Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
We’re now almost a month since Donald Trump won the 2024 election in a landslide. While there are still daily headlines crossing the wire about his policy plans and appointees, the fever pitch of political rhetoric from both sides of the aisle that existed just one month ago has inconspicuously vanished for the most part.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article called “The Great Trump Exhale” where I talked about how I could finally sit back in my desk chair and worry less about the state of the nation. It wasn’t just about who won, it was about the fact that the election, and its associated volatility, had passed. I wrote about feeling a palpable relaxation and how rolling back many of the “new” Democrat policies of the last 4 years—many, in my view, akin to suffocation of liberty via a massive Orwellian government—had made much of the nation feel like it could breathe again.
In addition to this feeling about the election results, part of me also feels pleasantly catatonic as it relates to the media, on both sides of the aisle. For example, I had a discussion with Matt Taibbi last weekend about why mainstream media has lost the trust of the American public. Oddly, it no longer felt like a moment to be outraged—and I wasn’t. Instead, it felt like we were 11 year olds who had just beaten the final boss in a video game we’ve been playing for the last 4 years, and now we were collectively watching the end credits.
Over the last three weeks, I’ve taken a lot of time off social media, which has felt refreshing. Even though no headline or political analysis was going to single-handedly tip off who would win the election leading into November, I, like many other Americans, got caught up in an incessant, relentless, panicked news cycle of rhetoric and analysis. Like any other addiction, it affected my sleep cycles, dopamine levels, and mood more than I care to admit. Heading into election day, not only was I scrolling through social media during all waking hours, but I was also spending endless nights watching political analysis on cable news.
And on my almost-daily walk home from the laundromat today, I was listening to a podcast that unexpectedly drifted into political territory. While the guest on the podcast held stark ideological and political differences from me, I had no mental or physiological response at all to what they were saying. Weeks ago, prior to the election, I probably would have...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE, 100% FREE, HERE).
