Fewer F**ks for Trump

I don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, I tell myself. Mine is a healthy immune response to the malignancy that is this monstrous man. But I do tend to boil over with frothing resentment. This can’t be healthier than it is helpful, and it doesn’t seem helpful. When I really seethe, it feels internally corrosive, like a cytokine storm.

Combined with others’ frothing, the therapeutic effect, if any, is to release pressure onto those nearby, receiving their relieved pressure in return. This creates an excited system, but it also dulls us into thinking this ferment is power in itself, even if we aren’t turning any turbines of change with it.

Trump isn’t just the cause but a symptom of grave sickness in the body politic. He could not have metastasized but for multiple systemic breakdowns, including elitist Democrats’ lack of economic solutions for millions of working people, while presuming their fealty simply because, the insider hectors, ‘the other guy is worse for you.’

To constantly vent our spleens at Trump is to ignore this broader biology and to surrender some belief in our agency to fight wider Trumpism—a project that will be with us after the tumor-man self-excises with age. Spleens, properly channeled, yet have a considerable role to play.

One reason we know our outrage is an insufficient cure for the Trump cancer is that he stokes and thrives on it. His maker scooped everything out of his brain that isn’t marketing savvy to make room for that single (unstable) genius. Among Trump’s mantras, “controversy elevates message.” We feed ourselves like fuel to his propaganda machine by supplying raw rage, which the punditocracy refines into controversy, and Trump burns to amplify his message and sell his power. He operates on the same algorithm as the social media we decry (which happens to be the same algorithm human news programmers employ, but we overlook it because they run on DNA not digital code).

Does this mean we should just tune Trump out? Of course not. We ignore him at our peril, especially the peril of the vulnerable among us on his target list who do not have the privilege of sidestepping him. Clamping the pillow over our eyes and ears until the nightmare ends may itself be a dream because Trump and the Christian Nationalists he is clearing a path for are determined to make theocracy permanent.

But clasping our heads like Munch’s Scream and exclaiming “The Horror!” at every turn is no way to live either. Besides, to a proto-fascist who separates the population into loyalists vs. traitors, and real Americans vs. those unworthy of membership, it hardly matters what Democrats, liberals, socialists, and leftists think of him. We are unlikely to climb out of this totalitarian tailspin unless Trump’s acolytes turn on him too. (Fortunately, there are signs of this. The bankruptcy of his ideas are their own self-destruct mechanism, as his plummeting approval ratings attest, in the wake of attacking Iran to distract us from the Epstein files, which has raised gas prices, inflation, interest rates, and the national debt. To say nothing of mass murder of Iranians, but MAGA minions don’t care about that.)

We can’t deplatform a president, the commander of the bully pulpit and a praetorian police force (ICE), except by methods which have already failed, i.e. not electing him (again) and impeaching/removing him from office.

In short, there is so much to scream about but so little utility to screaming. Is there not a more productive way to rid ourselves of Trumpism: one that is less toxically chemo and more holistically herbal?

For starters, we have a problem with the proportionality of our response to Trump’s provocations. It is natural to assume that the more obnoxious he is, the more shrill and sustained our reaction should be. But the opposite may be true. The more oxygen we expend arguing with crazy, the crazier we make ourselves. Compassionate people feel daily gaslit by a kleptocratic conman who rose to power by dog whistling to bigots, consolidated his grip by siccing us on one another, and maintains control by torching every institution that impedes him—while rebranding his authoritarian flexes (like mass voter suppression) as defense of democracy (“stop the steal”).

As if this weren’t disorienting enough, the fact that we have to scream the obvious to unflinching legions of brainwashed countrymen to (still fail to) break the spells that bind and blind them is dissociating enough to make us wonder if we’re the patients in the asylum.

We generally don’t stop to trade insults with delusional strangers on the street. Parents avoid arguments with toddlers in the throes of temper tantrums. Trump is a tyrannical tot. To pick up the other end of the rope in a tug of war with a malignant narcissist is to reinforce his delusion that he has a rational side to the dispute.1 Trump is a narcissist to the n’th.

