[NY Times] President Trump Is Alive. The Internet Was Convinced Otherwise.

pretty sure DaDakota has been using mental telepathy for years

 

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https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-unb...e?st=f1jfMa&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

The Unbearable Ubiquity of Trump
His presence is so constant that a long weekend without an appearance sparked rumors of his death.
By Joseph Epstein
Sept. 5, 2025 4:50 pm ET

We’ve all just got through a three-day weekend without Donald Trump. I assume he spent the better part of it golfing and with his family. I don’t know about you, but I found it pleasing to take a little break from the endless news conferences, interviews and televised cabinet meetings. I don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, but even without it, I’ve had more than my fill of his rattling on about his accomplishments, insulting his enemies, and threatening the rest of the world with tariffs.

No president in recent memory has been so constantly before us, so in our faces, as it were, as Mr. Trump. The man has extraordinary energy. The problem is his personality, which, to put it gently, isn’t everybody’s idea of a good time. An even greater problem is the constant intrusion of politics into all our lives that the Trump presidency has brought about.

Unless you have actual skin in the game, politics is a spectator sport that can soon grow dreary and wearying. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) felt that “politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” He also believed that “politics are an inferior form of human activity,” and that politics “were nothing more than a struggle for power.” In his “Notebooks: 1922-86,” Oakeshott wrote: “A general interest and preoccupation with politics is the surest sign of a general decay in a society.” We in the U.S. have over the past decade been living with this political preoccupation.

What offended Oakeshott about politics was its rivaling claimants’ promises of perfection, the arguments coming down to dueling virtues, “with one side intent on crushing the other.” Politics provides promises about the future. Oakeshott preferred life in the present. For him the role of government should be “to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness.” He added: “Politics is the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life, but of organizing a common life.” Our two political parties, of course, hold with none of this, each asserting that it and it alone knows the road to perfection, holds the key to the good life.

The pledge to Make America Great Again is the most recent—and historically perhaps the most insistent—political promise. So ubiquitous has its progenitor become in our public life that his Labor Day weekend away sparked a rumor that he had died. So pervasive has his contentious presence as president become that scarcely any pause from politics has been permitted the nation, with the result that our public life has become darkened by rivalrousness, agitation and anger.

Love him or loathe him, no one, it seems, can be neutral about Mr. Trump. He is the personification of political divisiveness. I like many of his policies—his support of Israel, his fight against urban crime, his wanting to end the Russia-Ukraine War—while disliking his vanity, braggadocio and constant stream of insults. Next year he’ll be 80, so there isn’t much chance of these personal qualities changing. Mr. Trump’s presidency will conclude, but our national preoccupation with politics isn’t likely to end even after his departure from office.

What, then, is to be done? I have a notion. (Readers of a certain age will recall Ken Kesey’s 1964 novel “Sometimes a Great Notion,” later made into a movie directed by Paul Newman.) My notion is to outlaw politics on certain days of the year; this on the model of those national holidays when the stock market closes and the mail isn’t delivered. On those days no political campaigning, commercials or political activity of any kind would be allowed. We’d be able to enjoy the quiet, the calm, the sweet tranquility of life without politics. Happy days, or at least a small number of them, would be here again.

Mr. Epstein is author, most recently, of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.”


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