Trump Again Displays What a Rotten Specimen He Is

It isn't like I wasn't paying attention to the news over my holiday. It isn't like I'd forgotten what a vile person Donald Trump is. I couldn't forget even if I wanted to.

And still it was jarring, if utterly unsurprising, that this is one of the first headlines I saw this morning on my first day back: The GIF of Donald Trump Hitting Hillary Clinton with a Golf Ball Came from an Anti-Semitic Twitter Account.

Immediately, whatever tiny but essential bit of restorative restful-mindedness I had achieved by taking a break was ferociously torn away — by the surreal but depressingly typical news that the current president had used his Twitter account to retweet a white supremacist who'd published a video doctored to show said president hitting a golf ball squarely into the back of the most distinguished stateswoman this nation has ever had.

This is classic Trump: Malicious, self-aggrandizing, elevating the profile of a white supremacist, publicly delighting in imagery of himself harming a woman.

It sickens me. It makes me angry — and sad. It exhausts me.

And because I know there are people waiting, lurking, eager for their chance to admonish me that there are more important things to pay attention to, to shame me for caring about this thing, and to shout down any attempt I make to explain what it is that makes this particular thing so emblematically gutting, even though I am well aware it is merely the tip of an iceberg of atrocious indecencies, I am steeling myself, again and as always, for the fight in front of me.

The fight that is always in front of me.

Trump to my right; an endless throng of gaslighters and belligerents to my left.

There is no tidy ending here. If you feel sick, exhausted, resolved, too, I see you — and we shall take up space in solidarity together.