it hurts to think about trump, yes, but you can't help it, can you? it's like saying, i don't want to think about cancer, i don't want to feed it, it's a beast from hell, i want nothing to do with it, it ain't me. but he ain't from hell, he's a pure product of america. and the evil he embodies, and the evil he puts into the atmosphere, we absorb it, we re-cycle it, we are porous, it gets in our skin, it becomes part of our inner narrative. we start trying to exorcise it by calling him hideous names like he calls all of us. it is doomed to fail, and take us with it.
mattea kramer writes about it, about the voices within, by charles fernyhough, how the voices we hear come into us, like noxious gasses we can't but breathe, the kind spewing out of the president's maws and the toxic sites of the land. we can try to breathe our own air, we can put our heads in orphan meadows and rasping trees, but our breath will be mixed with the american atmosphere. 
i must have experienced this from early on, it's not a new thing, though the parts per million have burgeoned and metastasized in my time. i must have got it from teachers, from fathers, from other sick politicians, from the tv, from the news. i was infected early on, i was inoculated against health, against a positive self image, against my self. i was told, like mattea kramer says women are, i would never be good enough, and then shown who was good enough, all the thugs in an endless smug procession, culminating in the poisonous snuff of the agent orange harrow-haired herr trump.

i know i can be maudlin. i know i can be naive.

but tell me the truth, do you think i'm doing any good here?