The only way I’m going to get through these years is by optimism. So I’m just trying my best to put that out there in the universe.
We are going to face big challenges. But we can come out of this stronger on the other side and with a better society. People have been through worse before.
I hear you. You're young. People say that "having kids makes you more conservative" which is bullshit, but what it does do is raise the stakes of politics. By the time climate change gets really bad, I'll probably be dead or too old to care about myself -- but my kids are a different story. And because that's out of my control to such a great extent, it creates a lot of emotion. If optimism helps you get through tough times, I'm all for that. Do what you need to do.
But I would counsel one thing: be prepared for the worst. And I don't mean the worst that you can imagine. I mean things worse than you can imagine. That's the consistent experience we've had with Trump: he is worse than most of us could have imagined. In 2017, I anticipated many of the horrible things he would do. But I didn't anticipate that he would be so cruel as to separate kids from their parents. That he would have people in his cabinet to enact such cruelty.
And I certainly didn't anticipate, in 2016, that he would actually foment an insurrection. I knew he wasn't going to accept defeat, and thus I expected his BS lawsuits and conspiracies. I didn't anticipate that he would lead a mob intending to kill or capture members of Congress so that he could attempt to engineer a coup. And I certainly didn't anticipate that the US Supreme Court would give him immunity for that.
I knew Trump was a fucking idiot, but I didn't expect him to start talking about how the 1890s were the best and most prosperous period of American history. I knew he was a totalitarian at heart, but I didn't expect him to start talking about the 1798 Alien Act. I didn't expect him to be claiming that Venezeulan gangs were conquering towns all over the Midwest. I didn't expect the "they're eating the pets." I didn't anticipate him calling America a garbage dump.
So whatever you think will happen in the next four years, I'd advise steeling yourself for the possibility that you can't foresee the horror that awaits us. It's not necessarily horror in the Khmer Rouge sense. Trump is the living embodiment of Marx's statement about how history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Hitler never dressed up like a traffic cone and rode around in a dump truck and he certainly didn't fellate a microphone. But farcical things can still be horrific.