This blog ceased publication on November 8, 2020, when Joe Biden's victory became apparent. I hoped, along with tens of millions of other Americans, that the Trump presidency, and Trump's malign influence on American politics, would begin to fade from memory.
Maybe we got too much of what we asked for.
If this daily blog with its HTML 1.0 design ever changed anyone's mind about Donald Trump, I'd be surprised. Its readership was miniscule and there was no shortage of news about Trump. In fact, there was too much—some people read it because they wanted to engage with at most one thing Trump did.
Of course, people's minds did change about Trump, and they'll change again without any help from me. Still, it seemed important at the time to keep some kind of record of just how relentlessly dangerous and criminal Trump's unhinged presidency could be. He was famously, provably lazy at his day job, often putting in three-day weeks filled with multi-hour blocks of "executive time" that he spent tweeting or watching TV. But he never took a day off from the spotlight—in fact, he seemed to delight in trolling Americans with drama for drama's sake.
In the years since, I've occasionally paged back through what I wrote here. It's astonishing how easy it is to forget the details, although in fairness there were more than 1,400 days in his term. I can't help but wonder if that accounts for his victory in the 2024 election. Perhaps he was so good at flooding the zone with reality-TV drama that it crowded out memories of the horrific blend of criminality and incompetence. (See the sidebar for a handy summary.)
I don't want to do this again. I so enjoyed not having to think about Trump every day. But I know I'll have to anyway. Writing down a little bit of what he says and does every day isn't much of an act of resistance, but it is something, and doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I'll resume regular posting in a few weeks, once I've had time to mourn what we've already lost and what we surely will. Good luck to us all.