A Trump Era Wish: Just One Day of Sanity
When a lunatic runs the asylum, every day feels crazy
Editor’s Note: Have a question about how to snuff the still, small voice inside that’s telling you that you’ve gone deeply, seriously wrong? Don’t ask Matt, ask the likes of Marco Rubio, JD Vance, and Senator John Cornyn, the last of whom has called for the arrest of Texas Democrats who have fled his state to prevent a vote on helping Republicans steal the midterm elections at the behest of — you’ll never guess — Donald Trump. “A dereliction of their duties in a democracy!” say the Republicans who are trying to kneecap democracy. Whoever originally said, “Crime doesn’t pay,” clearly never envisioned 2025. But our fake editor digresses. For all other questions with no clean answers, ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
So much ink is spilled on what MAGA wants out of this administration. But they only make up 40 percent or so of the population. So as someone who is most definitely not MAGA, what is it you want out of Donald Trump?
Max L.
His resigning in shame would be a good day at the office. But the smart money is on that never, ever happening, because there’s nobody left to hold him accountable. Since the Supreme Court has virtually guaranteed he can’t be prosecuted for crimes committed while in office (so he’s off to an impressive head start in that department), and since he has never even met the concept of shame. Mailing me a seven-figure stimulus check would be a close second place. But I don’t imagine they have many of those left, as they’ve already handed the equivalent out to billionaires in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. (If you’re truly loaded, fake-populism can be fun!: You get all the perks of oligarchy, but can still pretend you’re angry about everything like a pitchfork-wielding prole.)
But at heart, I’m a simple man. In fact, as I write, I’m wearing a burlap tunic, and am nourished only by a glass of tap water and a crust of single-grain bread (multigrain isn’t conducive to my minimalist lifestyle). So all I really want from Trump — since I’ve spent the last decade learning the hard way what Trumpism is all about (which is to cause maximum chaos/enmity/warfare at all times) — is just one day. One effing day of peace, of uneventfulness, of sanity. Of not feeling the President of the United States’ sole purpose is to kick half the country in the teeth. Or one entire day in which you’re not even aware that the President exists, because he’s quietly doing his job. Instead, for the last six months (and for nine years before that, even when he was out of office), every day tended to look like this:
You wake up. You let the dog and wife out for their morning pee. You crack open your laptop or your phone, and find out that the near-octogenarian, misanthropic lunatic — who is not barking up other seniors in the day room at The Villages, as he should be, but who is running the country straight into the ground — has been up half the night “Truthing” whatever is stuck in his craw (could someone please slip this guy an Ambien?). This, usually due to whatever he gathered from his Q-Anon followers and/or the remaining Fox staffers he hasn’t appointed to his cabinet. Then, when he’s not covering for his child-rapist pals (one of whom, serving a 20-year sentence, was just transferred to a country-club prison for no apparent reason after speaking with Trump’s Deputy Attorney General/personal criminal attorney), he spends the rest of the day laying waste to every institution in America. Our law firms. Our universities. Our sports teams. Our entertainment. (Yes, Trump is weighing in these days on Taylor Swift vs. Sydney Sweeney like a 13-year-old girl, which might excite his pedophile associates). Our media. You might not like them, but media is the last bastion of power-checking, since Congress and the Supremes have almost completely abdicated their responsibilities as co-equal branches of government under Trump’s President-as-Deity prerogative.
In fact, after shaking down CBS and numerous other media entities for imaginary infractions like a common Gambino capo making his collections so he doesn’t have to do actual work, he has weighed in on everyone needing to get cancelled from Stephen Colbert to his archnemeses at The View to most recently, Oprah’s best friend and CBS Mornings host, Gayle King, who Trump says “has no talent, no ratings, no strength.” (Careful, tough guy. King at least hits the gym five-to-six days a week. The heaviest thing you lift is a 3-iron and/or a double cheeseburger.)
