Living in the time of Donald Trump, every day is an endless slog in which we live millions of lifetimes. Specters of emotions we felt just moments before hang above us like stalactites that might just fall and maim us again. Every waking moment is an eternal knot of helplessness and fury so brief it feels like it never happened, so quickly is it displaced. It’s an undying uncanny valley of our instincts. Given that each minute we live in an administration that strips rights faster than lye on skin is both an eternity and a blip, I’d love to know, what the fuck is time even? I don’t understand.
Today is July 3, 2018. It has been one year and 5 months since Trump took office and sent us into a frenzy of daily horrors. It has been 602 whole sunrises and sunsets since he was elected on the platform of reinstalling white supremacy in a country where white supremacy is already doing pretty well for itself! It has been, by my count, somewhere between 17 and 800 years since Donald Trump descended down his golden escalator to announce his bid for the presidency and called Mexicans “rapists.”
Remember when Trump fired James Comey on May 9, 2017? That was right about when Constantinople became Istanbul.
Remember when he defended white supremacists after a woman was murdered at an alt right rally? August 13, 2017? That was last year and yesterday and a million years ago at the same time.
Remember when Trump released an official statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day and did not mention the genocide of Jewish people or Jews in general? According to my calculations, that moment coincided with the cries of a wee bab taking its first breaths of life in the mid-1500s in Stratford-upon-Avon. The sharp-tongued lad would go on to become William Shakespeare.
Remember when Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un on June 12, 2018, approximately 66 million years ago, when the asteroid killed the dinosaurs but made the fatal mistake of leaving a modicum of life behind?
Remember all the times Trump threatened nuclear war on North Korea? They haven’t happened yet.
Remember when Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina nearly detonated my brain with this horrifying handshake in May of 2016, which is about 12 minutes ago in an alternate universe where everything is the same but humans have tails?
Remember Vine???
Remember when Kanye became friends with white supremacists aka Dragon Energy? Or when Melania disappeared? Remember when Trump and his pals literally stole from the poor and gave to the rich with that tax budget? Remember when he lambasted London mayor Sadiq Khan over his response to the van attack in London? Remember covfefe? (No one does.) How about when he got into a feud with the widow of Army sergeant La David Johnson who was killed in Nigeria? Remember when Sam Nunberg lost his shit on television? REMEMBER WHEN THE PRESIDENT LOOKED AT A SOLAR ECLIPSE BARE-EYED?
Remember all the vicious attacks on the press, his political enemies, communities of color, immigrants, Muslims, poor people, LGBTQ people, disabled people, and women? They have been so boundless and overwhelming that they have bent both my conception of time and my readiness for a fiery death. We have 931 days—either a blink or 1,000 years of being strapped to a rock and having an eagle eat our livers only to have it completely regenerate every day—left of this term. Either way, that’s plenty of time not just to remember what this administration has done to our people but to do something about it.