Relatable: AOC Doesn't Want Four More Years Of Waking Up To Trump's Bullsh*t

Me neither!

Sisyphus, Photo by Gerard Van der Leun

There are a lot of reasons — very good reasons — to not want Donald Trump to be President again. Important reasons involving people’s rights and bodily autonomy and not wanting an economy that only works for rich people.

But there’s another reason that, while not hugely important in the grand scheme of things, remains one of the first things I think about when I consider the possibility of him becoming president — the man was SO. FUCKING. EXHAUSTING.

This weekend, during her Madden-playing livestream with Tim Walz (which I would get into except for how the only Madden I know anything about is Steve), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just came right out and said it herself.

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“Sorry, it got a little intense here, but it’s ’cause we’re eight days out from an election and I’m losing my mind,” she said. “And I’ve got a little smoke coming out the top of my head. But get it together! Get it together! Cast your vote so we can be done with this! I do not want to do four more years of resistance nonsense under Donald Trump, OK? Like, good God. Like, do we remember what it was like waking up every day and there was some shit going on?”

Oh, I remember. It was horrible and exhausting and it never ended.

I’ve gotten the “Oh, I bet that was great for you as a political writer, though!” thing for years. Let me assure you, from the bottom of my heart … it was not. It was deeply unpleasant, not to mention very boring to keep having to write the same damn things every day and come up with endless synonyms for “unhinged.”

The thing is, the things he said were so terrible that to even consider moving on to any other topic seemed like an attempt to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Who had any spoons left to address other issues and causes that mattered?

As someone who is pretty far left, I’ve always found it more prudent to focus the majority of my attention on issues outside of electoral politics. Without Trump in office, I’ve been freed up to focus on those issues — labor issues here and abroad, wrongful convictions, the death penalty, police brutality, poverty, prisons, genocide, human rights issues, greedy corporations, etc. This is not to say that these issues are in no way impacted by the actions of elected officials, just that there is work to be done on them outside of who we vote for, and that often they are issues on which politicians of all stripes need to be pushed. With Trump in office, there’s not a lot of space for that because everything is constantly on red alert. It crowds out everything. There’s very little chance for anything else we care about to get any air unless it’s something huge.

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It was miserable. It was a miserable four years. In fact, I don’t even understand how it wasn’t a miserable time for his supporters, who had to spend every waking hour defending his bullshit and explaining “Why he didn’t mean what he clearly meant.”

We should not have to live that way again. We shouldn’t have to wake up every morning and think “OK, what’s it gonna be today?” Our elected officials shouldn’t be spending their time crafting responses to everything he says or does, only for no one to even remember what they were the next day because the next day we’re onto another horrible thing.

And who the hell wants that?