Trumpocalypse: It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of the Trumpocalypse.

In 1987, R.E.M. released a song called “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” which included the lyrics, “and I feel fine.” I find that song running through my head these days as I read hysterical news articles about how very, very bad everything is.

For example, a Politico writer compared Russia’s possible meddling in the United States 2016 election to two unfathomable American tragedies. “This is our Pearl Harbor, our 9/11,” wrote Mark Hertling and Molly K. McKew. “In the past, we have risen to the defense of our values, our ideologies and our institutions. It’s time for another fight.”

This staggering lack of perspective actually baffles me, but it also just makes me tune it all out. If you believe reporters, everything is the end of the world.

It’s the end of the United States, the end of our economy. A nuclear war is coming, the Russians are defeating us, NATO is destroyed, Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to be impeached, Trump is going to be removed by Congress for mental incompetence, Trump is going to be indicted, Trump is going to resign.

The hysteria is exhausting. Meanwhile, back in reality, things are empirically good.

The economy is booming, consumer confidence is sky high, manufacturing confidence is elevated, unemployment is at record lows for African Americans, Hispanics, women (everyone). In fact, there are more jobs, than people who can fill them. Plus, there are more people in the work force than in a very long time. NATO members are stepping up and spending more on defense. Russia is being pressured by Trump more than any time in modern history; North Korea is struggling under stronger sanctions than any time in history (and it appears to be working); our trading partners all seem to be willing to negotiate deals better for the U.S; the Supreme Court is likely to be dominated by the right (or at least a lean that way) for a generation due to an unprecedented number of vacancies and spectacular picks by Trump. And, speaking of the Supreme Court, they’ve been on a constitutional roll lately. Thanks to the Janus decision, public employee unions have been gutted. Thanks to the Masterpiece Cake decision, religious freedom has been upheld. At the federal level, massive reform is taking place in civil service and the regulatory sphere.

And for all the outrage over “fake news,” the leftist media is enjoying great profitability due to Trump’s unrelenting attacks. Right wing media is experiencing the same due to the excitement of the base.

There’s even good news for people who practice the religion of Holy Climate Change Worship: the CO2 emissions of the U.S. are dramatically down, far more than the European Union, Japan, China, Russia, India, or anywhere else. And guess what? This is not due to government intervention.

Welcome to the Trumpocalypse. Can we just get a tiny bit of reality in the mainstream media coverage? Just a teeny bit?

Every day is Armageddon day in the media. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, only it’s the reporter who cried Armageddon.

Didn’t Mitt Romney tell us that Russia was our greatest geopolitical foe? Strangely, Obama told him that “the 80’s are calling and they want their foreign policy back.” The left just laughed and laughed. And now, we’re supposed to take the left seriously when they warn us — in hyperbolic terms — that Russia is our “greatest geopolitical foe.”

With all this Russia talk, I guess it’s fitting that a song from the 1980s is running through my mind, especially verse three which includes these lyrics: “Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped.” R.E.M. seemed prescient with those words, because that’s so accurate it’s funny.  Reporters being Trumped? About right.

If this is the end of the world, bring it on.

Like the rest of America, I feel fine.

Image Credit: Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons