Tom Nichols begins his article in The Atlantic "Don't Let Trump Exhaust You," with this:
The 2024 election has become a kind of waking nightmare in which many of us stare at Donald Trump as he unleashes some new attack on any number of targets: a judge’s daughter, immigrants, the rule of law, American national security, the Constitution. And we blink and shake our heads, stunned to think that many of our fellow citizens are eager to put this autocratic ignoramus back in the White House.
In a more normal time in American life, people had to leave politics for having a nanogram of Trump’s baggage. Think of the late Senator Thomas Eagleton, the 1972 Democratic vice-presidential pick who had to drop out of the race because he’d been treated for depression. The idea—how old-fashioned it seems now—was that America could not risk any possible mental-health issues not only in the president, but even in the person next in the line of succession. Today, however, we have a former president who exhibits all kinds of signs of a disordered personality—and yet the big worry among many voters (and too much of the media) is whether his opponent is missing a step because he’s roughly 42 months older than Trump...
The lies, incitement, faux martyrdom, racism, authoritarianism, etc., coming from the Malignant Loser every hour, every day are his way of overwhelming norms and of obscuring the existential threat he poses. They're also a tactic he's learned from Russian propaganda, the "firehose of falsehood" model which, according to a Rand Corporation paper (pdf), consists of two elements: "high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions..." The Malignant Loser is adept at the latter, and his accomplices in both the amoral horse race media and the Christofascist media miasma take care of the first.
But, as Nichols goes on to say, we must not give in to this tactic designed to exhaust us while it simultaneously energizes the numbnut MAGAt base. It's important for the Malignant Loser's incompetence, depravity, and derangement to continue to be made clear to the broader electorate, some of whom are apparently suffering from post-2017-20 amnesia. But this election is ultimately about the fortitude and endurance of the anti- Malignant Loser coalition to overcome the "moral swamp" we've already entered into. In other words, Keep Calm and Carry On.
