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Just a reminder that tonight’s episode of “Ask Mary Anything within Reason” will be live on The Mary Trump Media Channel at 6:00 p.m. ET. I hope you’ll join us—there’s a lot to talk about.
Like many of you, I’ve spent the last few days taking stock. Very much unlike 2016, I feel neither despair nor paralysis. Instead, I shift between a sort of clear-eyed detachment and a grim determination.
Richard Hawley’s “Coles Corner” keeps going through my head. There’s a hopefulness in it that’s offset by the aching recognition of loss; a wistfulness for what could (should?) be that sounds like a plea for what one fears one will never have.
As Elaine Scarry wrote in The Body in Pain, “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
I find myself floating in the void between those two extreme. Nothing feels certain; nothing remains in doubt. It’s an untenable position—self-contradictory, illogical, fraught.
The most expedient choice (which is less a choice than an instinct) is to let everything slide, to forget, to normalize. The first two are not viable options. The problem with normalization, (and we have plenty of evidence for this thanks to the almost unfathomable failures—deliberate or otherwise—of the corporate media) is that whether we're normalizing fascism or we're normalizing the destruction of democratic norms, or pathological behavior or our own mental health crises, we’re failing to deal with the underlying causes of our current plight.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the coming days, but tonight, as the sun continues to set just after 5:00 p.m.. I’m feeling rather wistful—about lost opportunities in the present both individual and collective, yes, but also those of our country.
How different things could have been if we’d taken different paths after Reconstruction, after Brown v Board of Education, after the Civil Rights and Voting Acts of the mid-1960s. Where would we be if the 2000 election had been decided fairly, or if we had gotten rid of the Electoral College?
That way lies madness, I suppose, but here is a conversation worth having: How do we negotiate the daunting situation in which we find ourselves without closing our eyes to what’s happening because we, rightfully, feel exhausted or demoralized or afraid or just utterly sick of it all?
On May 31, 2024 in the wake of Donald’s being found guilty on 34 felony counts, David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo wrote about opportunity costs in a piece called "The Stories We Tell Ourselves.” It resonated with me because opportunity costs are something I’ve been thinking about with increasing frequency over the last eight years.
Kurtz also looked at the issue through a slightly different frame—justice and the ways in which we order our lives and world views based upon the expectation, and, in some cases, desperate hope, that justice exists—an expectation that has been sorely challenged and, in many cases, disappointed in very specific ways since Donald came to power:
We grasp for anything that will make the story turn out the way that we expect it to. We need Trump’s grand undoing because we anticipate that it will give some shape or meaning to this decade-long disaster that has cost the lives of so many people. . . . As the years have passed and time taken its toll, it’s become grimly apparent that the expectation that justice will win out in the end is a luxury only available to the living.
We are facing the increasing possibility that justice won’t be available to most of us at all, but that still remains to be seen.
The opportunity costs of the Trump era are so staggering that sometimes they almost bring me to my knees. It’s not the fight for the rule of law, or for a peaceful world order, or to protect longstanding institutions and norms that discourages me. Those are worth fighting for. It’s what we would have been fighting for instead, the battles we never got a chance to fight, the reforms that have been back-burnered for a decade, the lost ground on so many issue fronts. That’s what sobers me.
But the continuing challenges of the present interfere with our ability to face and process the past because there’s only so much we can take, only so much we can process without overloading our ability to do so. We have to pace ourselves. We have to figure out how to move forward without sacrificing everything we aspire to at the altar of this fight none of us chose.
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