I spent Year One of Our Trump in my underpants, at my writing desk, in an office overlooking the expressway.
Tired and dispirited, I tried to avoid the shitshow altogether: I left the TV job. I followed no one on Twitter. I tuned out cable news. I poured my energy into these pages. Even so, the media delirium seeped in through the floorboards like pus from a boil.
I admit it, I was a fish to the clickbait. The clichéd and melodramatic outrage depressed me, but still I couldn’t help but watch. Each morning, I’d lock myself away, wearing nothing but yesterday’s underpants, unshaven and unbrushed, procrastinating on my laptop. Like most everyone else in America, I was now only a virtual participant in the national debate, a househusband with his soap opera, a caged commodity held captive by the social media platforms.
I watched live-stream press conferences with amusement and a nagging melancholy brought on by unemployment and a lack of action. Trump and the media. What was it today? One of his Orangeness’s whoppers? Biggest inauguration crowd ever? Obama had him wiretapped? Or the inane: Big Don is afraid of houseflies? Two-dollar Donny thinks the White House is a dump? (He ought to be thankful he’s not staying at the Trump International in Las Vegas. #Shithole!) Why was Melania wearing stilettos to a hurricane? Or the deadly serious: Did Trump obstruct justice when he fired FBI director James Comey? Did his campaign collude with Russian intelligence agents? Did he bumble his way into an obstruction charge? Will he be impeached? Will he bomb North Korea’s Little Rocket Man?
Some of these things were important. But it was hard to gauge their order since they were all given loud volume and wide play. It was good for ratings and clicks, but too much of it had little to do with the daily struggles of the American people.
Trump and his petty lies and his petty handlers calling his petty lies “facts” caused Orwell’s opus 1984 to resurface onto the bestseller list. In this futurist parable about a dystopian totalitarian society, hate ruled and whatever the leader said was true—was true.
But I sat in my office, instead reading Huxley’s Brave New World. It seemed more fitting to me. In this future world, the party bosses, their bureaucrats, and newspaper editors and the pharmaceutical manufacturers conspired to teach the masses to love their enslavement by giving the people exactly what they think they wanted: limitless and empty entertainment, free sex, and plentiful narcotics. It was a kinder, more sinister oppression. A place where freedom is lost without the citizen ever realizing it. A shitshow, in short.
No doubt, the tenor of political conversation had become harder and more shrill since Trump hit the political scene, but I thought I could hear a familiar echo through my headphones. Many of the white supremacists who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, for instance, were the same people I’d encountered two years earlier when I took that moonlight drive with the Grand Dragon of the KKK to Columbia, South Carolina. As sad and despicable as Charlottesville was, there were a few hundred of these white supremacists. Not thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands. Not an army. The media could estimate the millions who attended presidential inaugurations from aerial photographs, it seemed, but could not do a simple head count of a troop of racist orangutans. Shitshow.
In the things that matter in everyday lives, very little changed in a practical way: There was still a lack of good jobs, wages were still too low, the cost of health care was growing higher, the treatment of veterans was abysmal. There were the unaddressed matters of the budget deficit, the national debt, corporate welfare, failing pension systems, unaffordable tuition, and a broken immigration system.
Trump’s breakfast-time tweets and revolving cast of insiders whose names are certain to be lost to history aside, Goldman Sachs and the Joint Chiefs of Staff still ran the White House. Special interests still ruled Congress. And the taxpayers still subsidized the Senate gymnasium and sauna. (Ironically, it is a members-only gymnasium, thus making it the only certain place in Washington, D.C., where you will not see a lobbyist performing a rubdown on a member of Congress.)
Here in Detroit, the administration of Democratic mayor Mike Duggan received rave reviews from the national press corps, despite the fact that the neighborhoods were still crime-ravaged shooting galleries. Reporters would parachute into town for a mojito at the newest downtown bistro, take a quick ride on the new light rail, conduct a deskside interview with Hizzoner, and pronounce the place “Comeback City.” Much of the local print media, hollowed out by staffing cuts and a diminishing readership, were happy to promote the simple Huxleyesque narrative, and TV news simply copied their headlines. There were no stories about a federal grand jury corruption probe into the city’s demolition program. I had to tweet it in my underpants. At this writing, its investigation was still ongoing.
As for Flint, the governor’s people pronounced the water officially safe to drink, but few people believed it. The governor himself never showed his face in Vehicle City again to drink from the taps, while residents were now required to pay full cost for the water.
In the cities of Chicago, Baltimore, and St. Louis, murder spiked as police officers slowed their work. It is worth noting that no police officer has been convicted for the illegal use of deadly force in any incident in this book, and nationally, two have been convicted since 2013. It’s also worth noting that since the events of Ferguson, about fifty law-enforcement officers across the United States have been ambushed and killed.
In the South, industrial workers continued to reject union representation, overwhelmingly voting it down at a Nissan plant in Mississippi and a Boeing factory in South Carolina. In the meantime, labor officials plead guilty to accepting bribes form Fiat-Chrysler executives in exchange for company-friendly positions at the bargaining table.
In the West, Jon Ritzheimer, the half-cocked, pistol-packing “patriot,” pleaded guilty to conspiracy for his role in Oregon and was sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison. He remains recalcitrant, however, calling the government illegitimate and himself the Rosa Parks of the West. Booda, the fake sniper, also pleaded guilty, serving nine months in jail. The conspiracy trial of Cliven Bundy and his sons for their role in the Bunkerville takeover was declared a mistrial, after a judge ruled that government lawyers had intentionally withheld evidence that could have helped in their defense. The men cannot be retried, and the government is now investigating its lawyers.
Shitshow.
In the North, Junior the white kid from Garbutt did not pick up the heroin needle as predicted. Instead, he followed his father’s advice, finished high school, and enrolled in community college, where he studies to be a paramedic. The military recruiters still stop by.
In the Midwest, I tried to find DJ, the brave young black man from Ferguson, Missouri, who tried unsuccessfully to save the Arab’s liquor store. He vanished as far as anybody in Ferguson knew. I suspect he’s living a life and raising his son. I think that, because that’s what real men do.
In the workplace, a cascade of prominent men were fired for allegations of sexual harassment. Roger Ailes, after being pushed out of Fox with a $40 million severance, slipped and fell in his private residential bathroom, struck his head, and died. May God rest him.
Bill O’Reilly was the next to go, followed by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, followed by a host of male power brokers in media, entertainment, and politics. Through it all, Trump, the man accused of snatching a score of women and bragging about it on videotape, held tightly to the highest chair in the land.
Reporters were now shouting questions at the president that would have gotten them fired just months ago.
Sir, are you a racist?
Spinning-in-the-spinroom was ahead of its time.
Things were a mess. It felt as if the country had come loose from its moorings, and Washington was consumed by its own navel. But maybe there was a silver lining in it. Whenever Washington does manage to get “big things” done, the American people get whipsawed. The price of homes collapses. Jobs leave for Mexico. Trickle-down never seems to trickle down, while the roads fall apart. Like NAFTA or the war in Iraq, the consequences of the one thing Congress did get done—the mega eleventh-hour tax cuts—will not be known without the long lens of time. So maybe stalemate is the best medicine for what ails us as we try to catch our collective breath, collect the pieces of a broken future, and figure a path for our children.
It is dispiriting, though, to stare into the screen and then get up and go to the bathroom and stare into the toilet bowl and realize everything is headed in the same direction. We’re rafting down a sewer where the scenery never changes. The rich get richer. The poor get children. And the anchorman feigns outrage.
Ladies and gentlemen: we return you to our regular programming.