First and last time I voted for a president was for Obama's first term. Then he turned out to be a cronyist war criminal, and I've done a lot of digging since then. So now I don't vote, and I'm taking the same exact stance I took about Trump on the first term, which is to DGAF it out (which is the same stance I have taken for almost 15 years), because:
1. The office of the president isn't the center of political power, and hasn't been for a very long time, if ever. We delude ourselves by casting blame or adoration on whoever sits the throne.
2. The attention and outrage thrown at him (and everyone else) by the shallow moralizing of the modern left is what put him in office twice. And that's provided that presidential elections are real in the first place.
3. The only thing that makes a life better is doing the inward turn and pursuing what makes sense to your heart anyway. And nowhere in there will you find the kind of shrilling you see on the internet.
This man is just an up-welling from the unconscious. He's a signal. The most useful thing to do about it is to understand that *this is simply what happens now*. This is the stage we're at in the life cycle of empire, and nothing more.
Things might get brutal. Things might get horrifying. What am I doing right now to be the most complete version of myself moving into that? To support the people who are *actually* in my sphere? What am I doing right now to beautify and to take pleasure?
Enough with the emotional blackmail. Also, anybody that tells you that you have to comply with anything to "Defend Our Democracy" is delusional enough to think that democracy is something we are familiar with, so you can safely disregard anything that sloshes out of their mouth.
"The most useful thing to do about it is to understand that *this is simply what happens now*. This is the stage we're at in the life cycle of empire, and nothing more.
Things might get brutal. Things might get horrifying. What am I doing right now to be the most complete version of myself moving into that? To support the people who are *actually* in my sphere? What am I doing right now to beautify and to take pleasure?"
This just sums it up. It's all we can do, and I agree, it might get really, really brutal. The best thing we can do is be prepared for....whatever comes.
"They depend on the presence of a boogeyman like Trump to claim victim status."
Exactly @radicalradha. They rely on the specter of a boogeyman like Trump to manufacture victimhood—a classic tactic in the covert narcissist’s playbook. By framing an individual as a villain, they secure two strategic advantages:
(1) Shifting accountability for aggression: They outsource potential violence to a third party (e.g., a “White Knight” figure), framing it as righteous defense rather than their own initiative.
(2) Evading moral responsibility: They absolve themselves of culpability for disproportionate retaliation against their perceived oppressor, weaponizing victimhood to justify cruelty.
It’s a ruthlessly effective strategy—and one that exposes a gendered dimension of performative victimhood rarely scrutinized in discourse about power dynamics.
Neither Trump nor the GOP is any friend to women, but I acknowledge that at the moment, the Democrats/progs look worse. They seem to think all they must do is support abortion rights to be feminist. I say women have more than that one right.
You won’t believe the hate my mother had for Tricky Dick Nixon. Of course it influenced us six children; but I’m the only one who finally got over NDS.
You know how bad their TDS is/was? My sister was dying from cancer in a hospice ward and she tried to bait me into a political screed. I quickly changed the topic to weather.
I had feared my Thanksgiving dinner at our home last year would be ruined by TDS rants from my sister and husband. And it was. Due to a medical treatment that causes occasional fits of rage, I screamed them at the top of my lungs to stop and ran out of the kitchen.
When my turbulent mind settled, I did make it back to the dining room for a pretty good piece of pumpkin pie.
Nixon Derangement Syndrome. Oh, when America was younger and more naive and thought a President with an enemies list who saw the IRS as a harassment tool was the biggest scandal ever :)
I didn’t vote for Trump or the DEI hire, but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
Yeah!!! What you said!!! I don't think Harris was an idiot, but I think she was incompetent. I'd be depressed now if she'd won. I guess we chose the devil we know.
