Trump was constantly endeavoring to erase and revise the past and thereby to undermine the capacity of any of us to remember it or reference it. Because so much of what happened in our hard-hit country could have been avoided by a more compassionate and competent administration, it was part of the chaos. The pandemic felt like the final phase, throwing us deeper into uncertainty, isolation, anxiety, and a sea of lies and denials-and mass death. The phrase “drain the swamp,” repeated over and over by the most corrupt administration in a century or more, was part of its promulgation of confusion, its swampiness. It was a disorder from which we were forever trying to emerge into order, like people clawing a slimy bank, only to slump back into the ooze. To those who opposed him, the years felt like a constant barrage of insults to fact, truth, science, of attacks on laws, on rights, on targeted populations from Muslims to trans kids, on the environment, on scientists, on institutions that might protect or promulgate any of these preceding things, and on memory itself. When the Biden inauguration happened, I was surprised to find that I was not uplifted or relieved, but freed to feel how hideous the whole thing had been, how damaged I felt-and I heard from many others who had the same experience.Ī hundred days since the end of that era and the beginning of the Biden Presidency, the texture of everyday life then does feel at times remote, almost unbelievable, and when some national event transpires, it’s a huge relief not to have the incendiary idiocy of Trump’s commentary added to it (which is a reminder that it was both a presidency the senate could have ended in early 2020 and a long run on Twitter that Jack Dorsey could have ended before he finally did, after the insurrection of January 6). Morris in his The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder calls trauma “a disease of time.” With PTSD, the past refuses to become the past or stay there, and the traumatic event forces itself back, like a zombie rising from the dead, into the present, or the present of the source of trauma has never receded to become the past, either as something receding into the distance or incorporated into one’s historical narrative. During those four years of his presidency, our perception of time became disrupted and corrupted until it seemed to get stuck, stumble over itself into incoherence, loop, or crumble.ĭavid J. And like so much else he got hold of, he wrecked it.
Trump ever acquired in his shady, shoddy career as a developer was the terrain inside our heads.
The impact of the Trump era will probably be remembered as crimes and outrages, but what it did to our psyches may be harder to recall.
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