So, here we are in week two of the Donald Trump presidency. And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of exhausted. My brain feels slightly bedraggled, and I think I am plum out of sighs. Not because of President Trump, mind you, but because a significant chunk of America seems to have made a hobby of yelling and hollering and ranting and dramatically tearing its hair out every 10 minutes, warranted or not.
"President Trump is an American terrorist," former "Star Trek" star George Takei told the nation Wednesday. On ABC’s "The View," Whoopi Goldberg declared that she couldn’t see how Trump was "really much different than the Taliban." Upon Trump’s nomination of the apparently mild-mannered and widely admired Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, a dour Nancy Pelosi, House minority leader, described Gorsuch as a threat to everyone but robots, extraterrestrials and those mysterious giant heads on Easter Island. Gorsuch would be a disaster, she cried out, for all those who "breathe air, drink water, eat food or take medicine."
As you might have noticed, these are not the type of measured policy critiques that inspire people to listen up and take you seriously. But delirious anti-Trump panic — marketed as "The Resistance" — is now apparently baked in. On Tuesday, CNN ran a piece on a bunch of people who drew the word "RESIST" in the sand of a Maine beach. That was the entire story. "The group wrote the word ‘RESIST’ in enormous letters in the sand at low tide," the news network cheerfully reported, "then took pictures before the ocean rose again and washed it away a couple of hours later."
In other news, a colleague’s cousin’s neighbor’s ferret, Grizz, just learned how to jump through a hoop. Come on, CNN. (As an aside, it should be pointed out that drawing RESIST on a beach is just plain bad symbolism. No one wants his or her resistance to wash away in a few hours, or get crushed in the tracks of some oblivious power jogger and his wildly enthusiastic dog.)
I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. But when he was inaugurated, my brain helped me out with one thing: It promptly accepted the fact that he is our new president. It also noted that over the rest of his presidency, Trump will continue to be the man people voted for. Rather than acting like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Hillary Clinton, Bill Murray or Magnum, P.I., Trump would act like Donald Trump. Weirdly, it seems that at least 75 percent of today’s Trump-related hysteria can be boiled down to a denial of these basic facts.
President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order to suspend refugee arrivals and impose tough controls on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries was met with protests at U.S. airports.
In comedian Dave Chappelle’s now-defunct show, there was a popular skit called "A Moment in the Life of Lil’ Jon." Chappelle played Lil’ Jon, a rapper largely known for yelling "YEAH!" and "OK!" and "WHAT!?" in a slightly crazed voice. In the skit, Lil’ Jon appeared at places like the doctor’s office and the airport and answered every question, predictably, with "YEAH!," "OK!" and "WHAT!?" — until he suddenly, and quite randomly, bursts into fits of haughty Shakespearean English.
In some ways, the Trump-related freakouts that appear every few minutes online are similar. Trump will do something Trumpian — not bothering to wave when he boards Air Force One, complaining about Vanity Fair magazine, analyzing crowd sizes or veering into discussions of "fake news" when he’s talking about Martin Luther King Jr. — and social media will explode in outrage, shock and surprise, shaking each example like the aforementioned wildly enthusiastic dog.
People are welcome to critique whatever they like, of course. These days, in fact, it seems that endless critique is the sole function of our increasingly joyless social media. But therein lies the second step to sanity in the Age of Trump: More often than not, it’s worthwhile to tune out of social media’s yell fests. "I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world," the professor Alan Jacobs wrote at The New Atlantis on Jan. 23. "To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion."
He’s right, particularly in the age of President Trump. Unplug from social media for more than six hours, and you’ll find you’ve missed about three almost scandals, six near-tragedies, 26 stranger-on-stranger fights and 13 impending panics — all of which managed to fester, burn out and float away before you even return to the keyboard. Meanwhile, genuine good news or thoughtful, reasoned critiques of the Trump administration — some, for instance, were made regarding last week’s executive order on refugees — get lost in the gnashing of teeth.
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," said the writer Annie Dillard. One thing is certain: The next few years won’t be boring. But it’s certainly worth thinking about the best ways to spend them. Freaking out on Twitter might not make the list.
National Review
Heather Wilhelm is a National Review columnist and a senior contributor to The Federalist.
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