Even before the ptesidential election that put convicted felon and court-adjudicated sexual moleter and rapist Donald Trump back into office after voters rejected his 2020 attempt at a second consecutie term, many Americans expressed fatigue and depression of the direction this nation has taken.
After the election, many are now telling us that tjeu are “turned off” by what they see as a corrupt system that will being four years of discoure, violence and massive hate.
“I’ll see some crazy future Cabinet appointment, and I’m like, ‘I have no control over any of this. There’s nothing I can do about this,’” Drew Stanecki, 36, a nonprofit worker who lives in Virginia, told Elahe Izadithe of the Washington Post. “I couldn’t believe what just happened, and I knew I needed to take a step away. I can’t process it, and I didn’t want to.”
Stanecki is turning off news reports, no lnger reads the news on screens or in papers.
The Elahe Izad writes in the iPost:
So he immediately turned off the notification alerts on his Washington Post and New York Times apps. During Trump’s first term, he read so much news that he had to institute a “no-Washington-Post-after-7-p.m.” rule so he could sleep at night.
Now he doesn’t want anything pushed to him. Every so often, he logs on to see the latest, but the same feeling returns. “It feels inevitable, and I have to focus on what I can control, which is taking care of my family and checking in on my friends.”
Maybe people who were stressed about the uncertainty of the election no longer need to monitor the news because they now have certainty. Or could there be a general we’ve lived through this before malaise?
But if people are doing this in droves, “it would be adaptive, and psychologically beneficial, to cut back consuming media in the aftermath of the election” if they’ve found the results distressing, Silver says.
Look at that: Humans doing something psychologically beneficial for a change.
In our house, my wife now avoids the news. Trump, she says, brings too much anger and lies into our society.
Friends and colleages say the same. At our local diner, the talk is about football, auto racings and weather but not politics.
Andrew DelPonte, a teenager in Maryland, started his days listening to NPR. Brandon Wilson, a professor in California, drove his long commute home blaring MSNBC on SiriusXM. And Michelle Mullins, who works on corporate food loss and waste in Arkansas, fell asleep most nights watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
DelPonte, a teenager in Maryland, started his days listening to NPR. Brandon Wilson, a professor in California, drove his long commute home blaring MSNBC on SiriusXM. And Michelle Mullins, who works on corporate food loss and waste in Arkansas, fell asleep most nights watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
That is, until Nov. 6. Since the election, they’ve had it with the news.
Donald Trump won reelection with 312 electoral votes, but the popular vote shows a closer outcome between him and Vice President Kamala Harris. Among the 74.5 million people who did vote for her (with current tabulations coming within about 1.5 percentage points of all votes), some now treat the news like the plague. For the sake of sanity and self-preservation, they’re turning it off and tuning out.
No more push alerts. No more news podcasts. No more cable broadcasts.
For Wilson, “I pretty much stopped on a dime.” He consumed a lot of news about the election, but stopped with the MSNBC broadcasts the day after Trump’s win. It was the Monday-morning quarterbacking he couldn’t stand; he felt it was too early to nitpick about how Harris had run her campaign, and he found “the finger-pointing and bashing of the Democratic Party” to be counterproductive. (It’s worth noting that liberal-leaning MSNBC saw a big drop-off in audience the week after the election, whereas Fox News saw a big jump.)
“We’re all absorbing a lot about what this win is going to mean, and the last thing I need is a lot of things that raise my blood pressure,” says Wilson, 53. “Like blaming the candidate for some obvious problems with the electorate, like misinformation and disinformation.”
This all feels very different from2016. Back then, Trump shocked everybody, himself included: A businessman turned reality TV star with no political experience and, well, a lot of baggage, had become president. The nation — plot twist! —had officially entered unprecedented territory. How would it go? Each new, seemingly unbelievable development generated breathless coverage, and enormous ratings. Digital audiences grew. News outlets signed up legions of new subscribers who wanted to follow every detail of the transition and Trump’s ascent. In the media industry, it was referred to as “the Trump bump.”
Back then, Mullins, 49, felt “disbelief” at Trump’s win — and a need to pay very close attention to “what kind of outrageous things he is going to do.”
But now? She’s skipping her regular news podcasts and listening to more audiobooks, because this feels like the sequel to a horror movie she has already lived through. “I just don’t even want to know what kind of outrageous thing he’s going to do,” she says. “I’m resigned to, ‘He’s going to do outrageous things, and we’ll deal with it when he’s gone.’”
DelPonte, 19, was also very plugged in during the lead-up to the election. He read all 920-some pages of Project 2025, the conservative playbook for a new Trump administration, to understand what could happen next. But now? “I don’t need to hear the day-to-day preparations about what they’re doing to strip away rights for millions of Americans every day,” he says.
So he has turned off his Apple News alerts and quit the NPR broadcasts. Continuing to expose himself to all that news would make him “a glutton for punishment.”
That seems logical. If Elon Musk actingas a sort of co-president, mass deportations startingon Day 1 and Project 2025 authors becoming Cabinet officialsare your definition of a national nightmare, taking a break from the newsmakes perfect sense.
What we are seeing is a nighmare. along with a hangover that will perist for the next four years.
Stock uup ith strong black coffee and Extra Strength Tylenol. We’re going to need it.