Grow: You are right. I need to tone down my rhetoric about her. Clearly she was a DEI hire her entire life. Picked and elected because she was a black woman. Her inability to string together several sentences without resorting to word salad nonsense was obvious to anyone with half a brain. A category that includes me. 😎
I had high hopes for her; a DA coming from San Fran? She looked like she had a glare that could peel the chrome off your rear fender. And DAs aren’t exactly famous for being nice. What I hadn’t grasped is that San Fran is massively liberal and so is she. I’m not as sure her word salads come naturally to her as they do to Trump’s (his being brought on more by old age, his interviews 20-30 years ago show he was a perfectly communicative person). I suspect Harris suffered from Hillary Clinton Syndrome, something I’m toying with writing about in the future: Being so cognizant of being a woman (and in Harris’s case, a non-white woman—well sorta. She looks more white than anything else to me but whatever) that she just clammed up and was constantly tense, afraid of what the media will say about her next. I think she dug her own grave. I look at Republican Nancy Mace who speaks her mind and doesn’t care if you like it or not. She and I don’t agree on much besides gender definitions and rights, but I have to admire her spirit. Nikki Haley’s too. Republican women, at least in the way they handle themselves, are more closely akin to how I feel as a feminist, even as I don’t like their politics. One of the few truly ballsy women from the Dem side was Nancy Pelosi, who’s one of the greatest female power-holders ever. Once again, however you feel about her politics (and I did like hers), you can’t deny she got shit done whether you liked it or not.
👏👏👏 Thank you Labia and Radha for this phenomenal article! I didn’t fully agree with it but you did a great job on it! You also gave advice to those who unfortunately suffer from TDS. I liked the point Labia mentioned that this is nothing new and that Presidents have always evoked strong emotions from some. For example, back in the 1860s hundreds of thousands of Americans had Lincoln Derangement Syndrome. Harry Truman’s mother refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom when she was invited to the White House and she thought John Wilkes Booth was a great man for assassinating Lincoln. I couldn’t agree more with most of the advice you ladies gave! Definitely stay away from the mainstream news media it’s all about yellow journalism and sensationalism anyway. Stay active and do activities like hiking, running, cycling, rock climbing, boxing, kickboxing, swimming, snowboarding, etc. Also, run for office and become civically active. I’d also agree about finding reliable news sources. Here are some I know: Ground News, AllSides, Tangle News, 1440, The Free Press, C-Span, Merit Street Media, and Public News. Media Bias/Fack Check is also a good site. I would avoid Politifact and Snopes as they both have liberal biases. I would disagree however with some of the things Labia said. She said Trump wants to be a dictator I would disagree. If you look back in history this is an allegation made against many Presidents. John Adams was accused of this often during his Presidency, Andrew Jackson (who basically was Trump before Trump existed) was nicknamed King Andrew, Abraham Lincoln was called this by Southerners and Northern Democrats for taking the measures he did controversial as they may’ve been like suspending habeus corpus and throwing Southern sympathizers like Francis Scott Key’s grandson in jail, to keep the Union together. FDR was labeled a dictator for running for four terms. This is nothing new in American history. It just seems like to us because this our current reality and we don’t know or forget historical context. Trump is just like any other President and needs to be judged as such. People say he’s a power hungry and a criminal. Richard Nixon anyone? We are forgetting the lessons of history? I’m not a Rockefeller Republican not a conservative or a populist, but to paraphrase the great John Wayne, Donald Trump is my President now and I hope he does a good job. I encourage everyone to asses him objectively and with an open mind. I myself agree with the President when I think he’s right and am also not afraid to disagree with him when I think he’s wrong. For example, I love his immigration policy and appreciate what he’s doing for border security after all that went on with the Southern Border Crisis, getting rid of DEI, negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza, working to negotiate peace in Ukraine, shutting down USAID and the NED, pardoning the January 6th protesters, banning Transgender people from competing in women’s sports, and the work that the DOGE and Bobby Kennedy are doing. All that being said, I disagree with him on his protectionism, attempts to abolish the Department of Education, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, banning the Associated Press from the White House, repealing Lyndon Johnson’s executive order on affirmative action, trying to suspend our refugee admissions program, initially denying legal aid to migrant children, and pulling out of the Paris Accords. I also wanted to point out that he didn’t really want to take back the Panama Canal. What he was trying to do there was get Panama to leave China’s Belt Road Initiative which they did. In this way, he rolled back China’s influence in Latin America. With Gaza, Trump doesn’t really want America to own or occupy it. The Congress and the public would never support it anyway. What’s he doing is pushing the Arabs to take control of the situation in Gaza themselves and not expect America to come in and fix it every time they have a problem. The talk of making Canada and Greenland a state is just trolling to to basically put his thumb in Canada and Europe’s eye. It’s just the way he governs, he’s provocative. But there’s a method to Trump’s madness. He does everything he does with a purpose.
