I Will Continue Sweating the Small Stuff

My friend Molly Jong Fast wrote a short piece for Vanity Fair this week whose premise is surmised in the sub-head: “Every outrage and insult can’t be a five-alarm fire, as it’s critical for the media to stay focused on the most serious threats to America’s democratic institutions.”

(Before I delve any further into this topic, I think it’s important to emphasize that I don’t know if “sub-head” is the correct term for what I just quoted, but it sounds like something that happens between two consenting sailors in close quarters.)

Molly’s point is that Trump is going to do a bunch of outrageous things in his second term, just as he did in his first, and we would be making a mistake to run for our fainting couches each time he does. Instead, she advocates concentrating our ire on those things which threaten “the center,” which she says “may not hold.”

On its face the argument makes a lot of sense, but I wonder if she’s itching to fight a war that has already been lost. Put another way: what are the centrist issues that Trump ran on? The cost of those pesky eggs, for sure, but inflation played a tiny role in a campaign focused almost entirely on personal grievances and culture battles. The center, I’m afraid, is already gone.

Onward Christian soldier.

If that were not the case, Harris/Walz would have won walking away. It was the Harris campaign which focused on kitchen table issues like housing costs, entrepreneurship, healthcare, college costs, and expanding the child tax credit. It wasn’t the Democrats running on trans women in sports or immigrants snacking on those delicious Ohio pets. Instead, they allowed Kamala’s very existence as a mixed-race woman to define the terms of the debate they wanted to have. And it worked. The nation voted to restore to office a man who has never met a problem he could not make worse.

What does the center even look like now? Has Trump slid it so far to the right that our entire ship of state is listing starboard? When about half of all Americans support rounding up millions of people and housing them in concentration camps on their way to eventual deportation, I’m afraid the center as I have always understood it has drifted so far to the right as to be halfway across the Pacific Ocean.

America has almost always elected Presidents who operate within the bounds of normalcy. That “normalcy” could look radical in difficult times. During the Depression, for example, when FDR opened the money spigots and put people to work.

Our wars have also been extraordinary times when our presidents have enacted radical (and often terrible) policies that shatter normalcy. FDR, again, did this with the Japanese internment camps. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. Woodrow Wilson created “The Committee on Public Information,” which this article described as an “Orwellian propaganda ministry” designed to shape American opinion on our involvement in the first World War. The point is simple: even during extraordinary times, when Presidents elbow their way outside of constitutional strictures and norms, the results are almost always bad.

But we’re not even in extraordinary times.

The economy is solid. While the US is supporting our allies in two conflicts, the nation is not at war. Unemployment is low. Nobody is invading us (except maybe extraterrestrials). And yet, Trump ran a radical populist campaign that ought to have found little purchase with “the center.” But it did. Because the center is gone.

So, if that’s true, what’s a gal like me to do? How do we talk about the new Trump administration in ways that are both accurate and also accurately reflect the insanity he has already begun unleashing on an American populace who specifically asked for insanity? Molly believes we need to focus our attention on the big stuff. I agree. The problem is, from my point of view, it’s ALL big stuff.

Consider the nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Department of Defense. As I’m sure you all know by now, Hegseth is a Fox News host and combat veteran who has never served in government, never ran anything, has no experience in strategic planning or budgeting, has limited relationships with military and congressional leadership and, by the way, settled a sexual assault case, and sports at least a couple tattoos associated with white supremacy. This is one nomination and, critically, isn’t even the worst of his nominations.

Pretty sure THIS is the worst of his nominations but that’s only because we haven’t had a polio outbreak yet.

Is that not the big stuff? I’m not even being snarky when I ask the question: doesn’t that seem like a pretty big fucking deal when the Trump people are, allegedly, already drawing up lists of flag officers to be fired and/or charged with treason? I know I’m not supposed to freak out about every goddamned thing, but you know what? It’s starting to feel a little freaky up in here.

At the moment, Trump is lighting brush fires, each one of which threatens to grow into a conflagration. We can focus on this one or that one to the exclusion of the others, or we can try to stamp them out as they spark. The problem with both approaches is that either one is likely to create a blaze nobody will be able to control.

I’m glad thoughtful people are considering their approach to covering the second Trump presidency. Lord knows I’m at a loss for what to do or how to discuss it. My only thought at the moment is to proceed as a happy warrior of the opposition. Yes, happy, because as Molly points out, “MAGA loves nothing more than owning the libs.”

I refuse to fill their mugs with my liberal tears; let them drink their own bile instead, and let them eat their own. This will end badly. Of that I am already certain. How badly is up to them. I’m going to be over here on the sidelines calling them out every step of the way. There’s that saying: “don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff.” As this new administration starts to take shape, the small stuff appears to me indistinguishable from the big. I’m already sweating.