Z.A. Mackic

It never fails to amuse me. After Trump’s first evening back in office, journalists and commentators were falling over themselves with gasps of  “Oh, this is bad,”  and  “Oh, this is surprising,”  and my personal favorite,  “Oh, this will have terrible consequences.” Here’s the catch: it’s not surprising. He’s doing exactly what he said he would during his campaign. Word for word. The only thing missing is the tariffs, which—admittedly—I was looking forward to, if only to watch the  “egg prices”  voters squirm. Alas, I suspect one of his oligarch buddies sat him down and gave him a crash course in Econ 101. But the real comedy gold is mainstream media and social media reactions. Everyone— everyone —knew what Trump was going to do before he was elected. They saw it coming like a freight train. And yet, driven by their own greed for ratings and clicks, they all went along with it. Now, we get the pantomime outrage. Don’t worry—it’ll last about a month be...

Today, I’m sharing a coping skill you might find useful as we navigate the upcoming Trump presidency. Why? Because he’s already kicking things off with a circus—and the whole point of a circus, of course, is to provoke outrage.   Jean-Paul Sartre captured this dynamic perfectly:    “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past...

This morning, I was hit harder than expected by the news that Meta is giving up on fact-checking. As someone who survived a war and witnessed the chaos of dictatorship and societal polarization firsthand, this feels like an ominous turning point. Part of me hoped I was overreacting—after all, my imagination has a knack for catastrophizing. But with billionaire after billionaire in the U.S. folding before any real pressure is even applied, it seems my imagination isn’t catastrophic enough. A few months ago, I decided to focus on helping people who will inevitably end up worse off in the coming years. Why? Because one haunting memory from the last war still gnaws at me. Near my university, there was an old woman begging. When I first saw her, she wore decent clothes and didn’t look particularly hungry. But day by day, her clothes grew more tattered, her frame thinner. At the time, I thought,  I don’t have enough for myself—how can I give anything to anyone else?  And then, one d...