I think we'll have to wait and see about the whole dictator thing. I think he's shown some seriously dictatorial tendencies (and sometimes, outright expressions). It takes more than a few years for a true dictatorship to become successful (I have an article on how that actually works by a guy who lived in Turkey when it was a democracy and watched the very long transition to dictatorship). So no, Trump won't be 'king' in a few years but anything can happen.
And I do actually see some good in what he's doing, something I'll be writing about in the next few weeks. The 'shitbars' as I call them. Underneath the bad stuff there' something good. I'm also reading a very good book about the cycles American history goes through and how we're in the 'crisis' period, which is always difficult, painful, and traumatic for everyone--and can end very, very badly but often ushers in a new, sort of 'golden' age.. He also describes it as a bit of a purging or cleansing of an old guard that doesn't work anymore---I think we see this with the anti-progressive backlash, absolutely there's a massive cleansing there. And while I don't at all approve of the rogue elephant method of cleaning up the government, and Trump will be leaving one helluva mess for whoever succeeds him, I suspect they may be thinking, "Let's destroy it all and restore whatever we actually need," as they've done with the nuclear safety people (still, a pretty retarded thing to cut, along with air traffic controllers!) Da People have made their decision and now we're all going to have to live with it for the next few years. Just know this, Noah: EVERYONE is going to feel the pain. It seems like a real good idea now, yeah, this is what we voted for, right? Give it a few more weeks and when your services are no longer working, and you're finding a way to get your aging parents taken care of (if they do indeed cut Medicaid), and maybe your electricity has gotten very flakey, and now his tariff war is driving Trumpflation--maybe it won't seem like such a good idea.
First and last time I voted for a president was for Obama's first term. Then he turned out to be a cronyist war criminal, and I've done a lot of digging since then. So now I don't vote, and I'm taking the same exact stance I took about Trump on the first term, which is to DGAF it out (which is the same stance I have taken for almost 15 years), because:
1. The office of the president isn't the center of political power, and hasn't been for a very long time, if ever. We delude ourselves by casting blame or adoration on whoever sits the throne.
2. The attention and outrage thrown at him (and everyone else) by the shallow moralizing of the modern left is what put him in office twice. And that's provided that presidential elections are real in the first place.
3. The only thing that makes a life better is doing the inward turn and pursuing what makes sense to your heart anyway. And nowhere in there will you find the kind of shrilling you see on the internet.
This man is just an up-welling from the unconscious. He's a signal. The most useful thing to do about it is to understand that *this is simply what happens now*. This is the stage we're at in the life cycle of empire, and nothing more.
Things might get brutal. Things might get horrifying. What am I doing right now to be the most complete version of myself moving into that? To support the people who are *actually* in my sphere? What am I doing right now to beautify and to take pleasure?
Enough with the emotional blackmail. Also, anybody that tells you that you have to comply with anything to "Defend Our Democracy" is delusional enough to think that democracy is something we are familiar with, so you can safely disregard anything that sloshes out of their mouth.
"The most useful thing to do about it is to understand that *this is simply what happens now*. This is the stage we're at in the life cycle of empire, and nothing more.
Things might get brutal. Things might get horrifying. What am I doing right now to be the most complete version of myself moving into that? To support the people who are *actually* in my sphere? What am I doing right now to beautify and to take pleasure?"
This just sums it up. It's all we can do, and I agree, it might get really, really brutal. The best thing we can do is be prepared for....whatever comes.
"They depend on the presence of a boogeyman like Trump to claim victim status."
Exactly @radicalradha. They rely on the specter of a boogeyman like Trump to manufacture victimhood—a classic tactic in the covert narcissist’s playbook. By framing an individual as a villain, they secure two strategic advantages:
(1) Shifting accountability for aggression: They outsource potential violence to a third party (e.g., a “White Knight” figure), framing it as righteous defense rather than their own initiative.
(2) Evading moral responsibility: They absolve themselves of culpability for disproportionate retaliation against their perceived oppressor, weaponizing victimhood to justify cruelty.
