The weird little moral panics of the Trump Era are amazingly more disturbing for what they say about the state of our society than the election of the Dorito Lord itself.
We're late into "Trump Conspired With Saudi Arabia to Kill a Journalist/Trump Yelling at CNN Made Saudi Arabia Think They Could Kill a Journalist" and midway toward the peak of "Trump Will Send the Air Force to Strafe Unarmed Women and Children."
Who among us can remember the halcyon days of "Trump Will Start A Nuclear War With Pyongyang Before 2018 is Over"?
The part that completely blows my mind is how this dude, who has forced himself into the spotlight for four-and-more decades, is somehow an unknown quantity to the people most panicked about him.
The dude is all about the spotlight, not the hard work. To cause problems from where he sits, you have to try. He doesn't try. It's not his thing. His fans call this brilliant business management. His detractors, the thinking ones, call him lazy. It's sort of both.
His Cabinet is a hodgepodge, but they tend to stay out of the spotlight and do things. Whether those things are good or bad will vary by your personal preference, assuming you haven't gone around the bend BECAUSE TRUMP, but he's not doing most of it.
Deriding this or that Administration action is overwhelmingly deriding actions by Republican governors and other elected officials a lot of his critics cheered BEFORE TRUMP, doing things a lot of his critics cheered BEFORE TRUMP.
Wanna criticize him for being a deadweight in the mid-terms? I encouraged Democrats to do it with Obama, I see no reason Republicans shouldn't with Trump -- if he's actually a deadweight, which looks likely but won't be certain until the results are in.
But swinging between hair-lighting- and circle-sprinting-sessions isn't good for the mind or the soul, not least when there's so little substantive reason for it.
This is how Twitter is poisonous -- it encourages a breakdown in our discourse not for airing batty things (I used to moderate comments, I assure you, that fire's been burning for a long time), but by encouraging constant, light-speed reaction to and growth of batty things.
For your mind's and soul's sakes, take a deep breath every so often.
