Surviving the Maelstrom
How can we keep our sanity over the next 4 years?
Author’s note: I apologize for sending this piece out late. It wasn’t congealing on Thursday/Friday, and I care about you all too much to send you something that I didn’t think was very good. My commitment to you all: agree or disagree with anything I write, but I will never send you a piece that doesn’t reflect the very best I can do.
Agree or disagree with what Trump did during his first term (and I've done a lot of both), there's one component of a Trump presidency that I am not eager to relive.
And to be clear, this component isn't even entirely Trump's fault.
I call it The Maelstrom.
What is the Maelstrom? It's the name I give to the toxic whirlpool of incendiary comments and breathless, apocalyptic commentary sustained in equal parts by Trump and the media. During Trump's last term, it seemed like every other day he would tweet something incendiary but ambiguous. Parts of the media would then jump on his ambiguously-worded tweet and pump out story after story about how terrible it was. Many media personalities seemed determined to read everything Trump said or did through the worst possible lens, which meant that we the people were treated to an ever-growing deluge of outrage porn about how our great nation was crumbling before our eyes.
In the Maelstrom, news cycles came and went twice a day. Yesterday's news was already forgotten, swamped by the next tweet and the next wave of outrage. It was like being trapped in a hurricane of fear and anger. And just like in a real hurricane, so many of us lost our bearings, lost our sense of reality, and just tried to hang on.
While neither side would admit it, I think the Maelstrom was the product of a symbiotic relationship between Trump and the media. Trump relied on his crude tweets to distract the media from real issues. The media relied on outrage to his tweets to generate clicks, eyeballs, and money; in other words, to keep the lights on in an industry that felt like it was rapidly being hollowed out.
It seemed like the only loser in the Maelstrom was the ordinary American. We were fed outrage after outrage in a media diet that increasingly felt like one endless trip to McDonald's: all junk, no substance.
We can already see the Maelstrom starting to boil and seethe again. Here's one example among many of what it looks like:
A week ago, Trump took aim at Liz Cheney, saying, "She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?" His continued…"You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying…let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy."
In context, Trump's meaning was clear. In his crude way, he was calling her a chickenhawk. He was implying that she might not be so eager to put troops on the front lines if she had to deploy herself. His framing was indecent and rough; but all things considered, the criticism itself was pretty banal.
But parts of the media immediately jumped on his comments, choosing to view them through an apocalyptic lens. Story after story rolled out about how Trump wanted to put Cheney in front of a firing squad. Roll Call's breathless headline was emblematic: "Trump advocates ‘nine barrels shooting at’ Liz Cheney.” Arizona's attorney general launched an investigation into whether or not Trump's rhetoric rose to the level of a "death threat," and of course that became its own story.
It was all exhausting. And underneath the fear and the outrage and the apocalyptic predictions that Trump would try to kill his political enemies, what was the actual story? That Trump said something coarse and rude about a fellow politician.
Now that Trump is going to be president again, I worry that we'll see another four years of the Maelstrom. Another four years of Trump baiting the media day after day, and the media selling outrage and fear in (among other things) a desperate attempt to grab more market share in a market that too often feels like it's dying. The Maelstrom is a win for Trump and the media. The primary losers have the potential to be we the people.
So how can we keep from getting sucked into the Maelstrom? How can we exercise our civic duty to keep an eye on Trump (who, whatever his strengths, has some deeply authoritarian instincts) without getting sucked into an endless maelstrom of fear and outrage that pulls us away from our friends, our kids, our spouses, and our relationship with God?
I think the key is to recognize that the media is not one giant undifferentiated mass. There are at least two sub-industries that we need to identify.
The first is news. News describes what's actually happening. Trump made a coarse and incivil comment to a female politician. That's news. Trump also won the election, and Harris gave a concession speech. That's news. If Trump actually starts using the power of his new office to go after his political opponents, that will be news. I like news. It keeps us informed. It helps us as ordinary Americans to to do our civic duty to hold our elected leaders to account.
But there's a second sub-industry, and this one's pernicious. This one's driving the Maelstrom.
It's the industry of outrage entrepreneurship. This sub-industry masquerades as news, and it tells us that it's informing us. But neither claim is true. I think these entrepreneurs have figured out that the best path to our eyeballs and our wallets, to our clicks and our attention, is to sell us fear and anger on a daily basis. Outrage entrepreneurs are the ones who tell us how awful the other side is. They're the ones who pound their fist and get red in the face and say that our country will positively implode if we don't do what they want right this minute. Most importantly: they're the ones who, once you strip out the bombastic rhetoric and the veiled (and not-so-veiled) insults towards the other side, aren't actually telling us anything new. They're not actually informing us.
So how should we handle these outrage entrepreneurs? What if we started saying "No?" If someone came to our door and offered to make us more scared and angry at the world without telling us anything valuable, we would say no. We can do the same here.
What if we unsubscribed from all of the outrage entrepreneurs? What if we stopped opening the breathless fundraising emails warning us that our opponents are mustache-twirling villains whose evil plot to destroy the country will surely succeed unless we chip in $5 today? What if we turned off the cable news—and the talk radio—whose hosts endlessly tell us how awful the other side is?
What if we took a digital Sabbath, and unplugged from X for the next news cycle?
What if we just said "No?" Would we even miss out on anything important?
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should ignore the news. I think it is our duty in a democratic republic to stay informed. Our voice and our vote are powerful, and we have an obligation to know what's happening in our great country so that we can wield both wisely.
One organization I really like to help me stay informed is Tangle. It's a nonpartisan newsletter written by reporter Isaac Saul. Every day Isaac gives you the top news story of the day, together with smart commentary on the topic from both left and right. If outrage entrepreneurs are selling junk food (lots of empty calories, no substance), Isaac is selling the opposite: a daily meal that offers plenty of nutrition without the crap. I think Isaac proves that we don't need outrage to stay informed.
So what if we turned the outrage entrepreneurs completely off in our own lives? Over the next week, give it a try. And then notice what happens. Do you feel less scared for our nation, and less angry at the other team? Do you feel more calm and at peace? Perhaps most importantly, do you find that you have more time to spend with the people in your life who truly matter—your family and friends? If so, consider keeping your Sabbath from outrage entrepreneurship going.
(P.S. Over the next few weeks and months, one especially dangerous piece of the Maelstrom is going to be endless reports that our political opponents are awful human beings who don't value the things that we value. These reports are a lie. If you would like to push back on the fear and see the real and wonderfully hopeful truth of your neighbor who voted for someone else for president, I invite you to check out the national nonprofit Braver Angels. They offer 1:1 conversations where each of us can truly get to know someone on the other side. Having done a few of them, I think these conversations represent a powerful path out of fear and into hope).
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