It’s a ruthlessly effective strategy—and one that exposes a gendered dimension of performative victimhood rarely scrutinized in discourse about power dynamics.
Neither Trump nor the GOP is any friend to women, but I acknowledge that at the moment, the Democrats/progs look worse. They seem to think all they must do is support abortion rights to be feminist. I say women have more than that one right.
Feminism of today is a moral licensing regime and I can't be convinced otherwise.
You won’t believe the hate my mother had for Tricky Dick Nixon. Of course it influenced us six children; but I’m the only one who finally got over NDS.
You know how bad their TDS is/was? My sister was dying from cancer in a hospice ward and she tried to bait me into a political screed. I quickly changed the topic to weather.
I had feared my Thanksgiving dinner at our home last year would be ruined by TDS rants from my sister and husband. And it was. Due to a medical treatment that causes occasional fits of rage, I screamed them at the top of my lungs to stop and ran out of the kitchen.
When my turbulent mind settled, I did make it back to the dining room for a pretty good piece of pumpkin pie.
This is a great story
I have so many good family stories. That’s why I’m in the middle of writing an autobiographical novel about growing up. It has romance too!
Nixon Derangement Syndrome. Oh, when America was younger and more naive and thought a President with an enemies list who saw the IRS as a harassment tool was the biggest scandal ever :)
I didn’t vote for Trump or the DEI hire, but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
Yeah!!! What you said!!! I don't think Harris was an idiot, but I think she was incompetent. I'd be depressed now if she'd won. I guess we chose the devil we know.
Grow: You are right. I need to tone down my rhetoric about her. Clearly she was a DEI hire her entire life. Picked and elected because she was a black woman. Her inability to string together several sentences without resorting to word salad nonsense was obvious to anyone with half a brain. A category that includes me. 😎
I had high hopes for her; a DA coming from San Fran? She looked like she had a glare that could peel the chrome off your rear fender. And DAs aren’t exactly famous for being nice. What I hadn’t grasped is that San Fran is massively liberal and so is she. I’m not as sure her word salads come naturally to her as they do to Trump’s (his being brought on more by old age, his interviews 20-30 years ago show he was a perfectly communicative person). I suspect Harris suffered from Hillary Clinton Syndrome, something I’m toying with writing about in the future: Being so cognizant of being a woman (and in Harris’s case, a non-white woman—well sorta. She looks more white than anything else to me but whatever) that she just clammed up and was constantly tense, afraid of what the media will say about her next. I think she dug her own grave. I look at Republican Nancy Mace who speaks her mind and doesn’t care if you like it or not. She and I don’t agree on much besides gender definitions and rights, but I have to admire her spirit. Nikki Haley’s too. Republican women, at least in the way they handle themselves, are more closely akin to how I feel as a feminist, even as I don’t like their politics. One of the few truly ballsy women from the Dem side was Nancy Pelosi, who’s one of the greatest female power-holders ever. Once again, however you feel about her politics (and I did like hers), you can’t deny she got shit done whether you liked it or not.
