Crisis management

Donald Trump is our new crisis, as Vietnam once was our crisis and then Watergate and, before and after and concurrent to Vietnam and Watergate, civil rights (civil rights is our perpetual crisis); Trump is simply the new crisis, still relatively minor, not having reached (yet) the Horeb heights of Vietnam or Watergate, but a crisis nonetheless.

It helps me to think this way, that Trump is simply another crisis in a line of crises, and that I can reasonably expect that there will come a time when I won't have to deal with Trump ever again except in the semi-warm glow of unbidden but amusing memories. There I will be finally free of Trump, and he will be free to live out the rest of his life as either the clown I think he is or the shockingly inept civil servant he seems to be, a small man prone to making his strange little rages public, the ones that larger, more experienced and, might I say, intelligent men and women keep to themselves. 

Any message to those on the left and the right--and I suspect there are as many on the right whose heads are making that "what just happened" movement--must be grounded on this notion: not only don't normalize Trump, please make sure not to think of this Presidency as a Hollywood entertainment. I'm not a conservative, I don't have one conservative synapse in my brain, I try not to think of The Republican Party at all, when I think of The Republican Party all I can think of is the damage it's done to this country. I'm a liberal who's now lived long enough to see that crisis is sometimes salutary.

Liberalism is now a kind of crisis management tool; that's the best I can say of it, which isn't all that bad. I'm a liberal; I believe there's a fine future ahead of us, and that it will be full of crises.