You feel like you’ve been down this road before, for the past ten+ years. On a daily basis.

That you can’t believe what you’re hearing, what you just heard. You’re confounded by what the president of the United States just said, just did. In this age of AI deep fakery, your first instinct is, That can’t be real. Uh uh. No way. Somebody made it up. It’s simply not possible for what I just witnessed to be in any way real.

If it were, well then, surely there’d be some official pushback. Some sanctioned ramifications for such outrageous statements and actions. Consequences to such obvious criminal and unconstitutional intent.

This is the president of the fucking United States we’re talking about, for crissakes!

And yet, nothing. A resounding, if not silence, there’s never any silence with this guy, but a resounding shrug. That’s just who he is, what he says, what he does. You don’t like it? Wait until the midterms, until 2028. Until then, the lies, the corruption, the overt racism and sexism, boastful bigotry directed toward anyone not loyal to the regime, the sheer incompetence in governance, deliberate and inadvertent, the murder, the mayhem, the concentration camps operating on American soil, the corruption, did I mention the corruption? Oh, the fucking corruption!

Day in, day out.

The above snippet is from his speech last Wednesday in Dallas. Little more than a week ago. There’s been at least half a dozen acts and statements of grotesquerie since then, by the president and those associated with his administration. Off the top of my head, there’s the falling asleep at his own 9/11 memorial. His united Ireland proclamation. His son’s wedding present of a reception given by a Russian oligarch and close confidant of Vladmir Putin. FBI Director Kash Patel having to explain why he loosened the rules around hiring prospective agents who have been convicted of… wait for it, wait for it… bestiality.

Etc. & etc.

Day in, day out.

It’s the firehose of bullshit as proposed by an architect of Trump 1.0, Steve Bannon. A deluge of misinformation and skullduggery in amounts that are impossible to wipe clean, forcing you to get used to the stench. What are you talking about? Politics always smelled like this.

It is a state of being, of existing, that we’ve talked about.

Shocked but not surprised.

Or, in the original German: schockiert, aber nicht überrascht. Schockiertüberrascht, smushed into one word but expressing an ineffable condition that lies beyond the grasp of the English vocabulary.

A resigned disbelief.

The first stage toward accepting the unacceptable. A savaging of reality and, of course, a rewriting of history.

Believing six impossible things before breakfast.

But not in a good way.

It is the opposite of aspirational thinking. Thinking has nothing to do with the project. It’s all about feeling, the feelz, the vibes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with feelings. What would we be without them? Certainly not human. It’s the type of feelings that our current environment is engendering that’s the problem. The kind of feelings the president and his followers thrive on, thrive off.

A basic masterclass in bad mojo.

Resentment. Bitterness. Anger and antipathy. Hatred. Avarice and covetousness.

The basic composition of your seven deadly sins.

The world’s richest man and leading Nazi sympathizer has labeled the feeling of empathy, the thing, you know, that you feel toward other people, other beings, compassion, understanding, the communal sense of togetherness and of being as one, a ‘fundamental weakness of western civilization… The empathy exploit’.

Do unto others before they can do it unto you.

Fuck you, Jack. I got mine. And even if I don’t, especially if I don’t, fuck you anyway.

After getting the crowd to pledge allegiance to him last Wednesday, ‘the greatest president in the history of the United States’ extolls his followers to go out with their family and friends and vote in November, if they’re registered or not, even if they have to cheat like hell, like the other side does.

We’ve come a long way from ‘ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ or having ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’. From responsible citizens and informed voters to insufferable and intolerant trolls. Engaged in politics and social life only in so far as we can punk the other side, stick it to them, not the Man, because the Man’s egging us on, creating a reality where it only pays to be our worse selves.