👏👏👏 Thank you Labia and Radha for this phenomenal article! I didn’t fully agree with it but you did a great job on it! You also gave advice to those who unfortunately suffer from TDS. I liked the point Labia mentioned that this is nothing new and that Presidents have always evoked strong emotions from some. For example, back in the 1860s hundreds of thousands of Americans had Lincoln Derangement Syndrome. Harry Truman’s mother refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom when she was invited to the White House and she thought John Wilkes Booth was a great man for assassinating Lincoln. I couldn’t agree more with most of the advice you ladies gave! Definitely stay away from the mainstream news media it’s all about yellow journalism and sensationalism anyway. Stay active and do activities like hiking, running, cycling, rock climbing, boxing, kickboxing, swimming, snowboarding, etc. Also, run for office and become civically active. I’d also agree about finding reliable news sources. Here are some I know: Ground News, AllSides, Tangle News, 1440, The Free Press, C-Span, Merit Street Media, and Public News. Media Bias/Fack Check is also a good site. I would avoid Politifact and Snopes as they both have liberal biases. I would disagree however with some of the things Labia said. She said Trump wants to be a dictator I would disagree. If you look back in history this is an allegation made against many Presidents. John Adams was accused of this often during his Presidency, Andrew Jackson (who basically was Trump before Trump existed) was nicknamed King Andrew, Abraham Lincoln was called this by Southerners and Northern Democrats for taking the measures he did controversial as they may’ve been like suspending habeus corpus and throwing Southern sympathizers like Francis Scott Key’s grandson in jail, to keep the Union together. FDR was labeled a dictator for running for four terms. This is nothing new in American history. It just seems like to us because this our current reality and we don’t know or forget historical context. Trump is just like any other President and needs to be judged as such. People say he’s a power hungry and a criminal. Richard Nixon anyone? We are forgetting the lessons of history? I’m not a Rockefeller Republican not a conservative or a populist, but to paraphrase the great John Wayne, Donald Trump is my President now and I hope he does a good job. I encourage everyone to asses him objectively and with an open mind. I myself agree with the President when I think he’s right and am also not afraid to disagree with him when I think he’s wrong. For example, I love his immigration policy and appreciate what he’s doing for border security after all that went on with the Southern Border Crisis, getting rid of DEI, negotiating a ceasefire in Gaza, working to negotiate peace in Ukraine, shutting down USAID and the NED, pardoning the January 6th protesters, banning Transgender people from competing in women’s sports, and the work that the DOGE and Bobby Kennedy are doing. All that being said, I disagree with him on his protectionism, attempts to abolish the Department of Education, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, banning the Associated Press from the White House, repealing Lyndon Johnson’s executive order on affirmative action, trying to suspend our refugee admissions program, initially denying legal aid to migrant children, and pulling out of the Paris Accords. I also wanted to point out that he didn’t really want to take back the Panama Canal. What he was trying to do there was get Panama to leave China’s Belt Road Initiative which they did. In this way, he rolled back China’s influence in Latin America. With Gaza, Trump doesn’t really want America to own or occupy it. The Congress and the public would never support it anyway. What’s he doing is pushing the Arabs to take control of the situation in Gaza themselves and not expect America to come in and fix it every time they have a problem. The talk of making Canada and Greenland a state is just trolling to to basically put his thumb in Canada and Europe’s eye. It’s just the way he governs, he’s provocative. But there’s a method to Trump’s madness. He does everything he does with a purpose.
I think we'll have to wait and see about the whole dictator thing. I think he's shown some seriously dictatorial tendencies (and sometimes, outright expressions). It takes more than a few years for a true dictatorship to become successful (I have an article on how that actually works by a guy who lived in Turkey when it was a democracy and watched the very long transition to dictatorship). So no, Trump won't be 'king' in a few years but anything can happen.
And I do actually see some good in what he's doing, something I'll be writing about in the next few weeks. The 'shitbars' as I call them. Underneath the bad stuff there' something good. I'm also reading a very good book about the cycles American history goes through and how we're in the 'crisis' period, which is always difficult, painful, and traumatic for everyone--and can end very, very badly but often ushers in a new, sort of 'golden' age.. He also describes it as a bit of a purging or cleansing of an old guard that doesn't work anymore---I think we see this with the anti-progressive backlash, absolutely there's a massive cleansing there. And while I don't at all approve of the rogue elephant method of cleaning up the government, and Trump will be leaving one helluva mess for whoever succeeds him, I suspect they may be thinking, "Let's destroy it all and restore whatever we actually need," as they've done with the nuclear safety people (still, a pretty retarded thing to cut, along with air traffic controllers!) Da People have made their decision and now we're all going to have to live with it for the next few years. Just know this, Noah: EVERYONE is going to feel the pain. It seems like a real good idea now, yeah, this is what we voted for, right? Give it a few more weeks and when your services are no longer working, and you're finding a way to get your aging parents taken care of (if they do indeed cut Medicaid), and maybe your electricity has gotten very flakey, and now his tariff war is driving Trumpflation--maybe it won't seem like such a good idea.
I would love to read that article about the path toward dictatorship in Turkey. Is it something you can link?
Got it right here!
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/28/a-trump-dictatorship-is-possible-but-not-in-four-years-00137949
Awesome, thanks!