Waking Up From the Enduring Nightmare of the Trump Years
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I was born in 1976. That means that during most of my childhood the President of the United States was a genial, charming Troy McClure-like b movie actor you might know from such films as Hellcats of the Navy and Bedtime For Bonzo named Ronald Reagan.
I was too young to remember anything about Jimmy Carter’s presidency but Reagan made an indelible impression on me. From pre-school to eighth grade, the Commander-in-Chief was a jellybean-loving man-child who owed his political success to a warm smile, ingratiating manner and total mastery of television.
Yet as I have written here before, when a b-list reality television competition host you might know from such programs as The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice and such films as Ghost’s Can’t Do It and The Little Rascals named Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, my brain stubbornly refused to acknowledge that a semi-literate, sausage-fingered vulgarian like Trump could win the highest office in all the world.
In the awful November of 2016, Trump being elected president over the excessively qualified Hillary Clinton seemed like a terrible mistake. It seemed like a bizarre, cruel prank that went too far. It seemed like a cosmic fluke. It felt like a nightmare that we would all eventually awake from.
In other words Trump’s electoral victory in 2016 felt like anything but reality. It felt unreal, surreal, impossible, preposterous, obscene.
It never stopped feeling that way. For four solid years my brain continued to refuse to believe that I lived in a world where Donald Trump was president and the most powerful man in the world was an insult comic without any jokes.
How was Trump different than Reagan? For starters, Reagan was Governor of California before becoming President, so he had relevant political experience, and ran on a message of hope and optimism. He was a charming, happy man who was going to lower your taxes and get the government off your back and out of your life. Trump, in sharp contrast, ran as a hateful, mean-spirited bully who would attack everyone you hated on your behalf and never stop attacking.
For four fucking years Trump’s presidency was a bad dream I wanted desperately to wake up from. This was particularly true once the bad dream began to take disturbing, implausible turns, like a deadly pandemic that killed hundreds of thousands of people and dramatically changed American life in a way no once could have anticipated.
Not a handsome man!
In November of 2020 we finally woke up from the endless nightmare that was the Trump presidency. I worried that Trump might become the new normal, that he’d coast to re-election in 2020 and then be followed by Donald Trump Jr. or Ivanka or Jared Kushner or some other deplorable from his evil inner circle.
The election was way closer than it had any right to be considering how royally Trump screwed up the response to COVID 19 and the resulting economic devastation but I was just glad that it ended, conclusively, with Donald Trump no longer in office.
The nightmare returned on January 6th, when I saw things on my television I never thought possible, namely a mob of “patriots” attacking the sacred inner sanctum of American democracy on behalf of a crazed wannabe dictator and then a man who was synonymous with a silly yet somehow incredibly important social media website called Twitter getting banned from it permanently.
Without the office of the presidency or his Twitter bully pulpit, Trump is like the Wicked Witch of the West after a bucket of water is thrown on her: a spent power.
It’s only been a few months since Joe Biden assumed the office of the presidency yet Trump’s time in office already feels very distant, like a bad dream you can’t quite shake. I suspect that we will look back at Trump’s term as a very strange, fraught and awful time in our country’s history, when we were at war with one another and continually gave into our worst impulses and ugliest demons.
The terrorists attacks of 9/11 at least seemed to bring the country together in a spirit of resilience and fortitude. Trump tore us apart, and continues to tear us apart.
Trump’s presidency continues to feel unreal but thankfully it now belongs safely in our rearview, in a past that grows a little more distant by the day.
We finally woke the fuck up. Now it is incumbent that we return presidential politics to a place of sanity and logic instead of the Twilight Zone nightmare realm it inhabited from 2016 to 2020.
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