Trump 2.0 is pretty bad. I’m still figuring out my response to it.

One thing I’m not doing this time around is gorging on the news. I quit listening to NPR on my commute months ago. I keep my time allocated for news consumption to ~30 minutes per day. The two daily sources I rely on to prioritize what to pay attention to are:

  • Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. More than a daily news roundup, she puts things in historical context.
  • Dave Pell’s Next Draft. I started following him in more innocent times when he was focused on quirky Bay Area tech news roundups.

The one NPR show I have a weekly date with is On The Media. Today’s episode on Trump 2.0 was quite good, and you should listen to the whole thing. One thing that stuck out was a stat from a survey a Tufts University professor did in 2018, during Trump 1.0, where 1/3 of the people asked said they spent 2 hours per day on civic engagement, but 80% of them said that entailed just consuming news. That’s…. definitely not the most effective use of anybody’s time or energy.

That said, I think a lot of folks are doing what I’m doing. Is that why it feels like there’s less resistance this time? People are just overwhelmed and so they’re doing nothing?