As a New Year's gift for 2019 (and 2020), this blog presents an essay by The New Yorker's Susuan B. Glasser. Read and know why the days of 2019 seemed so dreary and all you had done was watch TV news. That was enough exposure, with even a single daily viewing, of the souce of your malady. You have contracted Trumpschmerz from Patient Zero aka The LK (Lyin' King). The malady was caused by a falsehood equivalent of a McDonald's burger-count — 10,000 and counting with a few days remaining in 2019. The drip-drip-drip of falsehoods is the mental equivalent of Chiinese water-torture morning-noon-and-night. If this is the (fair & balanced) disgnosis of our national pandemic, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Our Year Of Trumpschmerz
By Susan B. Glasser
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
So much for the holidays. In the quiet of Christmas and New Year’s, the President of the United States has repeatedly attacked “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi and her family, inveighed against the “bogus Impeachment Scam” and circulated the alleged name of the C.I.A. whistle-blower whose complaint triggered it, retweeted an account that described former President Barack Obama as “Satan’s Muslim Scum,” hosted the accused war criminal he recently pardoned over the objections of military leaders, and promoted a post calling himself “the best President of all time.” He even accused the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, of personally ordering Canadian television to cut a seven-second snippet of the schmaltzy Christmas movie “Home Alone 2” that features Trump, an accusation the President refused to retract, although it was quickly proven that the scene was one of many edited out as a time-saver back in 2014, long before either Trudeau or Trump was anywhere close to power.
Even now, three years into the Trump Presidency, there is no language to fully capture the madness of all this, though many of my journalistic colleagues have gone to great lengths to record and codify just how disturbingly nutty 2019 has been. The Washington Post reports that Trump ended the year having made more than fifteen thousand four hundred false and misleading statements since his inauguration. CNN’s “Inside Politics” produced a four-page, single-spaced list of all the people and institutions Trump has attacked by name this year. There are online trackers for the unprecedented levels of turnover in Trump’s Administration and for the rapidly proliferating array of lawsuits involving Trump’s assertions of sweeping executive authority. By any measure, 2019 will go down as a remarkable year in the annals of the American Presidency: Trump began it by causing the longest-ever federal government shutdown in history, after Congress refused to spend billions on his proposed border wall, and ended it as only the third President in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.
But, of course, all the metrics can’t really quantify the crazy of a President who acts like this and the relatively stable forty per cent of the public that continues to approve of him, no matter what he says and does. How will we explain to our future selves the sheer bizarreness of an American leader who rants at rallies about the evils of windmills and modern toilets, who brags that he and North Korea’s homicidal dictator “fell in love,” who repeats Russian propaganda from the Oval Office, and who issues major national-security decisions by fiat on Twitter without informing the Pentagon, State Department, or his own staff? All of that happened this year, too, and it’s not even what he was impeached over.
I thought I’d unplug over the holiday week, in anticipation of a frenetic 2020 that will begin with a Senate impeachment trial and end with a Presidential election that may well be the most consequential of my lifetime. I thought I’d take a break from Twitter and from endless, twenty-four-hour-a-day Trump. And I tried—I really did. I knew there was some issue with “Home Alone 2” but didn’t bother to spend a few seconds clicking around to figure out what it was all about until I was writing this column. For a few days, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago tweetstorms were like thunderclaps on a distant horizon; I knew the weather was bad on the Internet, and I happily stayed away. I realize this attitude is increasingly held by the American public, at least that segment of the public which doesn’t follow the news for a living.
It turns out, however, that staying away from the daily distractions of Trump has not been restorative. You can turn off the Trump show, but the nagging, unfortunate reality is that the show goes on, with or without you. The President of the United States is still out there saying crazy, mean, inappropriate things at all hours of the day and night. This remains disturbing, even if one is divorced from the particulars. You can turn off your smartphone, delete the Twitter app, bake endless batches of cookies, and binge-watch Netflix: Trump is still there.
Tuning out also brings other, more consequential anxieties. The less time spent in the hair-trigger news cycle of Twitter, the more time left to contemplate the bigger, more long-lasting consequences that all of this is wreaking on our democratic institutions and our nerve-wracked souls. By choosing not to immerse myself in the details of which conspiracy theorist Trump was retweeting, I had more time to think about the increasingly real possibility of Trump’s reëlection in November. By skipping the mini outrages, I had the mental bandwidth for the macro ones: time, that is, to consider what the Trump Presidency will look like after Democrats have tried and failed to convict and remove him from office, and what the impact will be, over the next several decades, of a federal judiciary remade by a President who is hostile to any interpretation of the Constitution that does not give him essentially unconstrained authority. I had time to think about what a second-term Trump will feel empowered to do and time to consider, once again, whether the President may have been literally, and not just metaphorically, correct when he bragged that his followers would stay loyal to him even if he shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.
There must be one of those long German words for all that soul-sickening worry, right? Some tortured mouthful of consonants that captures the ceaseless anxiety and absurdity of Washington in the age of Trump? I asked my friend, the German scholar and writer Constanze Stelzenmüller, an astute observer of Trumpism at the Brookings Institution and especially of its toxic effect on the troubled transatlantic relationship. She said that, even in Trump-skeptical Berlin, there was no single, widely accepted word that describes this phenomenon but gamely offered up her own stab at it. The word she came up with is “Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz.”
My German is nonexistent, but a quick Internet search suggests that Constanze nailed it. In thirty-three letters, she managed to capture the whole damn mess. Her word has pretty much everything that has come to characterize this uniquely dysfunctional moment in America’s troubled capital: Trump and his Administration (“regierung” means government); the slow-motion car crash of constant controversies (“schlamassel”); and the continuous pain or ache of the soul that results from excessive contemplation of it all (“schmerz”). Sure, it’s a mouthful, but that’s the point: there should be one word that sums up the Trumpian disruption we are experiencing, not merely a jumble of different ones. It’s the tweets and the other stuff, too: the endless attacks on enemies, real and imagined; the torrent of lies; the eroding of the basic functions of government; and the formerly unimaginable assault on our institutions. It’s impeachment and the Mueller Report and migrant children in cages, the bullying of allies, and the lavish praise of adversaries. It’s the uncertainty and worry that comes with all of the above.
On the brink of a new year, Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz has come to dominate our collective psyche. There is no taking a vacation from it. I confess that I have not yet figured out how to pronounce this unwieldy linguistic invention that so deftly captures our national Trump-soul-sickness. Luckily, I received a follow-up e-mail from Constanze, in which she proposed a shortened version that gets right to the angsty, anxious point: If “Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz” is too much, she said, you can just use “Trumpschmerz.” Either way, in German or in English, it’s my nominee for the word of the year in 2019. I suspect it will be in 2020 as well. ###
[Susan B. Glasser is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes a twice-monthly column on life in Trump’s Washington. She is Politico’s chief international-affairs columnist and the host of its weekly podcast, “The Global Politico.” Glasser has served as the top editor of several Washington publications; most recently, she founded the award-winning Politico magazine and went on to become the editor of Politico throughout the 2016 election cycle. She previously served as the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, which won three National Magazine Awards, among other honors, during her tenure. Before that, she worked for a decade at the Washington Post, where she was the editor of "Outlook" and national news. She also oversaw coverage of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, served as a reporter covering the intersection of money and politics, spent four years as the Post’s Moscow co-bureau chief, and covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin and the End of Revolution (2005), which she co-wrote with her husband, Peter Baker. Glasser received a BA cum laude (government) from Harvard University (MA).]
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