Waiting Game

You know how sometimes a sequel gets made and you think to yourself, “Why would they make another edition of a movie that sucked so bad the first time around?” Trump II has that feeling, no? The original cast of flunkies and miscreants has been downgraded to a bizarre assemblage of sexual predators, Fox News personalities, and neurodivergent billionaires seeking to refashion the treasury into a crypto Ponzi scheme. It’s like The Expendables franchise, only instead of adding more and more action stars from the 80’s, Trump throws in more and more sex pests and weirdos.

““You know, she stands for something. You know, man, we don’t stand for sh*t. We used to, but that dried all up, like this is gonna dry all up. This here paint is gonna dry.” - Mickey Rourke, “The Expendables.”

If it all seems too sordid to be real, that’s only because America’s young history has yet to elect the sort of government that, in other countries in other times, topples its own nation. We thought we were exceptional. We thought the Constitution would protect us from the worst abuses of the tyrannical and power-crazed. We believed it could not happen here. Will it now? I don’t know, but I’m certainly convinced of its potential.

When the asteroid took out the dinosaurs, I’m sure plenty of them watched the fireball streaking across the sky and flapped their little T. Rex hands and kept right on screaming, “It can’t happen here!” right up until the moment they were wiped off the face of the planet.

“We got through last time,” we tell ourselves, “And we’ll get through this time, too.”

Fair enough. So why does it still feel so icky around here every day? And what are we supposed to do about it?

Lots of stories like this one have popped up regarding the so-called Resistance, most describing the fatigue we feel from ten years of this shit. Why go out and march when marching accomplished so little the last time around? What are expected to protest, exactly? The will of our nation who voted for this calamity? What is the plan moving forward? Is there a plan?

The “plan,” such as it isn’t, seems as if it will unfold in reaction to events, not in anticipation of them. Although the president-elect has told us time and again all of the horrid things he plans to do when he assumes office, we do not yet know where he will first focus his attention. Will it be retreating from NATO? Punishing his enemies? Shutting down government services? Warehousing immigrants in concentration camps? All of the above? We don’t know where to put our attention at the moment because the horror show is happening all at once and coming from every direction. It’s GWAR at The Sphere.

Presidential transitions always have an uneasiness about them, either because your candidate lost, or because your candidate won. Change always brings worry. What sucks is when it also brings menace, as this one does. It’s an uneasy time because we anticipate crisis, but don’t yet know its nature.

There’s a certain artfulness to waiting. I’ve gotten quite good at it because I spend so much time traveling for work. I know how to structure those in-between times to minimize my anticipatory discomfort and maximize my opportunities for naps. While I’m not sleepwalking through this, I’m also not going to spend too much of my energy freaking out about a trip I have no ability to avoid taking. In the meantime, the airport bars are open and Happy Hour will continue until morale improves.

Needless to say, morale is not improving. Yesterday night, for example, the New York Times featured this digital cover:

We’re still two months out from Inauguration.

Half a dozen stories about criminality and incompetence involving Trump’s Cabinet nominees. A detailed accounting of Matt Gaetz’s payments for sex: take a shot. A recap of Dr. Oz’s fraud settlement: take a shot. Linda McMahon is set to inherit the Department of Education. Why? Nobody knows. Take a shot. If we start puking all over the place, you’ll know why.

Honestly, I don’t even know what I’m trying to say here, other than to give some kind of voice to the sense of unease I suspect most of us are experiencing to varying degrees. Even the Trump folks seem to be going about their work with a certain grimness that seems to forebode dark times. We’re waiting, all of us, but we don’t quite know yet what it is we’re waiting for. Unpleasantness, certainly. Corruption, no doubt. Tearful Jimmy Kimmel monologues, I certainly hope not.

I don’t want to keep talking about it, but I also can’t help talking it. I don’t want to devote too much of my mental energy to it, but I cannot seem to avoid that, either. Instead, I’m just trying to deal with the waiting in the best ways I know how. The trick, I guess, is to try to remain present. We’re here now. We’re ok now. We’ll deal with all the shit we have to deal with when we have to deal with it. And yes, there’s a new Expendables movie coming out in 2025 and yes, it looks terrible. But as they say in the trailer, “Another day, another challenge.”