Finding the Humor in the Horror of the Trump Years

When I discovered that it would be possible to cover both the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos and the Republican National Convention where Donald Trump would be anointed the Republican presidential nominee I vividly remember thinking that I had to experience both because Trump’s nomination represented such an incredible anomaly. 

I was legitimately gob-smacked that a maroon like the Ghosts Can’t Do It star somehow managed to con his way into a major political party nomination. I thought that future generations would look back at 2016 and be amazed and horrified by how close we came to making a narcissistic buffoon like Donald Trump the most powerful person in the world. 

Hillary Clinton would be elected president by a reassuring amount but not before we came horrifyingly close to the dystopian nightmare of Donald Trump in the White House. 

That’s not how it played out, of course. It still makes me shiver to write these words, but Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 and the years that followed were, indeed the Southland Tales-like vulgar celebrity dystopia we all dreaded. 

I remember thinking when Trump conclusively locked up the GOP presidential nomination how incredibly wrong and off the concept of Trump as the official Republican candidate for President seemed. 

I felt the same way when Trump was elected president. I could not wrap my brain around it. My psyche stubbornly refused to concede that something so ridiculous and wrong could possibly be true. 

EVERY fucking day of Donald Trump’s presidency I woke up horrified that Donald Trump was the Commander in Chief. That feeling followed me throughout the day. It never left me, in fact. Not even for a little bit. 

To remain relatively sane and channel this horror to a productive end I devoted myself to writing about the cultural horrors of the Trump years. As a core component of this website, I dedicated myself to experiencing the deadly detritus that we all suffered through together and somehow survived. 

I’m talking endlessly fascinating abominations like the Fyre Festival, and the tweet where a gloriously clueless Mark Duplass encouraged leftists to follow this absolute sweetheart of a guy he knows, this world-class mensch named Ben Shapiro, on Twitter and Gotti as well as Loqueesha and the Kevin Spacey “Let Me Be Frank” video and Gal Gadot and Super-Friends covering “Imagine” to inspire the anxious rabble. 

In the Trump years I did what I have always done: find the humor in the horror so that life’s unrelenting awfulness does not overwhelm and destroy me. It’s cathartic and rewarding forthrightly facing the literary insults of Rachel Dolezal, Steven Seagal and Milo Yiannopoulos in prose and emerging victorious. 

The Happy Place was born relatively early in the hellfire of the Trump years. So one of the many gifts of The Joy of Trash, our new book, is that it allows us, as a culture, to process the intense and surreal trauma of the years when Donald Trump was president and the whole world seemed on fire, and not in a good, toasty, making-S’mores kind of way.

We didn’t all survive the Trump years. In fact a fuck ton of us died unnecessarily because of the actions and policies of the Conspiracy Theorist in Chief but many us did survive and now we can look back and appreciate just how utterly bizarre and terrible it all was. 

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. That was 2016 to 2020 to me, although to be honest, things have never stopped being terrible!

We can’t keep the world from continuing to be an apocalyptic monster descending further and further into madness and despair. But enough time has passed that we can look back with horror and mortification at what was a singularly awful period in American pop culture as well as American life in general with The Joy of Trash. 

We can laugh now at the scoundrels and scandals of the past five years, albeit bleakly and with a preponderance of pitch-black humor. 

Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop

Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al  here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
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The Big WhoopNathan Rabin