Splitsville DON'T WORRY ABOUT US. WE'RE FINE.

The Younger-Than-Springtime Newsletter for Subscribers to THE SPLIT.

For the previous seven editions of Splitsville we’ve occupied and amused and enraged ourselves by focusing on the seventy-million-or-so people (read: idiots) who voted for Donald Trump—for President, if you can believe it. AGAIN.

We did so because our theme, or thesis, or gimmick, is that the USA is now Splitsville, which we define as being a state in which two incompatible nations occupy the same geo-political borders. One half the country (numbers are approximate) believes in honesty, decency, fairness, science, the rule of law, and objective truth. The other half voted for Trump, whose victory left the first half assailed by a hurricane of bad emotions, including but not limited to fear, anger, dread, anxiety, disgust, contempt, and hate.

These reactions emerged immediately—literally the day after the election—and for ten and a half weeks they had one thing in common: they were anticipatory. We were afraid of things that might happen, that could happen, that, okay, probably would happen. But they hadn’t happened yet.

Yes, Trump’s character, such as it is, was well-established. We had had plenty of first-hand experience of the words and deeds that had made him essentially the most detestable public figure in American history, and possibly the worst human ever born. But, in the main, that wasn’t what we were reacting to. After all, our response to Donald Trump, during the Biden administration, was one of revulsion and mockery. During that interregnum between election and inauguration, though, our response changed. We stopped focusing on what he was, and began—obsessively—worrying about what he would do.

But again, until this week, he hadn’t done anything. Yes, his nominees for Cabinet positions seemed (as they did during his first term) to be the calculated result of malicious trolling.

TRUMP: Who’s the worst possible choice for Secretary of HHS?

AIDE: Easy. Joseph Schmoe. He knows nothing about health, humans, or services.

TRUMP: Okay, so who’s even worse than that?

AIDE: Hm… Oh! RFK, Junior.

TRUMP: You sure?

AIDE: Definitely. If he’s Secretary, more people will suffer, get sick, and die than would under Joseph Schmoe or anyone else.

TRUMP: Bingo.

But the nominees, however dreadful and insulting to the very idea of competent public service, hadn’t done anything yet, either. So wasn’t it possible to reassure, or at least calm, ourselves and each other, by keeping that in mind? Couldn’t we ward off those pangs of fear and nausea by reminding ourselves not to dwell on things that, at least up until then, had no reality? Might we have found shelter from that emotional storm by resolving to Be Here Now?

No. Not entirely. Because Trump’s victory brought more than just the threat (or the promise) of future political, humanitarian, and climate catastrophe. It was, beginning on the day after the election, a fait accompli of moral disaster. Part of our reaction was to something that we couldn’t talk ourselves out of, that couldn’t be set aside as hypothetical, that couldn’t be deftly ignored by focusing on the present. It was this:

These are the worst people in the world. And they won. It’s wrong that they won. People this bad shouldn’t win.

Now, like all naïve individuals, we don’t think we’re naïve—at least, not any more. We (the editorial “we,” the two of us who write this stuff) know that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. When, after 9-11 and the Iraq fiasco, W was reelected, we thought that we had witnessed, not only the absolute nadir of the American presidency, but the dumbest and least justified electoral outcome that we would ever see in our lifetime.

But okay; these things happen. It was an aberration. Occasionally there’s a glitch in the Matrix but, thanks to the power of karma or God or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Force, it does limited damage. And Obama’s two terms seemed to confirm that. The right person won (twice!) and our sense of moral normality prevailed.

Then Trump—obviously a pathological liar, a bully, a racist, an ignoramus, and worse—won in 2016. So we had to re-assess. Perhaps we had, even in our post-W wised-up state, been naïve. Perhaps Trump’s undeserving-ness, his utterly wretched character as a person, hadn’t been as self-evident as we had assumed. Surely, though, this was (however monstrous) another aberration. As President, Trump would be a nightmare or a joke. (Or, as his handling of COVID proved, both at once). Then he’d go away, and the universe would return to normal.

Which it sort of did eventually: Joe Biden was elected, and all was well. Or at least well enough. When he stepped aside and Harris stepped in, it seemed even more probable that the right person would win and the wrong person be exiled to Florida, if not prison.

But then, after January 6, and the stolen documents in the bathroom, and the 39 felony convictions, and all the rest of it, he won again. And what we couldn’t shake or explain away or ignore, during the time leading up to the inauguration, was the feeling of wrongness. His victory, and the knowledge that every vile creature in the country was celebrating as though in a Mordor party scene from Lord of the Rings, was endlessly galling.

We should insert here the observation that to complain about something being “galling” is a privileged, white person’s first world grievance par excellence. Every Black person bullied by a cop or denied a job, every gay kid roughed up in school, every woman treated like a criminal for wanting an abortion, knows what it’s like to be subjected to the world’s ample supply of “wrongness.” We’re not seeking pity for the fact that our delicate moral sensibilities have been badly treated by Big Dumb America. We just think it’s worth pointing out that the victory of Evil (which is what Trump’s is) has consequences on more than just the human, economic, and physical levels. It’s bruising on what we may as well call the spiritual level as well.

Of course (to return to our gimmick), half the country doesn’t see it that way. Yet. We take some consolation in the thought that, in a year or two, or maybe just a few months, they will. When Trump does absolutely nothing good for, and possibly a lot of bad to, his devoted fans, and they realize that they’ve been betrayed, they’ll experience their own unshakeable sense of wrongness.

Or will they? Naifs that we are, we could be mistaken about that, too. When prices go up, and their jobs are replaced by AI or just eliminated, and health care costs remain extortionate, and the air and water get more polluted, and the storms and floods and droughts and fires get worse, and the next pandemic is as badly handled as the last one, and eggs get even more expensive, maybe MAGA will wonder whom to blame. If so, Trump will tell them. And they’ll believe it. Because don’t they always?

It shouldn’t be that way. It’s wrong. It’s stupid. But what else is new?