Our private eruptions don’t reach Trump, but they do give us heartburn and expel hot gas at our family and friends. Our public outrage, rebroadcast by politicians, pundits, and polemicists, feeds the aforementioned algorithmic loops. It creates ‘respectable’ debates on subjects about which there should be none, from whether undocumented children must be ripped from their immigrant parents and ‘deported’ to countries they barely or never knew, to whether queer people’s civil rights should be abridged, to whether the U.S. has a calling to invade Greenland.

35 years ago, a wise man named Amos Tuckahoe who resided in Berkeley’s People’s Park advised me to “disregard authority, not disobey it.” Tuckahoe was referring to the U.C. Police force’s constant harassment of the houseless. He didn’t mean roll over and take it. He meant, resist strategically, substituting some ass-dragging inertia for direct confrontation. When Herman Melville’s character Bartleby the Scrivener declined to do any scrivening, stating repeatedly, “I would prefer not to,” his employers were vexed trying to justify firing him.

Certainly, resistance demands a diversity of tactics, along with collective expulsion of anger. And collective action supplies both solidarity and security. I’m not here in this essay to judge or rank forms of resistance. But it is worth noting that a lot of oppressive state machinery, which turns on direct disobedience of law and authority, would run low on grist if we practiced more oblique disregard of it—in Amos Tuckahoe’s creative sense of the term.

In a free-ish society, street level revolt nets mostly short jail stints for participants. In a totalitarian one, ordinary activists become convicts and corpses. We’re currently well on our way toward the latter. Witness the federal sentencing of eight ICE detention center protestors in Texas in the Prairieland case to terms of 30 to 70 years for providing material support to a terrorist, aka a ninth person who shot and injured a police officer who himself drew his gun on the group, even though the only other criminal acts alleged involved property damage, and several of those convicted had left the scene before the shooting.

We can’t afford to disregard Trump, but we don’t have to match his vitriol, or take unnecessary chances that make us targets. Whether by design, or unintentionally accruing to the benefit of our overlords, half the controversies we’re at each other’s throats over are abstract to our lives, siphoning attention and energy from the half which deeply affect us. Protesting Trump’s ICE hunts, detentions, and deportations of course matter hugely. On the other hand, endless TV roundtables on his vanity projects and threats to invade allies and annihilate “enemies” just take his bait.

We might try flipping the script and reacting in inverse proportion—in manner, degree, and duration—to how crazy, sensational, and offensive Trump’s behavior is. This means talking under, not over, his tempestuousness. It means meeting his ridiculousness with Situationist absurdism, like Portland’s protest frog ‘ribbitstance’ to ICE and the threatened deployment of National Guard to “protect” them.

It means, in essence, focusing strategically and giving Trump fewer f**ks, because he is a zero and deserves no f**ks at all.

Diverging responses to Trump’s declaration that Lake Ontario is now Lake America illustrate the point: Google and Apple tuck tail and quickly change their maps to comply. Commentators wring their hands for days, amplifying Trump’s insult. But Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney politely and succinctly tells Trump to go f**k himself, schooling him that Lake Ontario has been so-named for 400 years, predating the formation of both countries, and exhorts Trump to “stop doing memes, stop throwing shade, stop trying to be tough,” and return to the trade negotiation table.

I do have Trump Derangement Syndrome. Not in the sense that Trump isn’t so bad. In the sense that he’s so bad I need to stop inflating him.

1. This is my friend Valerie’s metaphor. She helped run addiction treatment centers and points out that advanced alcoholism and narcissism express themselves similarly. And, as Valerie says, “The whole nation is getting a Ph.D in narcissism thanks to Trump.”

This piece first appeared on Ben’s Substack.

Ben Rosenfeld is a California-based civil rights attorney. Twitter: @benrosenfeldlaw.