I was working on a farm in Australia a few years ago, when I realised that my legs were covered in leeches. I'd been walking through this field of tall grass and by the time I came out, they were all over me.
My first instinct was squeamish disgust. Without really thinking about it, I flicked one off. That's the wrong thing to do. It makes you bleed. If you just leave them to do their business, they'll heal up the wound and drop off of their own accord. In the end, I had to sit down and watch these disgusting, slimy things take my blood.
It was a useful experience, in that it showed how quickly disgust can turn to tedium. By the time they were done, the horror had faded and I was completely unfussed by their presence.
And that's where I have ended up with Donald Trump: he is a leech and my disgust has turned to boredom.
I am tired of waking up every morning and being presented with the latest demonstration of his intellectual and moral inadequacies. It's a constant tide of filth, a daily churn of the worst aspects of the most boringly ignorant personality I've ever been forced to engage with. Every day he does this. Every day the signal is boosted around the world, by all of us.
It's not even psychologically interesting, in the way that, say, someone like Katie Hopkins is. You listen to her and you can at least consider some pop-psychology theories about what happened to her at school. But Trump is just a walking id, lashing out at whatever threatens his maniacal insecurity. There is as much complexity to his motivations as there is to a dog sniffing someone's bum.
"Poring over Trump’s vile pronouncements makes us stupider and less happy"There is little to be learned from poring over his vile pronouncements. And worse, I suspect it is personally corrosive. It makes us stupider and less happy. Spend a chunk of your day, every day, engaging with this stuff and eventually your intellectual and emotional capacity might rot away.
Trump is just the lonely old bore in the corner of the pub, telling everyone how great he is, lying about his past and occasionally saying something racist. You wouldn't get up from the table with your friends and go sit next to that guy. But one of the many outrages of the last year is that he has been placed on all our tables. We all have to listen to him now.
We are outraged, rightly, because we are not used to world leaders behaving in this grotesque way, like some sort of monstrous infant king. But that shock must pass now and be translated into something else. To get bored of Trump's personality is not the same as accepting it.
There is another way: one which does not involve normalising him or just tuning-out and pretending it isn't happening.
We need to analyse Trump's statements as part of the political causal chain, but stop bothering to debate them on their own terms. We should treat them like a weather event: something with causes and effects, but no intellectual value of its own.
The laws he passes are worth considering, as are the deals he signs and the danger he brings to the lives of minorities in the US. His late night tweets are not.
When he lies about a subject, we waste our time pointing it out. When he slanders a country, we waste our energy getting upset about it. When he says something hopelessly preening and self-promoting, we react with outrage. But why? We know he is a fantasist and a degenerate and a racist. We've known for years. Anyone who is not already convinced of it never will be.
If an anthropologist was doing a study of how children socialise, she would not walk in the room with them, get down cross-legged on the floor and start trying to steal their crayons. She would watch from afar, note the behaviour, and come to her conclusions. That's where we need to be with Trump. That's how we need to treat him.
There is no need to get down into the mud with him, over and over again, day after day, disproving and expressing outrage at his every half-considered utterance. It's not helpful, it doesn't work and, worst of all, it is incredibly boring.
