Trump Has Become Boring

moment of silence for 9/11 victims

Despite the furor about his recent appointments, Trump hasn’t changed all that much. He still executes the same performance at rallies, peddling the same bullshit but more so. He feels invincible, I think, but many of us feel outrage fatigue. We are tired of his unpredictability and bored with his schtick.

“The dynamic around him that’s existed in every organization he’s ever run, which is people currying for favor or trying to elbow other people out, all those things seem like they’re still there.”―Eli Stokols in Politico.

His people take on their same old fights. Nancy Mace attacks transgender-ism, for instance, but for most of us that’s like beating a dead horse. It’s more identity politics. Politifact notes that only “between 0.5% and 1.6% of American adults” declare themselves transgender, “with slightly higher numbers among young people.”

We are also tired of constantly having our buttons pushed. It’s like living with loonies like Laura Loomer or Stephen Miller who are constantly whacking away at their same old enemies. What’s not boring for some, I guess, is Trump’s choice of dictatorial militants to carry out his retrograde campaign of getting even. But in fact these battles are the same ones he’s always fought.

“But whatever boredom is, researchers argue, it is not simply another name for depression or apathy. It seems to be a specific mental state that people find unpleasant—a lack of stimulation that leaves them craving relief, with a host of behavioral, medical and social consequences.”

For some, the arts will be one answer to getting relief from these consequences, an escape from one’s Trumpian discontents. Some of you may recall the Theater of the Absurd, which taught us that to understand what’s really important in the world we should put our heads in the sand and accept the existential reality.

It was a struggle to understand the dark comedy and pessimism in plays by writers like Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, and Harold Pinter. They mocked political solutions and the vainly orthodox responses to humanity’s attempts to control its fate.

Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious. And, frequently, bored. Ionesco’s plays, for example, explore the illogical and the fantastic― the improbable and inappropriate ways we communicate. You could indeed be sitting at a Trump rally.