The Rude Pundit: It's Not Just the Pandemic. We're Traumatized Because of Trump and the MAGA Movement.

[babylonsister]

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2024/03/its-not-just-pandemic-were-traumatized.html

The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
3/31/2024
It's Not Just the Pandemic. We're Traumatized Because of Trump and the MAGA Movement.


Look, I'm not disagreeing with the pair of doctors who wrote in The Atlantic that everyone is grappling with at least residual emotional detritus from the Covid pandemic that fucked us up 4 years ago and that's why shit just seems so weird. I mean, how can you disagree with "In our lifetime, COVID posed an unprecedented threat in both its overwhelming scope and severity; it left most Americans unable to protect themselves and, at times, at a loss to comprehend what was happening. That meets the clinical definition of trauma: an overwhelming experience in which you are threatened with serious physical or psychological harm." Yeah, no shit.

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When we say that the pandemic has brain-raped us, we're letting the real rapists off the hook, and one of them is an actual and not metaphorical rapist. We don't definitely know if the start of the pandemic would have gone differently if literally anyone else had been president other than Donald Trump, but, c'mon, we know. We all fucking know. We all fucking watched as Trump played the raging dickhole with a panicked public, as if he could bully everyone into relaxing and just taking it. We watched him brag about the high ratings for his daily briefings in March and April as he moronically performed the part of an authority figure, suggesting that the pandemic would be over in a couple of weeks, that shit that didn't work or was outright dangerous would get rid of Covid, and then berating anyone in the media who tried to get him to acknowledge that people were dying in large numbers. That was fucking traumatic, too. Jesus, we were so traumatized by Trump's utter failure that we turned to Andrew Cuomo for comfort, and that led to a lot of us making walks of shame afterwards.

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And the anxiety and panic attack existence of the majority of Americans who are not Trumpist drones didn't come out of just the pandemic. No, no, no, we had already been through nearly 5 years of the rise of Donald Trump and the mainstreaming of open extremism in the form of the MAGA movement (Republicans had at least pretended to hide it pre-Trump). We had been through 3 years of the Trump presidency, with the threat of nuclear war with North Korea and the attempts to gut health care repeatedly and one goddamned impeachment investigation and vote. And then, going into 2021, we had January 6, election denialism, and anti-vax insanity, and then the eternal 2024 election and the multiple indictments of Trump and the rise in MAGA violence and what the fucking fuck? How the hell are we supposed to process all of this? And I haven't even mentioned the conservative cockmites on the Supreme Court gutting precedents like abortion rights, something that was semi-stable for nearly 50 years, undermining confidence in the federal government to protect even the most basic right, to bodily autonomy. And let's not even get started on the wars around the world now and the United States's diminished position as a global power that nations can fully trust.

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We are stuck in this fucking doom loop, like a cosmic algorithm of despair is keeping our content chaotic. If it's the "era of bad feelings," as some have called it, it's not just the pandemic. It's because it's the Trump era. It's the MAGA era. It's the era of fucking around and not finding out so far for the fuck-arounds. Sure, though, the rest of us are finding out because it's making us feel like everything's a house of cards that's one breath from collapsing, from violence, from explosion, literal and figurative.

And it's why we so desperately need Trump convicted and not just defeated at the polls. We need to say that someone is to fucking blame and punish them for it. It won't solve the trauma, but at least we know he won't be able to inflict more. Maybe then we can get to work restoring our feeling of safety in this America.