I'm Going to Stop Writing About Donald Trump So Much Here. You're Welcome!

A few weeks back I got an email via Squarespace from someone with a request/demand. He wrote that he’d been reading my website and that I wrote too much about Donald Trump, particularly in a blog post about Christopher Duntsch and the deadly underside of the American dream and that it was fucking obnoxious and I needed to stop it. 

I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the general gist. It was tough love minus the love. It was not the most sensitive or considerate missive I’ve ever received. On the contrary, it was blunt and painfully to the point. 

I would not have minded a little sugar to go along with the harsh medicine. Words of praise would have been appreciated. It would have been easier to get feedback like that if it had been preceded by compliments about how much he loved the site and/or me as a writer and human being. 

My first response was knee-jerk dismissal. The angry, defensive part of my brain responded with a defiant, “Fuck you. This is my website and blog and I can write about whatever the fuck I want. I’ll write about Donald Trump ten fucking times a day and there’s nothing you can do about it, you belligerent asshole.” 

That was my intense first response. My second response followed anywhere from ten to twenty seconds later and was eminently more reasonable and diplomatic. 

After that brief explosion of anger, I thought, “He makes an excellent point. I probably do write way too much about Donald Trump, particularly considering that it’s been nearly a year since he was defeated in the 2020 presidential election. Going forward, I’ll make a point of writing about him less obsessively.” 

My response mirrored the way I reacted to editorial requests for extensive re-writes back in the long-ago days when I wrote for other people. 

My ugly knee-jerk response was often, if not invariably, “Fuck you! The piece was perfect the way it is and I angrily refuse to change a goddamn word of it. I’d sooner blow up the building where this editorial request was made, The Fountainhead-style than change a goddamn word of my perfect prose.” 

As with my response to the criticism that I wrote too much about Trump, this was followed almost immediately by an infinitely more reasonable, flexible response. After that white-hot surge of anger had dissipated I would almost invariably think, “Actually, those are valid critiques that I will implement as directly as possible when I turn in my next draft.” 

Despite that momentary but intense flash of blinding rage I have decided to similarly take the reader’s advice and write about Trump much more sparingly going forward. I’m not going to forbid myself from writing about Trump because he remains an important cultural figure, unfortunately, but I will write about him substantially less than I did before. 

At this point I have been writing regularly about Trump for well over a half a decade, since shortly after he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on June 16, 2015. 

I wrote compulsively about Trump well before I had my own blog, which means that I had to sell articles about him to the outlets I freelanced for, which wasn’t that difficult, to be honest. 

Trump’s awful ascent to the highest office in the land coincided with my re-invention as a website proprietor and full-time blogger. Trump may have been an utter disaster as a Commander-in-Chief but I would be lying if I said he didn’t give me a lot to write about. 

As a pop culture writer I specialize in things that are terrible in a morbidly fascinating way that says a lot about society and the human condition. That’s why I found myself writing about Trump over and over again. 

But there is a time and a place for everything and I would like to think that the time and place for me writing about Trump constantly on this blog has come conclusively to an end. 

Like a lot of writers, I have a Donald Trump problem. I write about him too damn much. I think about him too damn much. I allow him to take up valuable real estate in my mind when I should try to forget him and not give him the attention and press he craves. 

The first step to overcoming a problem is acknowledging it publicly, which is what I’m doing here. 

So please do hold me accountable on this but also, don’t be a dick about it! 

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