I've Blogged About Donald Trump More Than Anyone Else and Could Not Be Happier to be Losing Him as a Subject

Wrote some books about him as well.

A while back Zoe Kazan criticized the term Manic Pixie Dream Girl, attributing it to a sexist blogger. As you might imagine, I was very insulted. How dare she call me a blogger? I was no sad blogger just barely getting by on the income from a self-published website. I was a veteran professional writer who held down prestigious positions with the big times likes of the A.V Club and The Dissolve while publishing books with Scribner and Abrams Image. I also objected to being called sexist. 

Cut to the present. Kazan and myself have made peace, with each other and the irrepressible, unavoidable MPDG. I’m now a sad blogger just barely getting by on the income from my self-published website and my days of being an employee of Pitchfork and The Onion are distant memories. The same is true of my days as a Scribner and Abrams Image author. 

But I have discovered, to my surprise and muted delight, that I quite enjoy being a blogger. It’s been a cornerstone of this site since day one. It’s the most personal aspect of an exceedingly personal personal website, the one that allows me to engage with readers most directly. 

Also, I get to tell people about the sandwiches that I’m eating, which is nice. I welcome the eternal challenge of waking up every morning and thinking, “What should I write about for the Big Whoop today?” 

This one too

Since this website’s launch in April of 2017, the answer to that perpetual query has often involved writing about disgraced soon to be ex-president Donald Trump’s myriad failings. I wrote about Trump dozen upon dozens of times, always in an unkind fashion. 

That’s because I always need subjects for this blog but also because writing about Trump was my way of coping with his victory and awful ascendancy to a place of supreme power. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 made me feel powerless. It made me feel defeated. It made me feel like the bad guys had won and would keep winning. It made me feel like every word I had written about Trump was a total and complete waste. It made me feel like the country was devolving into something ugly and brutish and unrecognizable, a dystopia that made a mockery of our supposed ideals. 

Writing about Trump for my tiny little audience has been cathartic. It hasn’t necessarily made me feel powerful but it has made me feel less powerless because I could use my voice and my modest site to speak my truth, to express the intense, visceral horror I felt about the Commander in Chief’s words and actions to an audience that overwhelmingly shares my politics but nevertheless find it comforting to know that other people felt the same way that they did about the most famous, powerful man in the world. 

The enemy of the people did pretty good, financially, under Trump for the most part.

I’ve never used this phrase non-ironically before, but the long national nightmare that was Donald Trump’s term is nearly over. Trump being president has made my life worse everyday. It was toxic and terrible on an existential and emotional level as well as a political one. Donald Trump has made my life worse as a father, small businessman, freelancer, American citizen and human being. But he has made my life easier as a blogger by giving me something to write about literally every day. 

I wrote about Trump extremely often. He was incontestably what I wrote about the most for the blog yet I still could have written more about him. I had lots of ideas that I never implemented because I did not have time and I did not want to overwhelm readers. 

Now I am losing this blog’s number one subject forever and I could not be happier about it. This will not be my last blog post about Donald Trump. He will not disappear the moment he leaves the White House. He will remain one of the most talked about, important people in the world. 

But the key difference is that I don’t have to care about Donald Trump anymore. I don’t have to follow his doings. I don’t have to read his Twitter feed or listen to him talk. I don’t have to see that awful face of his, or that weird pillowy body. 

Trump can, and will, rage against the injustice of it all, how the election was stolen from him in the greatest crime in the history of the universe but we can just ignore him the way should have been able to for the last four years. He may be an ex-president but he’s nevertheless just another impotent has-been yelling incoherently at a world he does not understand. 

Bye, Don. Thanks for giving me so much to write about but it hasn’t been worth the damage you inflicted on a country you profess to love. Not even a little bit.

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Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

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