For the duration of August 2016, partly as an experiment but mostly for the good of my mental health, I put myself on a media diet.
This diet had one rule: I forbade myself to read about Donald Trump, watch any video that featured Trump, or even speak the name of the man I came to call "he who must not be elected."
It turns out that food-restricting diets -- I'd just completed the notoriously strict Whole 30 in July -- were a breeze by comparison.
SEE ALSO:Hey America: It's August. Let's all take a nice long Trumpcation.Maybe you don't believe this would be much of a challenge. Maybe you haven't stopped to notice how much Trump is infecting our cultural landscape right now, arriving unannounced on screens in our sports bars and transit zones, like a large orange Big Brother.
Worse -- at any moment, he can put in a cameo appearance in casual conversations with friends and strangers alike. (I found myself ducking out of chats just as frequently as I had to swerve away from airport TVs.)
Maybe you're lucky enough to have friends who avoid politics; maybe you believe politics has no effect on your life, or you don't believe the guy who has spent months peddling the kind of extremism that would make Barry Goldwater blush is a genuine threat.
Or maybe you tuned out Election 2016 months ago, telling yourself you'll start paying attention again during the debates, which start Monday. Maybe you're also you're the sort of person who can stop yourself from looking at a flaming car wreck by the side of the highway, a good citizen conscientiously doing your part to avoid a rubbernecking backup.
If so, bravo. That's exactly what I was endeavoring to become: someone immune to the anxieties born of watching the daily tire fire.
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Little did I know that August, normally such a quiet time in the political news cycle, was one of the worst months I could have chosen.
I knew I was a passionate political news junkie, but I had no idea how hooked I had become on the drip, drip, drip of the Trump story -- in a negative sense, of course, but hooked nevertheless -- until I ripped out my media feed.
Equally addicted friends began bargaining on my behalf. Surely, they said, I could make an exception for polls, or at least polling averages? They wanted me to share in the schadenfreude; these were the halcyon post-convention days when Hillary Clinton had opened up a whopping 50 percent lead over Trump in the FiveThirtyEight "Chance of Winning" forecast.
I held firm against reading polls (at least until the margin began to narrow again at the end of the month, at which point I folded like a cheap suit). But barely a day in, I found myself trying to construct my own rationalizations: surely satiricalstories were OK?
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It took just one more day for me to break my media diet rules. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough quoted unnamed sources in the Trump campaign claiming that their boss had met a foreign policy expert and asked -- no less than three times, apparently -- why the U.S. can't use nuclear weapons.
The news was hard to avoid -- especially on Twitter, where former ICBM launch officer and conservative writer John Noonan went on a 20-tweet rant against the threat Trump posed to America's nuclear deterrence strategy.
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Here's the nub of the problem I ran into daily. It is necessary that I use Twitter for work. During the month, many friends and followers suggested that I employ some sort of filter like the kind used on Tweetdeck, muting all mentions of the GOP candidate to make my diet easier.
But that wouldn't have helped as much as you might imagine. Noonan's tweetstorm is the perfect example: just five of the 20 tweets used the word "Trump." Others reference him indirectly; the elephant in the room, or as Noonan put it, "the elephant jumping up and down on one side of the scales" of the delicate nuclear balance.
Of course, I could have filtered out other words Noonan used to describe the candidate, such as "narcissist." But that might result in me inadvertently blocking about half of Twitter.
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In retrospect, Trump was at his lowest ebb during the first week of August. It seemed the whole nation had banded together against his needless attacks on the Gold Star family of Iraqi war hero Captain Humayun Khan. There were even rumors that the GOP candidate was going to rescind the nomination he'd just accepted.
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The next day brought fresh ignominy: Trump couldn't name any woman he'd appoint to his cabinet other than his daughter Ivanka. Clinton cracked a joke about it that referenced Mitt Romney's infamous "binders full of women" statement.
I cited her for clickbait, but of course it was really my own damn fault. And it led to a key realization about my addictive behavior.
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The next 10 days were more successful. I cut back on compulsive Twitter checking and intuitively scrolled quickly past anything that reeked of a Trump story.
The orange one receded from memory. Checking my blood pressure with an arm cuff every morning, I watched it drop, slowly but surely.
