I hate that I'm letting the word 'Trump' into this title

Feeling my way through the past ten days

Why are you so angry? My husband frequently asked me why I was so much angrier than other women. It always made me smile. I was exactly as angry as every other woman I knew.

It wasn’t that we’d been born angry; we’d become women and ended up angry.

— Sarah Manguso, Liars

I didn’t watch the events of Inauguration Day, but I scrolled through the photos. Like everybody, I puzzled at Melania’s hat. I read the transcript of Trump’s inaugural address, but I didn’t watch it. I didn’t want to hear his voice, didn’t want to let it inside my head, though I thought I should know what he’d said. In the past ten days I’ve been monitoring the news more closely than I have in years, compelled to watch it all begin, to know what orders he’s issuing. But I’ve kept all the videos muted, or I’ve avoided clicking on them. It’s like there’s a line I’ve drawn between my ears and my eyes: to grant him access to the former would feel like a violation, but somehow if I only read his words, or read about him, he can’t actually affect me. Like all the information I take in doesn’t wind up in the same brain. I know it doesn’t make sense, this coy dance I’ve improvised of granting him one form of attention and refusing him another, but somehow I think it also does.

Ash came home all fired up one evening last week, the day after the inauguration. That morning Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde had confronted Trump and Vance at the inaugural prayer service. You’ve got to watch it, Ash said, you’ve got to see their faces, how dismissive they are, I can’t stop thinking about it. I said I’d heard about it, that I’d read a headline about the bishop’s statement but hadn’t listened to it. I got the gist, I told Ash, I really don’t want to listen. My insistence baffled me, even as I doubled down. What I was being asked to listen to wasn’t Trump’s voice after all — it was the bishop’s, a voice of sanity — but I had boundaries!

Of course I relented and watched the video. I was astonished by Budde’s bravery and humanity, by the guts and compassion — compassion-turned-to-guts — of her plea, which she cannily delivered in maybe the only setting left in all the universe where a woman could speak against Trump’s agenda and be guaranteed that Trump would have to sit still and listen¹ to every word. I was not surprised at the looks on Trump’s and Vance’s faces, their knee-jerk dismissal. That part was predictable. But what I keep thinking about is that, in addition to not feeling surprised, I didn’t feel much at all.

Ash was rightly outraged by Trump and Vance’s behavior. The president and vice president of the United States had behaved like petulant schoolboys in the principal’s office. I was furious too, I think. But I couldn’t locate the feeling anywhere. Maybe it had fizzed for an instant in my cortex, but I couldn’t hold onto it.

I mean of course they dismissed the bishop, I told Ash. Nothing can touch them, what do you expect? I felt a little proud as I said that, as I demonstrated for all assembled — my spouse, the dog, the guinea pig, the preheating oven, the dishwasher — the right way to respond to this administration. I can’t let it get me riled up, I told them, it’s only the beginning, this is how it’s going to be for a long time.

Then I woke in the night, remembered how to be a human being, and berated myself for shellacking over their outrage with my numbness.

I spent so much of Trump’s first term reeling, reminding myself and anyone who would listen that what he did and who he was wasn’t normal. You can’t let yourself forget what normal looks like, I told myself. If I could hold onto that standard, use it to brace myself, I could avoid being swept up in the rushing current of the Trump-era news cycle. I would feel anger, but I wouldn’t let it exhaust me. Keep your eyes on the prize, Molly: the Trump administration was not normal, and we’d vote them out, and in 2020 we did. It took until last November, until the 2024 election, for me to finally relinquish that word: normalcy didn’t mean what I thought it had, and maybe it hadn’t for years.

For the past three months I’ve been trying to catch up. I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading books. I’m trying to get clear-eyed, to see what is actually happening. I think it’s important to understand what MAGA supporters want, why they want it, and what they think they are getting with Trump. I think it is important to make myself literate in the coded language of this administration. It takes imagination, I’ve noticed. Because I would never have chosen this man as the leader of anything, I have to imagine my way into understanding. But it’s kind of like chewing a grisly piece of steak. You can work and work and work at it and maybe get a little flavor for your efforts, but it won’t ever be digestible.

But swallowing this fact — that Trump’s America is where I live now, and that he is exactly as hollow, merciless, and immune to shame as he promised to be — has left me in a weird spot, behaving in ways I don’t totally like. I do not want to ignore what is happening. No — I want to know, to be informed, to be ready. But I feel cautious about how to take in this information, of how much and when. I do not want to get accustomed to the actions of this administration. I want to be outraged. I am very fucking outraged. But I don’t want to let it get to me, because I know it won’t let up, and it will take something essential from me that I might not ever get back.

Anyway, as I work out the choreography of this attentional dance², I thought it might be useful to share a selected mish-mash of resources that are helping me think through this moment. (N.b. The NYT links are gift links — go forth!)

• “Trump 2.0 and the Return of ‘Court Politics,’ by Ezra Klein (I listened to the podcast version)

• “The New Rules of the Trump Era,” by Ezra Klein (ditto)

• The Unreality of Memory, by Elisa Gabbert, a collection of essays that I’m admittedly only partway through, but it’s already given me dozens of occasions to pause and think. I love the way Gabbert probes her own obsessions as a starting point for researched essays about disaster culture, global warming, all the ways we do and don’t wield our attentional powers for good. For instance:

Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange instinctual desire for things to get even worse — I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option — as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside. Of course, my rational mind knows better; it knows I don’t want what I want. Still, I fear this part of me, the small but undeniable pull of disaster. It’s something we all must have inside us. Who can say it doesn’t have influence? The secret wish for a blowout ending?

• Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, that dystopian classic, which I finally read last summer after having it on my shelf for years, and then,

• “On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life,” a conversation between adrienne maree brown and Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, where brown, reflecting on the writing of Octavia Butler, observes:

[A]ll organizing is science fiction, right? It’s like, we are reaching into the future, we are trying to project what we can imagine into the future, and organizing is a way of saying, we are going to put our hands directly on the future. We’re not going to sit by and let injustice perpetuate. We are going to get involved and shape it into something that we can all be in. But it’s also time-traveling backwards. So much of organizing is looking back, at what did our ancestors try, what did they learn, what were they up to? What was Harriet Tubman doing? We’re obsessed — I’m obsessed with Harriet Tubman. I’m obsessed with what was it like to walk in her shoes and to face her fears? So I always want to reach back and be like, Okay, well, now what is the Harriet Tubman activity to do in this time? And what does Harriet Tubman up to in 2063, because there’s always someplace that needs justice and liberation.

Please, tell me what you’re reading, listening to, and thinking about right now. Let’s pool our thoughts. The comments are open to all —

Always,

M.

1. “Listen” might be too optimistic a word? I mean, they had to hear the bishop, but I don’t get the sense that they listened. Like, their ears registered the sound waves carrying the bishop’s voice, but the information carried on those waves looked to have been arrested upon landing.

2. As soon as I typed this, I realized I’d gotten the image of a dance from all the Harriet Lerner self-help titles on my mother’s bookshelf when I was a kid, lolol — The Dance of Anger, The Dance of Intimacy, The Dance of Connection, The Dance of Deception — and also last night the chorus of the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” floated through my consciousness, what a gift