Is Trump fixing inflation, which he was elected to do, and promised to do, even though he has no idea how to do it? No. Anyone who has been to a grocery store lately — I go many times a week — knows that prices have held steadily high, or are climbing. Has he brought peace to the Middle East or to Ukraine as promised? Not even close, though his meat puppets, like spokesmodel Karoline Leavitt, still dedicate much energy to campaigning for his coveted Nobel Peace Prize. (If the Nobel committee ever awarded a Peace-of-Shit prize, he’d win in a walk.)
Is he actually helping any of the middle-or-working class who were supposed to be his bread’n’butter, whose cost of living is already inching up but is about to skyrocket when his arbitrary tariffs kick in, as that is a no-joke tax on the American people? If you can name a single policy, so far, that helps them, then you are a much more attentive reader than I. And I pretty much read all day.
But if you’re an axe-grinding culture warrior, who gets off not on actual results, but on spite, then I guess you’re sitting pretty. Because every move in Trump’s portfolio of moves is designed to maximize your sense of spite. He is not happy unless he is making other people unhappy. He is not the President of the United States, but the President of the Red United States, who lives to inflict pain on blue states, such as when he unnecessarily sent troops into Los Angeles to quell a tempest in a teapot (the LAPD is legendarily capable of putting down resistance — just ask Rodney King). Because like the goober rapist in Deliverance, he enjoys making anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly pledge fealty to him squeal like pigs. (Warning: hyperlink not safe for work, unless your boss is a manosphere poseur who thinks it’s cool to sodomize people who don’t have as much power as him.)
I do not glory in these atrocities. Rather, what I want out of the Trump administration is for me not to have to wrap my mind around them on a daily, and often even hourly basis. But I’m not being given much choice. I have new subscribers join up all the time, but also have old subscribers peel off because they just can’t handle the unpleasantness.
And I get that. Because I like my life to be pleasant and restful, too. I fish like a maniac. I just drove all the way to West Virginia to catch one smallmouth bass the other day. I spend a lot of time in the company of the purest soul I know: my dog. I obsess over my resident bluebirds, perhaps to an unhealthy degree.
But when I launched Slack Tide back in 2021, the semi-cheeky subhead of it was “taking life as it comes, not necessarily in that order.” It was a hedge, of sorts. A way to say I might write on the news, I might write off it. Wherever the spirit moves. But lately, the spirit has grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, and held my nose in the mess that is getting made of our country, as the spirit says loudly and clearly, “Don’t ignore this.” Don’t pretend not to see what is happening right under our noses. Because too many of us are not wishing to bother about being bothered about things that should definitely bother us. (Our Constitution getting trounced, the not-so-slow authoritarian slide, etc.)
That’s how life is coming at me, anyway. I wish I had a greater capacity to deny that reality, but I don’t. And reality isn’t doing me any favors by making itself so apparent. I love holy days, too. When the setting sun hits the stream just right, as you’re catching your fill of fish on dry flies. When your majestic dog canters across a meadow, reminding you how privileged you are to do time in his presence. When you sit on your porch on the mid-Atlantic seaboard, and still manage, despite the unlikelihood, to catch the Northern Lights. Life goes on. Ob-La-Dee, Ob-La-Da, and all that.
These are all wonderful, necessary things, which should not be filed in the remainder bin. But wonderful things don’t tell the whole story. And we should never be afraid to tell the whole story. We can’t transcend our troubles if we can’t even summon the courage that’s necessary to identify them. Denial is a coward’s way out. So that is what this piece, and so many others like it, are. An acknowledgment of reality — an effort to name it and claim it. Everything that is happening now is not an inevitability, but a choice. We could have better than this. And really ought to start trying.
Bonus Tracks: That was kind of a grim column. So here’s a thing of loveliness for its own sake. Nina Simone doing a 1967 cover of the 1952 Billy Taylor gospel/jazz song, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free.” (Originally an instrumental, with lyrics later added by Dick Dallas.) Which Taylor supposedly wrote after hearing his daughter come home from school one day, singing a spiritual. It’s a song that aspires to be free, while lifting off into something that approaches freedom.
And while we’re at it, here’s The Derek Trucks Band version of the same, off their 2006 album Songlines. Stick around to at least the 1:20 mark, and then again at 3:04, where some Trucks slide guitar licks kick in that are so sweet, you might need an insulin shot after ingesting.