The Trump Doomscrolling and Doom Posting is Exhausting

Explore Ruminato While I Take a Short Break: There's a lot here to keep you occupied for a few days

Today, my newsfeed featured a story of radioactive wasps found near a nuclear facility in South Carolina.

My first thought was, “Oh, come on!”

Like most of you, I’m feeling exhausted from all the doomscrolling. And doom posting. My mental health demands that I take a short break. My physical health does, too.

Image licensed from Adobe Stock

Probably only for a couple of days, because the mad clown regime, which is led by someone who can’t speak coherently for more than a minute, will trigger me into action, and I’ll have to write about it. The mad clown seems incapable of not launching an attack every day, especially now that he needs to spend his days distracting us from his Epstein files.

I’m trying to rethink all of this, so I’ve stepped away a bit already from reading the fifty Substacks per day reporting on what a monster Trump is.

A part of me wants to scream, “We know!” I know. There is nothing new here, even when there is. His takeover of D.C.? Sure, from an implementation standpoint, it’s new, but it’s not anything we weren’t expecting. It’s business as usual. Another day in the steady stream of Trump’s newsy excrement.

And here’s the thing. Do the people in Texarkana care? No, probably not, and that part also isn’t new.

Texarkana is in Bowie County, Texas, which became,

D. Earl Stephens ✍️

points out, a boom town under Joe Biden. He quotes the New York Times in one of the few doom posts I’ve read during the last few days:¹

During the four years from January 2021 to January 2025 — the years of Biden’s presidency — the unemployment rate in the Texarkana metropolitan area fell to 4.2 percent from 6.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The metro region’s gross domestic product had experienced sluggish growth from 2010 ($5.04 billion) through 2020 ($5.8 billion). After Biden took office, however, the region’s G.D.P. shot up, reaching $7.2 billion in 2023, the most recent figure available at the Federal Reserve.

Stephens then asks, “And what did Biden and Democrats get for all this?

This:

Bowie County, Texas, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump — 72.3 percent to 27.7 percent for Biden, a 44.6-point margin. In 2024, despite the growth of green industry and economic improvement during the Biden years, Trump beat Kamala Harris in the Texarkana counties with 75.4 percent of the vote and 24.6 percent for Harris, an immense 50.8-point margin.

Have attitudes in Texarkana changed significantly since the election? Has anything, even Epstein, moved the needle? I’m pessimistic about that.

The mad clown was already on the hook for $83.3 million in the defamation case filed by E. Jean Carroll after she successfully demonstrated in civil court that he had committed acts of sexual abuse against her. This did not matter to Texarkana.

By October 2024 and the eve of the election, 27 women had claimed that he committed sexual abuse against them.²

This, too, did not matter to Texarkana, despite its new boom economy under Biden.

His other character defects were encyclopedic in scope before the election. They involved a record of larceny, probable treason, adjudicated sexual assault, misogyny, racism, and hate mongering never seen in American history.

Texarkana gave him 72.3 percent of its vote.

He lied 30,573 times during his first 4 years in ways that were documented and recorded.³

Nearly 75% of Texarkana said, “Bring him aboard. We want more of this.”

The only thing that might be different is the Epstein files, but his relationship with Epstein was not hidden during the 2024 election. Nobody who breathes oxygen wasn’t aware of their relationship.

As I look at the latest polls, I still see that 40% wall of approval for him. It’s a wall that has been there since the beginning. It seems unbreakable. And all I can do is throw up my hands in despair.

So I’m taking a short break for a few days to reset. After that, I want to focus on solutions.

How do we solve this?

I will, as usual, take deep dives as I search for and report on ways to fix this, with lots of happy footnotes. Because I like footnotes, and I hope you do, too.

I am pretty sure that the answers are out there.

I hope you’ll join me while I search for them.

Nothing should be off the table, from a tax strike to hacktivism. But I do believe that one focus needs to be on finding a way to disrupt the right-wing media machine.

Other than that, I don’t know yet. I intend to focus my Substack and other reading on those who talk about solutions, rather than repeating the same news I see fifty times a day. I’ve also fallen into the trap myself of repeating the news ad nauseam, so this isn’t a criticism. It’s easy to do when the fusillade of malfeasance is so constant. But it doesn’t work for me anymore.

I won’t survive four more years like this. I don’t think I’m alone with that thought.

Let’s fix this. Let’s treat this like it’s World War Three, and use the steadfast determination the victors of World War Two found when they faced implacable enemies.

Notes

Hat tip to

Susan Niemann

for her Note on the Stephens post.

To those kind souls who are aware of my November health mishap and who might be wondering if this post is an alarm bell: No, it is not. I’m fine. Same situation as before: A slow but steady recovery process. But it’s another thing I need to be careful about. Mental health can impact physical health.

And thank you to those of you who have become paying subscribers or sent me a little bit to help with this recovery process through my Ko-Fi link. It means a lot and helps more than you can know.

And thank you, also, to my non-paying subscribers. None of us can pay for all the Substacks we want to. So I’m here to remind you that you help motivate me and keep me from wanting to just crawl into the corner and wait for the next attack in a fallout shelter of depression and possible mania. Thank you for that.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll explore Ruminato. There’s a lot here you may not know about. Check out the navigation menu and the older

stories. If you like what you see, I hope you’ll share them with your friends and colleagues.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

Footnotes

1. IT'S THE RACISM, STUPID

2. Sareen Habeshian, and Rebecca Falconer. 2024. “Stacey Williams Is 27th Woman to Accuse Trump of Sexual Misconduct.” Axios. October 28, 2024. https://www.axios.com/2024/10/28/trump-sexual-misconduct-allegations-women.

3. https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116231/documents/HHRG-118-JU13-20230718-SD002.pdf (PDF)