I’m so tired. I feel like I could cry. But I’m so upset that my tear ducts are empty. The duality of annoyance and anger isn’t letting up. Every moment of 2026 has been dysregulation. I understand there are swaths of this country who willingly choose to live in the instability of Fox News. But there was a choice.
In another timeline, I’d have offered them grace about falling into Fox. I’d offer them the assumption that they’d unwillingly fallen victim to the lies. But now, after these last 18 months, my mind cannot muster the necessary empathy because my body aches. My bones ache for the level of stupidity we’re seeing from the Trump administration. We’re being run by the D team, if that.
If they were foolish in the first term, they’ve been unutterably morally bankrupt in the second. Mean and stupid shouldn’t be the only qualification to run the government. They should at least be able to care about anyone but themselves. Think about that: the bar we’re at. Having any empathy for anyone other than yourself.
In another time when I taught, I’d tell students about the Roman Emperor Commodious or the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, both flawed leaders. I could see in their eyes how this was not so much a cautionary fable, as they didn’t need to worry. People have evolved to be better than that. Of course, now we know, those leaders at least had some level of functional thought in their minds. Trump’s mind’s functionality remains an open question.
Here’s where history has not prepared us for the stupidity of this moment. For example, there was a dancing crisis in 1518. For months, dozens and dozens of people couldn’t stop dancing. They wanted to stop. Their body refused. The historical writing about the event usually attempts to understand the causes or focuses on the shocking nature of the phenomenon. But now, I wish we had more tales of how the onlookers must have felt. What was the mix of fear and shock they were feeling? How did they make it through the emotional weight of being part of something so insane?
Our moment has the added exhaustion of media. The pernicious nature of mass media is one of the roots of our era. As I’ve written, anti-intellectualism has long been part of our national ethos, from the days of itinerant preachers in the wilds. But Fox astutely saw this kernel of weakness. They exploited the people, breaking their sanity with one stupid story after another. Where before Reagan, news had to be balanced and researched, Fox offered slanted tales of the real world. News became entertainment, and reality, as a result, became fiction. But unlike the willing suspension of disbelief in reading a book or enjoying a movie, Fox viewers largely had no idea of the fallacious nature of the news they were being served up.
Intellectually, I can see the ways in which they were susceptible to mind control, given that many Fox viewers are older and less educated. I do understand how fear can hurt your body and soul. There must be a bodily exhaustion that Fox News folks feel every day. Their muscles twitch at the purported wrongs being committed against their kind.
Their fictional world has resulted in real-world problems for everyone on earth. And I’m pissed. I’m tired and angry. I’m so, so tired.
Of course, as a historian, I know that authoritarians use this type of blitzkrieg to weigh people’s intellect down so they can push through their policies. I can see how the future requires people to step up, clear-eyed and thoughtful, against the policies that negatively impact our nation.
And I will be that person. I will be that person today and tomorrow. In order to resist this insanity, though, we also need to be able to wallow in the mind-numbing stupidity of this moment. We need to feel the shock of watching checks and balances disappear. We need to accept that our bodies have been impaired by the stress of this era.
Every day is a fight. Maybe as a nation, we need to have this reckoning, where we all need to come to terms with the fault lines. Maybe we didn’t. Either way, here we are in the worst of times, with the sneaking suspicion that the times will only get worse, and we will need to get out.
Unlike MAGA, whose life is fiction, we need to stay with reality, which includes seeing this moment’s stupidity with clarity. The real world is hard enough. Their fictional world can be canceled if we all work together, and we will, if nothing else, so we can get past this dread and fight for brighter times.
The Mughals fell. The Romans did too. We write the history of both in retrospect. We analyze to pinpoint the beginning of the end. Historians try to decide if it was this battle or that inflation. Were there other ways it could have gone? Were there contributing factors?
Now, history isn’t exactly about today, but it is. Historians are encouraged to scrutinize bias and excise those elements from their work. But even then, we’re human. Read historians telling the stories of Rome in the 19th century, and their tales of the expansion of the Empire are quite different than those written today. I cannot imagine how it would feel to be writing about the fall of Empires while waiting for the hammer to come down on the US.
But will it? We don’t know. We’re in the eye of the storm. They say that the point right in the center of a storm offers an eerie quiet, so in that sense, the heightened emotions of living under Trump might be a sign we’re actually moving out of this horror. There are signs that we’ve started to change. Literally fewer Trump signs, for example, seem promising for a future that is different than the past. But if those people put those signs up to celebrate hate and self-satisfaction. They’ve taken them down for the same causes. They wanted to win for their hate. They’ve come to see that they’re losing, but they haven’t abandoned their hate.
Where does this leave us? We hate them, and they hate us. We’re all miserable. And the Trump administration is raping the nation for profit.
But it isn’t the end, actually. To live in the moment and feel everything is but one part of mibaking change; the other is to celebrate in your own mind the aftertimes. We need to keep that in our hearts. Just as we feel the overwhelming exhaustion, we need to breathe in the feeling of the next moment. In our minds, we need to plan for better futures. Yes, this is a terrible time. Yes, the worst are in charge. But they are not here forever, and we need to make sure that future where they’re out of power happens. We really can. And then think of that moment, in the after, how glorious we will feel.
