Prime
From TPM Reader HL …
I feel I’ve weathered the transition fairly well. After many years of watching evening MSNBC, I essentially stopped watching the night after Ruth Bader Ginzburg died, and shifted all my newsgathering to the written form from Twitter to actual newspapers. I felt less harried and no less informed, and paved the way for a presidency I don’t have to worry about.
From TPM Reader IG …
This moment has me thinking about the feeling that we’ve been robbed of time. People like to talk about the odd way in which 2020 feels as if it was both endless and just didn’t happen at all. I’ve only recently stopped saying “last summer” when I really mean the summer of 2019. But, the truth is, the whole of the last five years of Trumpism feel this way. If this really is the end of the Trump era then it is still like we just gave away half a decade of our lives to this all-consuming negativity.
From TPM Reader PJ …
I’m with a lot of your readers. While I think the day to day is less punctuated by evental feelings of panic and worry, things are bad and not sure to get worse. We have a very undemocratic political system. The more democratic elements of our system carry most of their potential in how a judiciary might find them to be very expansive, but that judiciary is owned by the right. I think in 2009 the GOP triggered the Doomsday Machine. The rabid anti-Obama partisanship, the debt ceiling debacles in the years that followed, right-wing enthusiasm for racist police killings, GamerGate, Trump’s rise, the final removal of the mask of respectability of the Republican Party…the white masculine death machine is on the march. Just consider the judiciary….even if we got the Fantasyland Biden of our dreams, how much of what he does will hold up to right-wing judicial review? We’re talking about a court system that might take us back to a pre-Lochner territory, eliminate the governmental ability to delegate regulatory authority to executive agencies…this is return to Medieval stuff.
Where Things Stand: Yet Another Data Point Suggesting Trump Screwed GOP In Georgia
As Republicans — led by former President Trump — peddled lies about a stolen election and rampant voter fraud post-November, Georgia still had two runoff elections to conduct. And there was much speculation at the time about whether the Big Lie might actually harm Republican chances in the state.
From TPM Reader MG …
You asked, “What Sense Are You Making of the Post-Trump Era?”
Well, there is simply a mixture of relief and apprehension.
The relief is for the obvious things: The relatively smooth deployments of the Covid vaccines, a steady hand at the helm of state, government doing what the federal government should do, no more intentional twitter eruptions and all of that. Considering where we were on January 20th, it is immensely comforting to be where we are right now.
From TPM Reader JE, a rather different take on the question, less political outlook than deeply personal, inter-personal experience …
So, by far the biggest outcome for me from the “Post Trump Era” (and to some extent I need to move the date back to November 2016 to describe this fully) is the realization that a lot of middle class white Americans (I’m in that group) are still racist as hell. Prior to that the racism was couched in careful language, was eased out with a nod and a wink that indicated that maybe someone still wasn’t on board with the modern state of the world.
From TPM Reader KG …
I’ve enjoyed reading the replies to your question, but I have a somewhat different take. As a 79-year old white female I’ve seen remarkable changes in the country. Change being the operative word. My first brush with politics came on a train carrying Harry Truman, who I watched speak while sitting on my father’s shoulders. I’ve been a political junky ever since.
Thank you to everyone who’s sent in their reads on making sense of the post-Trump Era. I’ll be publishing more this afternoon. Keep them coming. My interest in soliciting these notes is that we are in a confused and confusing political-historical moment. It’s important to untangle that for anyone who is concerned about the country and civic life. It’s even more pressing for a news organization.
We owe a great deal to the insights and knowledge we gain from the social sciences, with their modeling, systems creation and statistics. But at core humans are a story-telling species. We organize the world around us through storylines, narrative arcs, the actions of individuals, the interplay of actions and reactions through time. This isn’t to embrace a “great man” theory of history. It’s not a comment on how history works. It’s a statement about how our brains apprehend, understand things – how we take the discrete facts we find and put them together into something that tells us something. Nor is it to relativize contending ‘narratives’, something that has long been the province of certain parts of the academic world and through a strange alchemy is now also pervasive on the right. Some narratives are truer than others. Many are deeply false. It is simply that we understand most intuitively through storylines, through the progression of events and the actions of people.
