What happened to #resistance?

When Trump got elected in 2016 liberals lost their minds. The pussy hat protests, everyone on cable melting down every 1 minute. Unprecedented! Democracy dies in Darkness! (Democracy dies when Jeff Bezos buys it). I was at some media party and some of the most financially and socially privileged people in the history of the world were melodramatically fretting that as journalists they’d be rounded up and sent to camps. I went to dinner with some friends after a protest in New York and an otherwise reasonable civil rights lawyer turned ghost white and flipped my friend’s phone upside down because he made a Trump joke and she was convinced he’d get surveilled and dragged away.

I had a gig doing news writing for a #resistance news cite. It involved watching 8 hours of cable a day and then spinning the overdramatic news segments into even more absurd clickbait headlines (please pray that brain atrophy is reversible). It was non-stop hysteria. I say often that I got the world’s dorkiest PTSD staring at cable all day, when every news hour was the end of the world. The #resistance was so intense that even when Trump did something objectively good—like freeing Alice Marie Johnson—commentators spun it into an unprecedented attack of all that is normal and right in the world.

Why are things different now? #resistance is dead, or very, very limp. The New York Times, while politely alarmed at his hurricane of first day executive orders, has dropped a habit they picked up in 2016, which is to add “wrongly” to every statement uttered by Trump. “Trump, falsely, claims blah blah blah,” which was always annoying because it seems like a standard to apply to every politicians and genocidal apartheid state, but isn’t, and also fueled the sense that he was, as he claimed, given unfair coverage in the mainstream press.

It’s a whole different world.