At some point in the next handful of years, I fully expect that a clever, enterprising grad student in economics or statistics will write a brilliant doctoral thesis on just how much a Donald Trump presidency has cost us. It won’t be on the obvious costs — a decimated economy, hundreds of thousands of lost lives, the demise of our moral credibility as a nation — but on the small incremental costs to each of us in terms of our time and mental and spiritual health.
Over the past four years, I have observed how obsessively I watch the news and Twitter for the latest outrage perpetrated on vulnerable and marginalized people, the most recent instance of graft and corruption, the newest assault on the pillars of our democracy. Obviously, those threats are real; but the reason for my obsessiveness has more to do with Trump’s manic need to dominate every news cycle. Every. News. Cycle.
Recently — undoubtedly long after it came into common parlance — I encountered the term “doom scrolling,” our propensity to lay in bed long after we should be asleep, continually updating our news and Twitter feeds looking for the latest signs of the apocalypse. I’m sure that this was a reality before a Trump presidency, but I certainly never experienced it. Now, it feels like an addiction.
It is in the nature of Trump’s sociopathic narcissism to require the spotlight every single instant. From the moment that the fragile Cheeto rode down the escalator to declare his candidacy, his inflammatory language and has been aimed at provoking outrage and attention. Even his obvious graft has taken place in plain sight, where everyone could take notice.
That’s the hallmark of a narcissist: it doesn’t really matter whether we adore or despise him, he just needs to be the center of the universe. He needs the attention, and I know that; but somehow I cannot keep myself from giving it to him. And in giving him my attention, I have impoverished my own life to an astonishing degree.
It isn’t simply about the loss of the value of my time — our time — although that is the element that may be the simplest to measure economically; it’s about the overall decay in the quality of our life. Every hour that we spend obsessing about his latest outrage, is an hour we haven’t been uplifted by the soaring beauty of a novel or captivated by a clever, witty new television drama.
Every time we get angry about his assault on our way of life, the world becomes a little darker. Our ongoing frustration probably means that we barked at a spouse about a simple household need or were surly with the children at the dinner table. Our sense of helplessness probably resulted in a needlessly aggressive response to a work colleague. Our sense of despair undoubtedly seeped out as impatience with a grocery store clerk or gas station attendant.
Tonight, after I returned from walking the dog, my wife Jeannine said, “Tell me if you read something funny; I need it.”
“What’s wrong,” I inquired, worried that something upsetting had occurred while I was out. We had just had a lovely dinner with Joshua, and everything had been fine.
“Oh, nothing, I was just looking at the news.” Of course.
A mood ruined, an evening bluer. Not a crisis in itself, but the cumulative effect over four years on all of us — a nation, a world — is staggering. How often did we come into work tired and depressed, unprepared to bring our best game? How many times did we fail to clasp a beloved hand, too caught up in our own interior dismay? How often did we let a creative spark blow out because we just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to nurture and explore it?
Donald Trump has made our world smaller, meaner, and bleaker. Or we have let him do it. But we don’t need to anymore. Once he is dragged kicking and screaming from the Oval Office, his ability to dominate our national psyche will diminish significantly. Oh, he will certainly try to continue to inject himself — through manic tweeting, perhaps his own talk show or even another presidential run — but they will be frantic, vain attempts.
We have an opportunity to evict him not only from office, but from our minds. We can reclaim that mental and emotional space and use it to make our lives richer. We can let go of the doom scrolling and reconnect with our better, saner, more hopeful selves. It is time to bid him a long-overdue farewell.