I’m glad the NFL season starts tonight. I have a feeling the games will seem less contrived and artificial than baseball has come off in the Age of Corona. And I need the distraction. Four years is a very long time to put up with having Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Americans elected a complete ignoramus to be the most powerful person in the world, and I’m definitely at the end of my rope.
The people in my life know that I follow politics closely, so they usually want my opinion on the latest outrage. The conversations always end the same way. People listen, and then they throw their hands up and say, “I just don’t know that anyone will care.”
I’m tired of hearing it. I’m tired of having that same question haunt me day after day. I’m ready to have a vote and find out what people care about. I share Jennifer Szalai’s boredom about the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book Rage, which contains virtually nothing we didn’t already know or, at least, should have easily surmised.
Did he downplay the virus for some misguided political reasons? I must have written as much more than a dozen times. Did his trusted advisers consider him dangerous and unfit to serve? Did they call him a moron with the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader? Well, we’ve known that for several years now. Does his former intelligence chief still have the nagging feeling that Vladimir Putin is blackmailing the president? Welcome to the club, Dan Coats.
I don’t know that hearing all of this once again is going to change a thing just because it’s now Bob Woodward saying it. What I do know is that there are already a lot of ex-Republicans and ex-Trump supporters. Everyone has their own breaking point. With George W. Bush, some people walked away after no weapons of mass destruction turned up in Iraq. Others couldn’t abide the federal response to Hurricane Katrina or the Terri Schiavo affair. It never made sense to me why someone would abide torture and warrantless surveillance but draw a line at how FEMA is being run. But people have their own reasons for how they feel, and maybe some will hear Trump on tape admitting that he deliberately lied about whether young people can get COVID-19 and they’ll think that’s worse than anything that’s come before.
The case against Trump was made before he was elected in the first place. He’s spent four years proving us right. I’m done talking about it. I’m ready to send it all to the jury, and if they give him a bill of good health then I don’t think I’ll have much to say about politics ever again. After all, in that case, it really will be true that no one cared.