I Thought I Was Done Writing About Donald Trump. I Was Wrong
When “Sleepy” Joe Biden soundly defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, I wrote a blog post about how I wasn’t going to be writing about the disgraced, twice-impeached one-term president any more but that I couldn’t be happier to be losing Trump as a ubiquitous topic for the Big Whoop.
From this website’s birth in April of 2017 I have written about Donald Trump more than anyone other than “Weird Al” Yankovic. Yet the prospect of not having to write about the poster boy for untreated Narcissistic Personality Disorder filled me with joy.
That blog post turned out to be woefully premature. I’ve written about Donald Trump less since he left office but I still end up writing about him all the time. I certainly write about him more than our actual president. When I have written about Biden it has been to express relief that his followers are not psychotic cultists willing to literally risk their life for their cult leader’s impossibly huge ego or to convey amusement at the right’s cynical branding of safe, centrist, eminently predictable Joe Biden as a bomb-throwing Marxist revolutionary controlled by Bernie Sanders and AOC.
Trump warned a press he habitually called The Enemy of the People that they would rue the day that he was no longer in office because it would mean a sharp decline in ratings and newspaper circulation and website traffic.
Trump was right in that the new guy didn’t attract eyeballs and attention the way the old guy did. That’s because Joe Biden is overwhelmingly concerned with leading our country out of an unprecedented medical and financial crisis through steady leadership whereas Trump was, is, and will always be a messy bitch who loves drama.
Heck, that was Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan: Trump: A Messy Bitch Who Loves Drama. In the reality show that is American politics in 2021, Trump is the camera-hungry villain who starts fights with everyone and Biden is the normal guy who is barely in the show because his story lines are so boring.
Trump genuinely seemed to think that the presidency is mostly about boffo ratings and social media dominance. That may be true of weathermen. It may be true of game show hosts. But it is most assuredly not true of American presidents.
One of the reasons Trump apparently held regular press conferences about COVID 19 was because they got great ratings. He did not seem to realize that they got good ratings because people couldn’t wait to hear what kind of crazy-ass shit the most powerful man in the world would say next.
That’s the essence of the public’s endless fascination with Trump. He’s so unhinged, outrageous and pathologically obsessed with holding onto the spotlight that he could say and do anything, no matter how transparently unhinged and wrong.
I’ve also carved out a niche for myself as a pop culture writer who specializes in writing about things that are crazy and terrible and improbable and wrong, that should not exist yet exist nevertheless in angry defiance of God’s will.
That’s Donald Trump’s presidency. Hell, that’s Donald Trump’s entire existence. He’s vulgar and trashy and crude and utterly repellent, and consequently way more fun to write about than Joe Biden.
I do not miss the daily full frontal assault on our individual and collective nervous system that constituted Trump’s presidency. But it sure gave me a lot to write about.
Since that unfortunate incident on January 6th Trump has done almost impressively little other than call in to his favorite shows, complain about the election and claim credit for COVID 19 vaccines.
Yet even in his absence Trump gives me more to write about than the guy actually doing the big job, and doing it well. We have someone in the White House who is not a drama queen who angrily demands attention. That’s bad for bloggers like myself who need something to write about every damn day but good for our country, humanity and civilization as a whole.
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