President Trauma

Put not your trust in princes, nor enfants terribles.

The Democratic Party may force us to ignore this bit of scriptural advice, which is of a piece with the leftie clan’s overall disregard of prohibitions on theft, murder, and screaming “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, I HATE YOU!” at your mom.

Donald Trump is setting Republicans’ future electoral success back a decade over the Iran war and jumping gas prices. This autumn’s midterms look like a rearing donkey kick. The big 2028 dance? Ballots may as well be counted in the Mariana Trench; every vote will be sodden in seablue.

Whom are the Democrats offering for the layup presidency? Oh, joy: A playpen of overgrown adults with complexes. Axios reports that Oval-hopefuls are “lean[ing] into their childhood traumas.” Swell! Just what the country needs: President Rosebud.

Call me old-fashioned, being born at the fin de millénaire and raised primarily on Game Boy Color and all. But there’s something off-putting, even degrading, about airing your Underoos issues, as if the public is a therapist-in-recline. Daddy didn’t pay enough attention to you? Mommy took the cutting board to your innocent patootie after stealing a Hershey Bar? Meanie Ms. Boyd embarrassed you in front of the class after you whiffed a long-division problem? Take your first-world perturbations to Dr. Phil.

If you want to make millions based off your death-by-a-thousand-slights recountings, stuff them in a Y.A. book and clean up. Otherwise, do as any self-respecting adult: cry into a Kleenex behind closed doors, blinded windows, with the tube at max volume. Like Les Murray wrote, weeping men keep the “dignity of one.”

Would that leftists not be so emotionally incontinent. “It’s a character flaw of the progressive imagination that it will always fixate on something to be anguished about,” observed critic Kyle Smith. The tired punch list of typical liberal aches: wealth inequality, concentrated riches, spoilt environment, explicit racism, implicit racism, hidden racism, perceived racism, outright misogyny except if it’s widely practiced in the Arabian Peninsula.

In the past decade, around the time the iPhone dropped like Fat Man on our attention spans, a new contender staggers into the lib-whinge ring: painful recollection. Left-wing politicking has long been the oppression Olympics, with various minorities and baroque sexualists jockeying for what Steve Sailer derisively calls “intersectional Pokemon points.” More points, more due sympathy. But what of leftists born pale and able? All the marching, all that online browbeating, all that screaming at their parents, all those pledges of undying loyalty to the underappreciated. Shouldn’t staunch allyship with the oppressed count for something?

Like scientists discovering the Higgs boson, the typical suburban prog stumbled upon a new marker to lump them among the lessers. Stunted by boredom, lethargic by comfort, desperate for purpose, the inherent neuropathology of pillowed wokerstars had to latch on to a malady that sounded painful, but wasn’t easily disprovable. The whole “recovered memory” hoopla of the 90s ran its course. But we Americans are ever innovators. The past participle “recovered” was easily swapped for the blunt two-syllable noun “trauma,” which invokes the physicality of a baseball bat to the shin.

At last, the guilty bourgeoisie, happily ensconced in a stable bedroom community, could do more than slum. They could grasp what long eluded their class: true victimhood! As with immutable skin collagen, recessed episodes of emotional anguish are invincible to criticism. Who are you to say my mother didn’t claw my eyes out for using her rouge when I was six? You don’t have a time machine! I SUFFERED PUMMELING THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU’LL NEVER KNOW!! I DON’T CARE IF SHE BOUGHT ME A MERCEDES FOR MY 16TH BIRTHDAY!!!

The ‘28 Democratic primary is shaping up to be less woke-shame circle, and more woe-is-me tearfest. The odds-on candidates have their scripts prepared, in the “let’s talk about me” Wolfian vein. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro will cite his siblings’ inability to “stop the chaos and the yelling” at home, which sounds quaint by modern familial standards. California’s sun-touched son, Gavin Newsom, has a sob-story: his mother once told him “[i]t’s okay to be average, Gavin.” Don’t worry, reader! I’ve already dialed CPS for a posthumous arrest. The Stay-Puft governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, frequently references his mother’s alcoholism. This grimdark tale might be compelling, even relatable. Was little Jay Robert a raggy, half-starved kindeleh sleeping on a swill-stick floor, an empty Boone’s Farm bottle for a pillow? Nope. Just a lowly heir to the Hyatt corporation. A real hard road!

The Republican hope for four more years may yet be saved, even if the President manages to make every Sunoco fill-up cost a mortgage refinance. The Stupid Party™ failing to lower prices and stop new wars should be its death certificate. But enters a deus ex moanchina: grown men, whose pockets are lined from Newport to Anchorage, playing at Little Orphan Annie.

Sickfluencer culture is annoying, even vaguely scammish. Mixed with theatrical politics? Best Amazon-bulk order some Dramamine.