Please note that I just called him Donald Trump. I didn't call him Donald Fucking Trump as I always did before the election. Nor did I refer to him with some third person pseudo-pronoun, like "the new president" or an acronym ("SCROTUS") as I have since.
Calling him by his actual name is a sure sign of normalization.
Normalization is wearing me down.
I know that this fatigue is not unique to me. Indeed those Americans who are actively and valiantly resisting the evils of the Trump administration (not to mention all the additional evils of the fucking Republicans in Congress) must be suffering from normalization far more than I. The resisters are the heroes. I'm just a guy who has a hard time finding enough energy to write one angry blog post per month.
It turns out that normalizing Donald Trump is strenuous work. Based only on the behavior of every previous president, the man keeps doing completely unpredictable things. In his few months in office Donald Trump has proven to be personally erratic, egotistical, boorish, bigoted, angry and greedy.
It's hard to understand how his unwavering base can still support him. Somehow they do. They evidently are okay living in a country that's becoming more and more erratic, egotistical, boorish, bigoted, angry and greedy.
My opinion is that those problems couldn't happen to a nicer guy. And I mean that quite literally. If Donald Trump were a nicer guy - even just a little bit nicer - many of his problems would disappear.
However, it appears that Donald Trump is a new kind of politician: a jerk incapable of even insincere gestures of reconciliation to his opponents. There are forty four more months left in his first term. He is raising money for his 2020 re-election campaign.
His re-election slogan is "Keep America Great". Cart Before Horse.
President Donald J. Trump is going to drag the United States through a lot more mud and shit before the next presidential election. His supporters, those people in the other bubble, will cheer mindlessly even when the mud and shit splatters on them. For the rest of us, the fatigue has only just begun.
Meanwhile, here's something out of the Other Bubble: a paragraph from an apparently real White House press release describing President Donald J. Trump, "great leader":
President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor . . . and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.
If only.
