I’m a writer. Though I’m given to waxing pretentious about my profession, here that’s not a philosophical statement or some soul-searching claim about vocation; I mean it in the most banal way possible. I write things, and sometimes people read them. If I’m lucky, they think about the things that I’ve written after they read them. If I’m really, really lucky, some small number of them change their minds, in however small a way. That is the actual arc of what I do: words, then readers, then (rare but real) effects on thinking, usually minor ones. That arc is narrow, fragile, and unpredictable. The range of things I can meaningfully influence is small. The kinds of readers I reach are finite. And when it comes to Donald Trump, there is nothing I can say that will matter, not even a little bit.
That’s not some empty gesture of fatalism. It’s a recognition of reality. There’s already an immense and suffocating media ecosystem built entirely around Donald Trump, pro and con, left and right, earnest and cynical. The man is the gravitational center of modern American political discourse. He is the sun around which all else orbits. He has been analyzed, dissected, profiled, parodied, investigated, indicted, psychoanalyzed, lionized, and demonized to a degree that exceeds comprehension. Every possible critique of him has already been made, often in triplicate. His corruption, his cruelty, his incompetence, his shamelessness – all of it has been written a thousand times, often by people far more credentialed and connected in the world of partisan politics than I am. He and his reign are topics so saturated with analysis that there’s scarcely any rhetorical oxygen left to consume.