Then it emerged that then-campaign manager Paul Manafort had received nearly $13 million in still-mysterious payments from a pro-Russia party in Ukraine. I managed to rationalize away reading about it -- but in hindsight, of courseI was breaking my Trumpcation rules.
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Possibly the greatest temptation of the month: friends posting a Twitter hashtag game that mashed up Trump memes with one of my favorite topics, Star Wars. I managed to resist that one.
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By the time the car crash of a Trump campaign dumped Manafort and hired an executive from the news site Breitbart to replace him, I was starting to feel personally trolled by the news.
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As the month dragged on, the gravitational pull of trivial Trump news became harder to resist. There was the Trump staffer's reality-denying "says who?" moment; Trump calling himself "Mr. Brexit"; the "Second Amendment people" comment and the subsequent Secret Service investigation.
Headlines and retweets scrolled past not just in my Twitter feed, but also on the Bloomberg and CNN news screens in my office. Before my eyes demurred, my brain was able to absorb just enough information to want to know more.
It was like getting itch after itch, and not allowing myself to scratch any of them.
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The takeaway here? It's not just a case of "my goodness, that Mr. Trump certainly is in the news a lot!" When you're outside the Trumpsphere looking in, you realize that all of this chatter over minor outrages could not be more effective at obscuring the big picture.
The big picture of Trump, paradoxically, becomes more clear on the days you manage to ignore him. It is simply this: Trump is the most extreme right-wing main party candidate in our lifetimes. Possibly in all American history.
But this threat is akin to climate change -- in that it doesn't change enough in the short term for it to matter. The threat is self-evident but rarely newsworthy.
And because it is forgotten, America is a hair's breadth away from handing an extremist the Supreme Court and the nuclear codes, not to mention the ability to dismantle the EPA, the Department of Education, and the modest gains of Obamacare.
What he says changes on a daily basis. It is futile to try keeping track. What doesn't change is the fact that he is gaslighting America -- making seductive demands for your fealty, and above all your attention.
If he's crazy, he's crazy like a fox. Or maybe like a wolf.
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This is what a 21st century cult of personality looks like, and it is astonishingly effective. There can be no doubt that Trump controls the political conversation in America right now. Good news month for him (September) or bad news month (August), it's still all about him.
Unambiguous news cycle victories for Clinton are few and far between. Her DNC acceptance speech is probably the only example this year thus far; little wonder that she jumped 10 points in the polls immediately afterwards.
SEE ALSO:When Hillary Clinton embraces her inner nerd, she winsOther apparent Clinton victories are not so clear cut. For example, the most retweeted political tweet of 2016 is Clinton telling Trump to "delete your account" after Trump slimed Obama for endorsing Clinton back in June.
From a Clinton supporter's perspective, that was a tremendous put-down, a real fist-pumping moment. At the time it happened, we described it as the "ultimate internet burn."
But thinking back on that tweet from the end of my Trumpcation, I realized it meant something else too. It meant the most popular retweet of 2016 was a Trump retweet.
How does that not count as a victory for his "pay attention to my stupid s**t sideshow" strategy? How does it not hide the elemental fact of his extremism?
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I spent the last few days of August in the Nevada Black Rock desert at Burning Man, which is about as far away as you can get from civilization in the lower 48. It is a festival that prides itself on its separation from what it calls "the default world." You'd think Trumpcation would be easy here.
And you'd be wrong. I still had to duck out of heated political conversations about He Who Must Not be Elected, and I still found myself spreading Trump-esque memes -- such as "Make Burning Man Suck Again."
Heading back to Reno from the event on Aug. 31 in a shuttle bus, I scrolled through Twitter, trying not to read tweets about Trump's eyebrow-raising visit to Mexico. Trying, and failing.
At Reno airport, by coincidence, Air Force One sat on the tarmac; Obama had just been to a fundraiser in Lake Tahoe. I saw the majestic plane take off, more concerned than ever that the man I'd been trying to avoid all month may be its next occupant.
Avoiding that outcome may mean that we all have to go on a permanent Trumpcation -- which is to say, maybe we should all start trying to ignore the daily grind of Trump outrage in favor of focusing on the big picture.
TopicsDonald TrumpElections
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