Unreasonable expectations and cults of presidential personality: A rant

This is going to be a rant. Some won’t like what follows but the problem is I can’t write anything that I want to write until I get this off my chest.

The coming months (and perhaps years) of blogging are shaping up to be hard. This is because many of you have decided you need to be outraged when presented with honest assessments of what I think is happening in American politics under President Donald J. Trump. You’re fine if I write honest posts about what I think is happening in Germany under the rule of anybody at all, and you were fine when I wrote honest pieces about what I thought was happening in American politics under President Joseph R. Biden. When I write about my honest impressions of U.S. events under Trump, however, I get waves of enraged responses. Idiots who don’t even subscribe come out of the silicone shouting at me to watch their favourite MAGA YouTube account and iNfOrm mYseLf.¹ Other people who do subscribe rapidly unsubscribe in high dudgeon. I am told to stick to Germany or that I was only interesting when I wrote about Covid or that I don’t know what I’m talking about for any of a myriad other reasons.

I find these reactions both unbalanced and unreasonable. Anything I post that is longer than about 1,000 words is always something I’ve thought about and researched for a while. These aren’t one-off shitposts that I throw up to troll my valued readers. I’ve tried to be diplomatic, but that doesn’t work. On the one hand people still get mad so it hardly matters, and then on the other hand still other people who claim to agree with me get mad too because they deem my diplomacy to be evidence of deeply feared “audience capture.”² Never has the narcissism of small differences weighed more heavily upon me. Most of the angriest readers seem to agree with me on all the most important things; the stuff that gets them hopping is trivial in comparison. What does it matter, if the Iran war is actually going fantastically and I’m mistaken in my pessimism? If tariffs really work out or if Denmark decides to give Greenland away after all, what’s the big deal? Why are my reservations about these things such a problem? It’s baffling to me.

As an interim solution to this friction I’ve tried not writing at all, but we all know that isn’t the way. So I’m going to write about these problems, and I’m going to be as brutally honest as I can be about them because I’m irritated and I’ve had enough and I want to clear the air now and forever.

What follows will only be for subscribers, because I’ve long learned that it’s pointless to argue with the entire internet and some of this blog’s more casual readers turn out to be very careless angry dyspeptic types who are just going to have to wonder for all of eternity about all the enraging insane stuff I have stashed beneath the fold.