Splitsville RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

The Pluckily-Hanging-In-There Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Last weekend, Donald Trump re-posted this, as reported by, among others, Jeff Tiedrich, on his Substack. Trump didn’t write it. Some other numbnuts did. But Trump did send it out to the braindead MAGA hordes:

There is no #JoeBiden - executed in 2020.
#Biden clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities are what you see.
#Democrats dont know the difference.

The stupidity of this—that the Joe Biden we saw during “his” whole administration was not the actual, one-hundred-percent human Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., but a series of clones, doubles, and robots—is so profound as to be easy to ignore, the way the vast size of the Earth is, compared to each of us, something so wildly out of human scale that we don’t find it particularly concerning.

(Although the post does prompt one point we plan to engrave onto a massive club of Brazilian mahogany, which we will use to beat the following into the brains of conspiracy theorists who yak on about this or that person being a “clone.” Namely, the process of cloning is not the same as the process of making a copy of something—what we used to call “running something through a Xerox machine.” You cannot clone a fully-grown cow, or giraffe, or Joe Biden, and obtain a fully-grown, adult replica of the subject. If you were to try to clone a human—which you aren’t. It’s illegal, immoral, unethical, and technically difficult—you wouldn’t get a fully-grown copy of the original. You’d get an embryo, which would have to be gestated and brought to term. For the Biden we saw on tv to have been a clone, they would (as Marcie Jones on Wonkette notes in her account of this inanity) have had to have created it 80 years ago (when cloning did not exist), and someone would have had to raise the infant through childhood into adulthood. Okay? Okay. Now let’s hear no more about this, and you finish your homework.)

The point is not the Q-anon-style idiocy of the post. Although wait. Actually, the point is the idiocy of the post, and the fact that we normal people have to know about it and react to it. Because we all, in one way or another, do react to it.

“Sez you,” sez you. “I don’t react to it. It’s just more Trump-MAGA nonsense.”

If only. But even simply by dismissing it as nonsense, you do react to it, and so do we. It becomes another (admittedly small) stone added to the titanic heap of pebbles, rocks, and boulders of repression massing in the unconscious of every person in the US witnessing Trump and his administration and responding to them appropriately—with horror, disgust, contempt, fear, and anger, none of which we can adequately express.

Sound bad? You bet. And it gets worse. We are also stuck witnessing the inadequate reactions of others to this Trumpian monstrousness, and having to stifle and sit on and repress our responses to them. It’s not enough that we endure seeing Mike “Ask Me About the Scriptural Basis of My Values” Johnson lie about the budget bill, or hear Karoline Leavitt’s obvious mendacity about her boss. We must also watch the New York Times fail to publish such headlines as “The Speaker of the House is a Smug and Sanctimonious Little Shit” or wait in vain for the Washington Post to display, above the fold, “Trump’s Press Secretary Should Go to Hell,” with the sub-hed, “Experts: As Soon as Possible.”

The occasions for this kind of repression are plentiful; indeed, the administration has been explicitly populated by lunatics and gibbering idiots specifically in order to render decent people gibbering idiots and lunatics. As Jen Rubin at The Contrarian notes:

While Musk was the most unstable, wacked-out member of the Trump team, we should consider the full array of misfits, cranks, neo-Nazi sympathizers, demagogues, anti-constitutionalists, and habitual liars who populate the Trump team. In a single administration, there have never been so many intellectually shortchanged figures, ethically compromised lawyers, and emotionally unhinged conspiratorialists (from Kash Patel to Ed Martin to Paul Ingrassia to Emil Bove to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to Pete Hegseth to Stephen Miller). Given all that, the coverage of the Trump crew has been bizarrely inexact and feeble. Continuing to treat them as simply “conservatives” or “right-wing” figures rather than unwell and part of a cabal of nuttery serves to normalize a dangerous, bizarre regime, unlike anything we have seen in modern American history.

It is not too much to say that at least a third of the country bears the psychological burden of this repression, and there is no way it doesn’t affect our daily lives. It undermines our work, subverts our relationships with others, causes us to snap at children and household pets, and forces us to wake up in the middle of the night (or fail to get to sleep altogether), our minds aflame with righteous indignation.

And everyone knows it. Go up to any stranger on the street in New York, Boston, L.A., Seattle, or Chicago, and say, “Is he dead yet?” and the odds are overwhelming that a) the person will know exactly what you mean, and b) answer, “Not yet, GOD DAMN IT.”

Such an exchange would be a tonic for both parties. In fact, now that we think of it, we hereby recommend it become common practice among civilized people everywhere. But it’s not enough. It’s a single Band-Aid™—one of the tiny little circular ones—applied to the lacerations inflicted, every day, by the emotional and moral AR-15 of Trumpian words and deeds.

No, what we really need is an all-out, full-time version of what, in 1984, George Orwell described as the “Two Minutes Hate.” Here’s Google’s AI description:

In George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," the "Two Minutes Hate" is a daily ritual where citizens of Oceania, particularly Big Brother's Inner Party, are forced to watch a propaganda film depicting Emmanuel Goldstein and the Brotherhood, and loudly express hatred towards them. This ritual serves to channel the citizens' frustrations and anxieties towards an external enemy, diverting them away from the Party's oppressive rule.

Tempting, no? Except we need to do this at any time and at any place, and not just in a formal ritual for two minutes. After all, if the cure for repression, and the prophylaxis required to prevent it, is the open expression of emotion, then the only way for us, and 100 million other Americans, to obtain mental health would be to express ourselves wherever we are—at home, at work, at school, at the gym, on the street, in restaurants, in the house of worship of our choice—by screaming such things as “FUCK TRUMP!” and “VANCE IS AN ASSHOLE!” and “LINDA MCMAHON IS A GALACTICALLY STUPID CUNT!” and “EVERY REPUBLICAN IN THE COUNTRY IS A TITANIC DOUCHEBAG!” all day, every day. If you’re anything like us, your passion would move you, too, to similar heights of eloquence.

Granted, such behavior is not exactly included in the recipe for a good civilization. In fact, civilization probably depends on people not “acting out” this way. But we thought we had a good—or, at least, good enough—civilization, and now look! Besides, if, as many say, the source of depression is repressed anger, the way things are going we’re looking down the barrel of four years of serious depression unless we do something. Sure, many articles and blog entries have emerged since Trump took office, giving advice on this very topic. They all suggest admirable things: join a politically active group. March, demonstrate, call your representatives, write letters to the editor, etc. etc.

And that’s all well and good. But can’t we just scream our brains out? Otherwise we face a new version of Splitsville, which is our term of art referring to the presence of two (or more) distinct nations occupying a single geo-political entity. The US will become—it already is!—a place where a third of the population labors under an immense burden of bottled-up emotions. Another third, the MAGA contingent, also feel bad, of course. But a) they have no trouble whining and bitching about it openly, all the time, and b) their complaints concern everything except Trump, whom they’ve cast as their savior.

FOR NOW, we hasten to add. Wait until their beloved neighbor is deported, or they’re kicked off Medicaid, or their parents can’t get Social Security on the phone, or those manufacturing jobs fail to materialize, or their hurricane-ravaged town can’t get FEMA aid, or…Let’s just say, they’ll have plenty of negative emotions to express, repress, or drink into submission.

And the other third of the population? They “don’t follow politics” and so just don’t care.

But come on! Why should they get to be happy? It’s not fair! And it makes us so mad…