Government

Entertaining Ourselves In The Days After Trump

We now have three more weeks of excitement: Who else will Trump pardon? 

By  
on

(Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images)

When we dropped off my younger child — Jeremy, you remember him — at college, I turned to my wife: “I remember that, before we had children, there were things that the two of us enjoyed doing together. But I can’t for the life of me remember what those things were. It’s time to do those things again.  What the heck were they?”

(I hear a chorus of you shouting, “sex.” That’s not funny.)

I feel the same way about President Donald Trump. We wake up every day to see what he’s done — to the liberals, to the country, to the world — and struggle to stay abreast of the breaking news. The outrages of a few weeks ago have vanished, obscured by the outrages of today. Trump was impeached barely a year ago. It seemed so momentous at the time; I hardly remember it today.

Attracting attention, of course, can be either good or bad. Neil Falconer, 35 years my senior and a mentor years ago, used to say, “Be careful about attracting attention. You can attract attention by running naked down Fifth Avenue at rush hour. Not all attention is a good thing.”

That’s certainly true for Trump. He attracted attention when he was doing good things. He attracted attention when he was doing crazy things. But above all, he simply attracted attention.

We now have three more weeks of excitement: Who else will Trump pardon?  Will he try a self-pardon? Will he announce that he’s running for the presidency in 2024? When will he make that announcement? Will we kill a few more terrorists in the next few weeks of January? Will we bomb Iran? (Those last two I sort of expected before the election. But there’s still time.)

Sponsored

Trump wants attention. For the next three weeks, it’s easy for him to attract it. He will.

It’s so exciting.

It’s so exhausting.

And I’m not sure it’s good for us as a country to give the world’s greatest stage to one of the world’s most accomplished people at drawing attention to himself.

In any event, what now?

Sponsored

With any luck at all, we won’t hear from President Joe Biden for weeks at a time. We can go back to worrying about paying the mortgage, raising the kids, writing the brief, bringing in clients, and all the other stuff that occupies a lawyer’s mind.

Meanwhile, Trump will do his best to attract our attention from the sidelines.  He’ll make announcements, criticize the administration, praise or torture other Republicans, and do everything he can to stay in the limelight.

And the lawsuits! The civil cases, for defamation, sexual assault, and whatever the New York attorney general has in mind. They’ll be the trials of the decade! And the criminal case. If the Manhattan district attorney goes after Trump for something criminal, we’ll wake up every morning wondering what happened in voir dire, what the evidence shows, and whether this is all yet another witch hunt. That’ll be the trial of the century!

But, sooner or later, this will fade.

Newspaper sales will decline; television ratings will plummet; social media will calm down a bit.

And we’ll all have to start thinking about what we did to entertain ourselves in the days before Trump.

Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Drug and Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.

Topics

, ,