“I was really depressed yesterday by all the bad news coming out of the United States,” my g/f told me the other day.
Indeed, it is a common complaint these days. Donald Trump is everywhere in the news. As one N.Y. Times writer reported recently, no American president or anyone else has ever received this amount of media coverage. Why, even bloggers like me are writing about him.
I suppose we are all captivated to varying degrees by the “palace intrigue” in the White House, and we are somewhat incredulous that such crass people could actually be in charge of the United States — for the next four years, at least. Or perhaps eight years.
That latter point is worth keeping in mind and measuring against the history of mankind and, before that, all the time that has expired since the seed of our universe sprouted (see the Big Bang theory).
Donald Trump’s time in the White House — whether it be four years or eight years — is but a blink in time. Actually, it is less than a blink. It is so short that it is unmeasurable, and will be lost in the passage of time soon afterward.
It is worth keeping this in mind when all the bad U.S. news gets you down.
All things do pass . . . “It’s not always going to be this grey.”
Top photo: Shooting star. Photo credit: funcrush28 via Foter.com / CC BY
Jillian Page 
But kind of like tornado or hurricane damage. For that matter fire and flooding. It’s the re-building that’s the PTB(paininbutt) %(
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They will rebuild. But America will not last forever, Trump or no Trump.
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2 years, tops.
It’s the cyclical politics that I’ve observed in the past half-century. The progressives gain power and move the country two steps forward, and the conservatives want to “take back” their country (the phrase goes back at least 50 years). “Take back” has enjoyed many reincarnations since President Johnson. When he signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the southern Democrats went viral. At this point in time the Republicans were the liberal party and the Democrats were the stuck-in-time conservatives. The southern Democrats all became Republicans and they took over the party.
Power has alternated from conservatives and progressives on an approximately 8-year cycle. It’s rare for a political party to hold power outside of that cycle.
So, why do I say 2-years, tops?
In November 2018 there will be a whole lot of pissed off progressive-minded voters who will remove enough Republican members of the House and Senate to effectively neuter the Trump Empire. With the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate, Trump would be powerless.
Even if the Democrats only take the House or the Senate, but not both, Trump will have an extremely difficult time getting any bills passed.
But Trump is probably going to be impeached before two-years. The 1972 Nixon administration’s attempted cover-up of its involvement in the Watergate break-in was the first count in the articles of impeachment. So, watch as Trump continues to deny any connection with Russia during the campaign. It’s DeJa Vu all over again (Yogi Berra).
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Dan Rather wrote a piece, a week or so ago, saying that Trump’s first weeks in the White House are reminding him of Nixon’s final weeks.
This was something I had thought, too.
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Philosophically you are probably right, but in practical terms you may well be wrong.
You have to remember that Donald Trump didn’t start this phenomenon, he has just taken it to the WTF warp factor. That’s what makes some people think it is new, but if you look back at the conservative movement in the US (and elsewhere) over the last forty to fifty years, you will probably discern a different pattern of behaviour.
A salient question now is whether one thinks that a nadir, a bottom of the political and societal cesspool has been reached when if we were to be very honest, no-one has an idea what the bottom of said cesspool looks like, apart from it’s allegorically very dark and stinks to high heaven.
Politician, all politicians, but especially right-wing politicians have learnt from Donald Trump, not that it is just feasible to lie, they’ve been doing that for long enough, but that it is actually okay to lie, advantageous, virtuous, wise even. That is because they have learnt in 2016, that those who will vote for you don’t mind if you tell them lies, because that is a representation of events, of reality, that they prefer to believe exists. It’s simply confirmation bias, in it’s crudest form. You know as well as I do that if you listen in on discussions involving such people they will wilfully and deliberately reject any evidence to the contrary and if you persist they just resort to the most primitive foul-mouthed raving and abuse. As an aside, there is some evidence emerging that some of it orchestrated and machine-generated through bot technology. That is the context for the 2018 half-terms and the next presidential election in 2020. Like the sound of it?
The thing is that if this is where political campaigning has advanced to, ie continuing downwards, and those who think they can benefit from it don’t mind or fear what the bottom might be like or where it actually might be, why would they be reluctant to see how far they can take it in serving their own interests? How about murder of your opponents or of those who would vote for them? How about murdering some of your own supporters in order to trigger a massive counter-reaction to your opponents?
Think that none of this is possible in the Internet age, where anybody can observe or comment? I suggest think and reflect again on both recent and older historical events.
PS. I wonder how much of this strategy right-wing conservatives may have learnt from revolutionary movements around the world over the last one hundred years or so, which have nominally if nothing else, been associated with left-wing revolutionary events and reckon that there is no reason why they cannot adopt and use it themselves?
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Civil war?!? (again). There are certainly enough guns to go around south of the 49th %|
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“Donald Trump is a flash in the universal pan” Jillian, I would have thought an experienced journalist would use a spell-checker. You mis-spelled ‘flush’. 😉 But then again, my spellchecker once wanted to correct the spelling of ‘Chretien’ to ‘cretin’ (but on that occasion, *it* was wrong).
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