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From TPM Reader HW …
I came from a very abusive household. My mother has the same cluster personality disorders as Trump and I was the focus of her physical and emotional assault. Where that helped me with Trump, is my years of therapy allowed me to see all of the patterns. It was all there and in some ways, it helped me recognize that my childhood experience was very real even as many tried over the years to normalize it or minimize it. I think that the Trump children are horrifying individuals, but I still have some bit of empathy for them. Not everyone can pull themselves out of the hell that is a crazy parent. I have a good life and a great family. My brother, however, is a financially insolvent drug addict who is repeating all the cycles with his kids.
From TPM Reader WH …
I was going to hold off on replying to your call for De-Trumpifying stories, but the response from reader BW really hit home and heartened me to share this.
I can vividly remember tuning in to the first GOP debate in 2015 and having my schadenfreude boomerang right back at me as soon as it became clear that none of the candidates or moderators knew how to respond to Trump’s bullying and buffoonery (or the audience’s enthusiasm for it). It immediately took me back to my stepdad—the easily disprovable lies about his own accomplishments and equally outrageous fabrications to disparage others, someone who rarely brought in any sort of income but spent freely on things ordered off late-night TV, a man who used his height and baggy clothes to hide flab and exude dominance. My stepdad even had a very weird combover system going on, except for days when he opted for a “NO SPIN ZONE” hat. So a lot of overlap.
From TPM Reader HS …
My De-Trumping is all about gaining historical perspective on how we got to the present moment and what the Democratic Party has to do to both move the country forward AND win the 2022 elections. And there is no better way to do that than dive into Rick Perlstein’s four volume masterpiece of our nation’s political and social history from Goldwater to Reagan. I lived through this period (born in 1950) and was reading progressive journalism that whole time (my lefty parents subscribed to The Nation, The New Republic, Ramparts, I.F.Stone’s Weekly, etc.), but wow, the stuff Perlstein digs up that you didn’t know about at the time it was happening is astonishing!
From TPM Reader JO …
All my life, during good presidencies and bad, the imagery of Washington has always meant something to me. Whether actually visiting, walking down the mall and gazing at the familiar buildings with a stirring of childhood patriotism, or seeing the famous façades in news photographs or paintings or movies, I’ve always responded emotionally. Not Bush, nor Reagan, nor even Nixon could besmirch the basic positive meaning of Washington, for me — I was a small child when Nixon resigned but it always seemed like, as bad as he was, the Presidency itself, on the most symbolic visual level, remained somehow untouched.
From TPM Reader WL …
My own feelings on this relate to experiences I’ve had in my past living with alcoholics. When you live with a drinker, you just never know what you’re going to wake up to every morning, you’re not sure what that phone call you have coming in really means, and you become very sensitized to nuances in behavior that in normal situations pass unnoticed. This was much like my experience with the Trump presidency; every morning you would wake up and while still in bed wonder what news lay waiting on your feeds to shock or amaze you, More importantly, given the erratic nature of his behavior, what was waiting for you could be very extreme, life-changing events that couldn’t have been predicted, Certainly nothing like living under Biden, whose evenness of temper and rationality would give fair warning of any sort of upheaval.
It’s a good thing he was such a coward. We could have had things far worse if he had guts.
From TPM Reader JRM …
Like you, I and my family have been largely unaffected in direct ways by the past 4 years. I’m white, straight, cis, and am retired with plenty of money. I haven’t had to deal with the cruelty and utter lack of concern for anyone not devoted to Trumpism in any direct way.
As a political junkie, the Trump years have been a long and painful shit-show, occsionally uplifted by his administration’s ham-handedness and general lack of skill causing more grandiose plans to crater spectacularly or, more commonly, just wither away as some new obsession took hold. But all that ability of mine to soldier on was predicated on his eventual loss in the 2020 election. And I followed every twist and turn of the election nearly obsessively.
From TPM Reader SR …
In the late summer of 1991, I was at the beach with my best friend from law school and another friend in the midst of an exhausted drunken bender following the bar exam. People who go through any kind of professional licensure or credentialing exam after a course of instruction, or, I suspect, a dissertation defense know the sense of complete mental exhaustion, the feeling of recovering from having one’s mind and body completely drained, that follows weeks and weeks of grueling, high-intensity cramming for a high-stakes, high-pressure, high-difficulty test. What follows isn’t so much celebratory as an almost sullen lassitude and very inward directed focus because the exhaustion is the herald of uncertainty about the immediate fugure (“did I pass?”) and momentous life changes ahead regardless.
Into this stew dropped the news of the coup by old-school Soviet hardliners against Gorbachev.
Where Things Stand: A GOP Day Of Reckoning
By now we know that the meeting between Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did not quite go as the Republican leader hoped.