Why Don't I Ever Write About Trump?

for what? for whom?

I've only begun to fully read through all the comments and emails I received in regards to my recent post asking my readers to share what they think this newsletter should be or become, and I haven't even really begun to come to any grand decisions on that score. But I want to reflect on a question that has popped up many times in the past and did again in response to that query: why don't I write about Donald Trump?

This has become, at various times and in various ways, a source of bafflement, consternation, or outright anger from people who follow me, or hate-follow me, or just occasionally stumble onto my work. Some of them sincerely ask why I don’t engage more directly with the single most dominant political figure of the last decade. Others are sure they already know the answer - that I’m secretly sympathetic to Trumpism and part of some “horseshoe left” that wants to converge with the far right, or more plausibly, that I fear alienating my audience. (More plausible, but still wrong; I have very few Trump supporters in my readership.) These responses range from naive to paranoid to tedious, but what they all share is a fundamental misconception about what I’m doing here. So let me say it plainly, with all the clarity I can muster: I do not write about Donald Trump because there is very little for me to accomplish in doing so.

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.