out to be so close that it’s not clear for DAYS afterwards that he actually lost!

I mean to me this is the single most mind-blowing moment of the previous five and half years. Everything else that had happened I could sort of understand on some level — I mean I predicted it pretty much before anybody else did — but this?

But of course I hadn’t seen anything yet.

So . . . after being a total catastrophe, Donald Trump nearly gets re-elected, and when he loses by about 12 votes in a Wisconsin diner, he decides hey I’ll just stay in power anyway by overthrowing the government, So he spends a couple of months trying to do that (people kinda sorta forget that January 6th was just the public culmination of a two-month-long conspiracy in the precise criminal law meaning of the term, hi Merrick!), then lets loose a violent mob on the Capitol in an attempt to literally murder his political opponents, gets impeached for that faux pas, and there are about nine days in there where it seems this is it, it’s gone to far, we’ve lost the sun, it’s FINALLY all over, and then . . . No it’s not. At all.

It turns out almost exactly half of America looks back at all this and says, the problem is the Democrats. Which means the problem is Those People, who must be kept from stealing Our Country by very literally any means necessary.

Which is why we’re all going to be where we are tonight. Because all this actually happened, and is still happening right now. Which I still, on some very basic level, don’t completely believe could be true.