Seven Days of Hell

A Discourse Blog roundtable on Trump's first week.

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Last night, a group of us got together for another in our occasional series of roundtables assessing our current hell-state. This time, we spoke about the first full week of the new Trump administration. An edited transcript follows.

Jack: I wanted to start by asking everyone: one week in, how are we all doing? Rafi, let's begin with you.

Rafi: Oh, Jesus Christ. Do we have to?

Jack: Yeah.

Rafi: I'm feeling terrible. I'm feeling annoyed, and then with the undercurrent of just terrible. I think it operates on two levels, where the news of the day gets you angry and feisty, and then it just contributes to this deeper reserve of feeling profoundly awful that just swells underneath it all and informs it all. So that's where I'm at.

Katherine: The single stage of grief.

Rafi: Yeah, feeling annoyed and also profoundly depressed.

Katherine: If we're talking stages of grief, I would say I've settled into kind of mono-grief—like this singular stage characterized mostly by numbness, which I'm not really proud to claim because things are only going to get worse. They're already worse. But at the same time, nothing unexpected has happened. It's all incredibly stupid. It's all incredibly evil. And I guess we just knuckle under. I feel incredibly numb.

Cros: I also think in some ways that liberal society is using this big public grief in place of actually doing anything.

Everyone's feeling so bad and lamenting the state of the world—oh no, what's going to happen? And the demographic that I see doing this the most, of course, is, I guess, our cohort, for lack of a better word—generally liberal white-collar people who are not going to be on the front lines of who the Trump administration is going to hurt. A lot of the hand-wringing over what's going to happen comes without any real specificity as to what he's actually doing. You can say you're sad about Trump being elected, but that's not a replacement for trying to figure out the ways that you can affect the things that are actually happening.

Jack: I’ve also been feeling numb. And I've been trying to think why that is. There's the fact that this is the second time this is happening, and so that level of unknown shock is just not there in the same way this time around. This is someone behaving exactly as we know he likes to behave. It's just things are further down the terrible track than they were seven, eight years ago.

And then I think that 2024 was already pretty horrifying in terms of where we were in our politics. We just experienced the Democratic Party bankrolling a genocide for almost a year and a half. We know that if Democrats come into power they would have tried very hard to match Republicans when it came to things like immigration. So I guess I'm like, we were already so fucked that it's hard for me to feel like we've reached some new level of super fuckery that we hadn't quite managed to get to. And I know that there are lots of things that you can point to that are going to be worse. And I think that is all true—this is an emotional reaction in some ways more than an intellectual reaction. But we are in the Trump era and we have been for the last decade. It was still the Trump era even when Biden was president. So it doesn't feel like as much of a rupture as it did the last time.

Cros: I think that there have been some things that have been immediately, markedly worse.