The People On TV Can’t Hear Me Scream

When too many violations of truth and facts, numbers and norms, rip away my calm facade

I lost my temper and became furious this past Sunday while my wife and I were watching the news show Face the Nation. The host, Margaret Brennan, was moderating a conversation between two Congressmen, a Democrat and a Republican. The two men are the leaders of the Problem Solvers Caucus, an initiative to bring together Representatives from both parties to find common ground.

I liked that the two Congressmen were willing to escape their parties’ ideological strait-jackets to find agreement on some issues. On Ukraine, for example, they both expressed discomfort with the administration’s sudden abandonment of Ukraine. Both hoped that the policy would be short-lived.

But then it happened. The Republican congressman, reaching for an historical analogy of appeasement, compared abandoning Ukraine to Russia with abandoning Poland to Nazi Germany in 1939.

"When we had - when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and you had leaders, including Neville Chamberlain and many other leaders around the world saying it's not our problem..." ¹

I paused the show and began punching the sofa. When I realized I was scaring our Shih Tzu Sophie, I sprang up from the sofa and grabbed my hair. I may have resembled the distraught man in this artwork. ²

So why was I so affected? I take my history seriously and the Congressman had been completely wrong about what had happened to Poland in 1939. In fact, upon the invasion of Poland, Britain and France had declared war on Germany and World War Two had begun.

It was Czechoslovakia, not Poland, that Britain and France had abandoned. That abandonment had taken place in the fall of 1938 with the infamous Munich agreement––“peace in our time” –––the unfortunate phrase used by British PM Neville Chamberlain after ceding the ethnically Germanic portion of Czechoslovakia to Germany. For more details, see below.³

I was so upset that momentarily I couldn’t speak. Then I started screaming at the TV. My words tumbling out in double-time but still not fast enough to catch up with my need to correct.

I wanted to do a reverse “Ring,” the iconic horror movie where the demonic child Samara crawls out of a TV screen to take human shape in order to kill the person watching. ⁴ I wanted to crawl through our TV screen into Margaret Brennan’s studio and seize the Congressman by his suit lapels and correct him then and there.

To my disordered mind, the Congressman had spread a terrible historical falsehood. However, the Congressman had been right that general appeasement of Nazi Germany by the British and French in the 1930s was a disastrous policy. My fury was wildly disproportionate to his misstatement.

I realize now that the Congressman’s misstatement was for me a synecdoche,⁵ a part signifying the whole of all the violations of truth and facts, numbers and norms, that have assailed my brain since Donald Trump was elected. And not just from Trump but from the people he’s surrounded himself with and from those of his supporters who I know.

Not all lies are equal

I can’t compare the Congressman’s gaffe on Face the Nation with some of the very recent misstatements of RFK jr. as Health Secretary about measles and vaccines.⁶ One is annoying, the other enraging because it will spread disease and cost lives. Or Trump supporters cheering on the dismantlement of USAID, which will cost lives globally. Or Trump supporters applauding DOGE’s efforts to cut costs for the sake of “fiscal sanity” when the reality is that Trump’s budget bill would increase the national debt regardless of how many people DOGE is able to fire.

I realize that politicians of both parties lie. And any lie upsets me regardless of party or president. Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” could have been named by the satirical news source The Onion since it had nothing to do with reducing inflation and instead was a front-end loaded spending bill that increased the deficit in the years of 2022 to 2025. ⁷

My personal top ten list

Back in October before the election, I wrote a post, My Personal Life Trumps The Election. I said I would accept the result with serenity knowing I had done my part to oppose Trump being elected. I also said, naively, that the election would probably not make it into the top ten list of events that were important to me during the next four years.

I still believe that what happens to me personally is more significant than national politics. My personal wellbeing and that of my family and friends are still the priority. We have the baby naming of our granddaughter in May and are expecting a new grandchild this summer. My younger son is getting a promotion at work in a job that he’s become passionate about. It’s wonderful to see him continue to flourish.

My wife Debbie and I have parents in their eighties battling various health issues. Debbie is having elbow surgery in a few days. I’m very focused on all of that as well.

And I stay occupied with my writing. In addition to these weekly posts, I’m halfway through a first draft of a novel I’m becoming dangerously fond of.

But I no longer can say that the 2024 election will fail to make my top ten list.

What’s changed for me

It’s an evolutionary survival skill to sense danger, become fearful, and then react. Constant anxiety has been a natural and necessary condition of human existence. See a predatory beast and run.

Sarah Fay

makes this point about evolutionary psychiatry in her memoir Pathological. ⁸

“The mind is perfectly designed to respond to danger;”

With the advent of the Trump administration, I sense danger. I’m afraid that the government’s tools of lethal force––the Justice Department, the FBI, the military––could eventually be used against any American who opposes the administration. Those arms of the government are now led by MAGA loyalists. I don’t see guardrails.

And we have a Health Secretary who is anti-vaccine. The National Institute of Health (NIH) just cancelled studies to improve vaccine uptake. From the horse’s mouth:

"It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focus on gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment…" ⁹

If fewer Americans become vaccinated as seems likely under an anti-vax regime, the risk of infectious disease rises for everyone, including me and my family, especially our young grandchildren.

Trump’s EPA is going to try to make the air we breathe more dangerous. ¹⁰ That scares me, too.

Last October I thought that if Trump won, his second term would resemble his first. I was wrong. It’s been less than sixty days and already the administration’s actions have been far more extreme than anything I can recall during the entire first term. I fear how far Trump will go.

But I don’t know how to react to my fear. I can’t run. I can’t hide. I can’t fight back. So my fear turns into anger at my helplessness.

I live my good, productive, and privileged life near the green heart of a great city surrounded by my family and friends. But with a miasma of anger hanging over me. Four years of this could really take its toll.

Sarah Fay

in Pathological again:

“The emotion of depression (a slowing, a weight) could be the body’s response to extended periods of the emotion of anxiety (rushes of adrenaline, edginess, the sense of splintering and then cracking).”

That rush of negative adrenaline, that’s why I screamed at the television.

I hope I can find a way to follow the advice of the Stoics––to allow my emotions and thoughts to be affected only by what’s in my control. But right now, that exalted state of emotional repose seems far out of my reach.

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Question for the comments: What has been your reaction to the Trump administration? I want to hear from all political points of view.

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1. From the CBS News transcript of the March 9th, 2025 show.

2. A self-portrait by Gustave Courbet as re-imagined by the photographer Vik Muniz. This artwork hung in our bedroom during the 2008-9 great financial crisis and it did nothing to soothe my nerves.

3. Hitler broke the Munich agreement after six months when he occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March, 1939. Britain and France reacted by accelerating their rearmament and by providing Poland an unconditional security guarantee. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France honored their commitment to Poland and declared war on Germany. And the war came.

4. Perhaps the scariest movie scene ever.

5. A synecdoche is a part of something meant to signify a larger whole. When you “offer your hand in marriage,” you’re offering your beloved the whole of yourself–––your entire body, heart, mind, and soul–––unless, of course you’re “Thing” from The Addams Family.

6.

RFK Jr. Falsely Claims Measles Vax Causes Deaths 'Every Year'— Vaccine expert debunks recent statements from nation's top health official

7. Penn Wharton Budget Center Analysis

8. Pathological

9. The Associated Press

10. The EPA, formed in 1970 under Nixon, has had a bipartisan history of steady progress on making the air we breathe cleaner. Now Lee Zeldin, Trump’s EPA head, is intent on trying to reverse that progress.