{"id":695,"date":"2019-08-01T15:38:16","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T19:38:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/wordpress\/almostclassical\/?p=695"},"modified":"2025-01-09T22:08:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T04:08:23","slug":"the-groundhog-day-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/2019\/08\/01\/the-groundhog-day-presidency\/","title":{"rendered":"The Groundhog Day Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was away from the new for days and even weeks at a time this summer.\u00a0I didn\u2019t miss much<\/strong>.\u00a0When I did see a television tuned to cable news or read a headline on my phone, the story could have been from any time since the 2016 election campaign.<\/p>\n

Disliking Donald Trump is easy. Following news and commentary about his latest outrageous act or statement is exhausting.<\/p>\n

Though I lack any evidence for this, I have to imagine some younger voters \u2014 and maybe voters of any age \u2014 find Trump pushing them towards progressive, and even outright anti-capitalist, anti-market, anti-republican ideals.<\/p>\n

Faced with Donald Trump, voters rush to reject \u201ccapitalism\u201d and anything that Trump claims to support. If Trump is the free market, why not be a socialist? The problem is, Trump is not a market capitalist (he is a corporatist) and he\u2019s certainly not a fiscal conservative or social libertarian. Trump is all about Donald Trump, with no guiding ideology other than his narcissism.<\/p>\n

What Donald Trump does prove is that the Republican Party was as soulless as he is, since most GOP officials and voters won\u2019t reject the nonsense spewed by this president.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written before that most \u201cDemocratic Socialists<\/a>\u201d have no claim to the label\u00a0Socialist<\/strong>. They confuse and conflate terms, taking public commons and public welfare and turning those into \u201csocialism\u201d that has nothing at all to do with controlling the means of production. Trump is making socialism acceptable more broadly simply because calling yourself a socialist is a way of proclaiming, \u201cI hate Trump!”<\/p>\n

Day after day, week after week, President Trump has said or done something ignorant, racist, sexist, xenophobic, reckless, and (probably) entirely incorrect.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t need to watch the news to know Trump is a lousy person, a horrible leader, and a cancer within the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

But, I\u2019m not going to declare myself a socialist. I\u2019m not going to waste time pretending to be surprised by whatever he\u2019s done this week or day. I\u2019m surprised when an hour passes and he hasn\u2019t done something proving his lack of character.<\/p>\n

Missing the news, I miss nothing. There\u2019s nothing that\u2019s going to lower my expectations any further. The news is simply a spiral downward.<\/p>\n

I realize our leaders have all been flawed. Some of the greatest presidents fell short of their own stated ideals. Some good presidents were men who had to mature and grow even while in office.<\/p>\n

We shouldn\u2019t hold\u00a0leaders to impossibly high standards, but Trump reminds me of the worst of so many all wrapped up\u00a0into a single symbol of reactionary fear<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Trump is Wilson\u2019s racism and abuses of power. He\u2019s Nixon\u2019s paranoia. He\u2019s Clinton\u2019s lack of impulse control. Whatever you dislike about a past president, chances are Trump has that trait.<\/p>\n

Even this post feels like a waste of time and energy. If you defend Trump, I won\u2019t persuade you he\u2019s toxic. If you dislike Trump, I probably don\u2019t dislike him enough to please you.<\/p>\n

What Trump has done, day after day, is wear down many of us who used to be news and information addicts. I loved listening to debates and exploring theories of leadership. Trump proved most of the theories I read wrong. If he is reelected, which I believe is more likely with each passing Democratic debate, yet more theories will need to be discarded.<\/p>\n

It is hard to be passionate about politics in the Age of Trump. Tomorrow\u2019s outrage will overshadow today\u2019s offense. And whatever he does next week will surely be more shocking.<\/p>\n

Decades from now, how will we explain the president who exhausted a nation? My nightmare is waking up and finding nothing has changed even after this presidency ends.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was away from the new for days and even weeks at a time this summer.\u00a0I didn\u2019t miss much.\u00a0When I did see a television tuned…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"iawp_total_views":3,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,80,157,103,61],"class_list":["post-695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-2016-election","tag-trump","tag-news-media","tag-partisanship","tag-social-media","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2024\/03\/AC_Banner_Gray_1200x630.png?fit=1200%2C630&ssl=1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfivL7-bd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1385,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions\/1385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tameri.com\/almostclassical\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}