Nov 09, 2016

President Trump

Donald Trump is now President-elect of the United States. In a couple months, he will become President Trump.

I'm shocked by this. It's a disconnected, faraway feeling. In the liberal coastal enclave where I live, everything is as it was yesterday. Things will probably keep chugging along here as they have been for quite a while. Maybe even for Trump's whole term, but who can say.

Everyone's shocked by this. All the media I consume is either expressing stunned disbelief or spouting apocalyptica. Yes, this seems very, very bad. And yet I expect that things for the most part will keep chugging along. The dissonance is strong.

I wonder how much the current feeling mirrors the experience of Wilsonian intellectuals in late 1919, or of German liberals in February 1933. The sense that we have just made a profound collective mistake, maybe that's the same. Or maybe not. Who can say.

Evan Osnos' President Trump's First Term (a) is the best imagining of Trump's early presidency I've seen. Now, given that we are hurtling towards the thing itself, I find the article to be a gentle balm.

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