The Absence of Words

 Hi all.

When the Trump Presidency started, I stumbled upon a weekly blog idea, The Trump List.  On a lark, I had posted a list of bad things Trump had done in just one week, and I realized it would be a good bit.  It was. I did the Trump list from early 2017 until January 2018 (with a break in there for summer), but then I had to stop.  The lists were taking up too much time every week, somewhere around 30 hours.  The posts were wildly popular, with some getting over 5000 hits, but it was too exhausting to keep trying to compile the list, edit it and get it posted.  As I said back then, I got kids and they were starting to miss me.

After some fans (including some national pundents) asked for me to keep trying, I came up with the Trump Top 20 Weekly Countdown.  I felt I could trim down the work load, only keep track of the most insane things the Administration did and keep everyone happy.  I managed to keep the Trump Top 20 going for about 6 months, but by early November 2018 I had to stop.  Once again, the weight of going through Trump's weekly messes was too much.

I remember asking when I started the Trump Lists, even as bad as Trump was, would I have enough stuff to post every week, but as Trump's term ramped up, so did the crazy.  It wasn't that I was doing more research or scanning more news sources.  It was because the load of incompetence from Trump and his Administration was quickly getting larger and larger.  

This was by design.  Trump was weaponizing the news.  He made it impossible to cover his crimes by flooding the news cycle with incompetence.  Every time he did something horrible, he'd intentionally do something else horrible to take the spotlight off of his first incompetence.  By being the most incompetent President ever, both unintentionally and intentionally, presenting a daily buffet of things impossible to track, he avoided having to answer for most of his individual malfeasances.

2020 has been a nightmare.  Trump's intentional flooding of the news cycle welcomed in the CoronaVirus. He never had any intention of trying to save the American people from the pandemic.  On the contrary!  He seems to have intentionally made this as bad as possible, and in turn making his deluge of 20 daily news stories, into 50.  

I have a job which requires me to stay on top of the news. I remembered how exasperated I became in late January 2020 when it became clear what was heading our way with COVID.  It was already near impossible to keep on top of the news ("remember last week when Trump was impeached?!?) but we were all hoping, begging to see a side of Trump we knew was never going to be shown.  There was no hidden Trump empathy.  Anyone paying attention to Trump knew he couldn't tackle this historic crisis.  Seeing we were about to enter a long dark tunnel, I hunkered down.

Not only was writing hard during this last year, at times it was pointless.  I would start writing a blog piece and before I could post it, it was dated, needing revisions, or sometimes a complete rewriting.  After that happened a few times I started to write less.  Unless I was posting within an hour of the story, it was dated by dinner time.

I now finally see a light in the distance.  I can't wait to get back to a time when I'd hear a story about the President maybe once a day. I spent a lot of time after Biden was declared the winner decompressing and purposely not watching the news.  This morning, I noticed I looked at about a third of the news outlets I was looking at on Friday. I feel the gears starting to slow down. 

I aim to get back to writing and posting.  I apologize to everyone who has wanted new content.  I highly encourage you to go revisit the Trump Lists and the Trump Top 20's back in the 2017 and 2018 archives. I thought they were quite good.

I should have new content up soon.

Thanks.