We’ve All Got Too Much Trump on Our Minds

The life and career of Donald Trump is easily the hottest show in town. The problem is that it is beginning to seem the only show in town. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, the two George Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama attracted nothing like the same intensity of attention over their full terms as has Mr. Trump in what is only the beginning of his. As never before in recent history, politics has come to dominate daily life. People I know report that they get in three or four political discussions a day, all of them centering on Mr. Trump.

If our president suffers from a Copernican Complex, the belief that the sun and all the planets revolve around him, surely the past 18 months have resolved it for him by making it seem true. Owing to his erratic, splenetic, chaotic style of governing, these same months have left the rest of us with what might be called Trump Syndrome, whose chief symptom is a diminishing interest in anything outside politics.

The Trump presidency having swept the boards of national attention, one would expect political magazines, or what the New Yorker writer Wolcott Gibbs once referred to as “salvationist” publications (because, whether liberal or conservative, through politics they are out to save their readers’ souls), to salivate over the endless copy Mr. Trump has dropped in their laps.

But what were once called general-interest magazines offer no relief. Harper’s has devoted more of its space to politics, and the cover of the current issue is devoted to “ Mike Pence’s Persecution Complex.” The Atlantic features a long article on Donald Trump and the Evangelicals. On a recent cover of the New Yorker, a magazine once loftily above the petty details of everyday politics, our president appears—behind a lectern, thank goodness—buck naked. The American Scholar, which during the 23 years I edited it never descended to mention a current-day president, is now in its content quite as Trumped-up as these other magazines.

Why have the editors of these periodicals gone ga-ga over Donald Trump? Ian Buruma, of the New York Review of Books, long a left-wing salvationist magazine, in a recent interview in the Guardian, an English newspaper, noted that “we are living in the age of Trump, and that does give publications that believe in tolerance and democracy a responsibility. How you deal with it is, of course, a big question. Just ridiculing his vulgarity isn’t going to help anybody. But you do have to keep at it.”

Doubtless other editors, and many ordinary citizens, feel that they too have to keep at it. Very little fresh or interesting gets written or said on the Trumpian subject. Yet coming out strongly for or against Mr. Trump establishes their sense of their own virtue, and thereby makes all who do so feel good about themselves, however much they may wish to appear worried about the state of their country. And so the beat goes on—thump, thump, thump; Trump, Trump, Trump—with everyone continually pounding away at the subject of our Donald.

In his “Notebooks,” the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote: “Politics is a suitable subject for conversation—perhaps that is all it is suitable for.” Later he added that “politics is an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” What Oakeshott would make of the current Trumpian delirium would be well worth knowing.

I suspect Oakeshott would paraphrase a certain Danish prince and strongly suggest that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in yet another conversation about Donald Trump. There are spring and another baseball season, driverless cars, the decline of the contemporary university, one’s family, the perennial nuttiness of human nature . . . and more, so much more.

During World War II, there was instituted something called Meatless Tuesday, this in aid of making more meat available for the troops. I wonder if it wouldn’t make sense for each of us voluntarily to institute a Trumpless Thursday, on which no discussion of any kind or in any media about Donald Trump would be allowed, this in aid of remembering how pleasant the world can be without the intrusion, incessant and clangorous, of politics.

Mr. Epstein is author of the forthcoming “The Ideal of Culture and Other Essays” (Axios Press) and “Charm: The Elusive Enchantment” (Taylor Trade), both to be published in 2018.