Your Body Wasn't Meant To Survive Two Trump Presidencies

We’re not meant to endure forever, we’re meant to transform.

There’s a specific kind of fatigue that’s hard to describe, one that isn’t just about being tired, but about being metabolically overloaded. It’s the state of having too much knowledge and too little power, of being asked to stay informed while being robbed of any recourse. It is the experience of living through a second Trump presidency, not in the technical sense, but in the political one, in the slow and ongoing disintegration of democratic norms, in the normalization of surveillance, cruelty, and institutional erosion.

And the body knows.

Yesterday, as Congress passed a nearly thousand-page bill that expands the reach and power of ICE while slashing health care access for working-class Americans, I went live with Qasim Rashid and a health care worker who runs a rural clinic left us a comment that gave me chills. She told us that she had dissociated after the bill passed. She described sitting with a blank stare as her patients came in the next morning, watching people online celebrate the vote while knowing what it actually meant…that her patients, many of whom rely on medicaid and clinic subsidies, would no longer have care.

That celebration, the republican triumphalism of it, felt like a hallucination. I mean they prayed and did the YMCA after passing a bill that will kill 50 000 Americans. It doesn’t get more dystopian than that. The bill, in substance, is a stunning consolidation of authoritarian power. It creates a blueprint for a fully militarized federal police force with extraordinary latitude to detain and operate outside of normal judicial scrutiny. It allocates billions to ICE while slashing healthcare and services for the most vulnerable. But because it was spun to voters as a way to reduce their taxes, a stunning lie, given that it actually raises both spending and the deficit. And the spectacle was reframed as a win.

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What we are living through is not simply an ideological shift. It’s a physiological one. The body is not designed to endure this much unresolved fear, this much state-manufactured volatility, for this long. What I’ve seen, what I’ve felt myself, is the creeping awareness that we are being asked to accept conditions that are impossible to survive in both literal and emotional terms.

That is what I wanted to name.

Because there’s no mainstream vocabulary for what happens to people when they are forced to function in a society that consistently betrays them. There’s no shared language for the intimate violence of watching civil liberties be quietly dismantled while the country pretends to be at peace.

And yet this is where we are: sick kids losing their medicine to fund an unaccountable police state. Working families told there’s no money for care, while masked agents are handed new powers to operate outside of constitutional law. The expansion of ICE isn’t incidental, it’s the point. The central premise of this bill is that surveillance and force are worth more than life.

It’s taken me longer than usual to write about this because I’ve had to metabolize the reality that I’ve now lived through this twice. The first Trump presidency was a shock to the system. This second version is a corrosion. The exhaustion it produces is more ambient, more cellular. And far more dangerous.

But I also want to be clear: I’m staying.

I’m staying in this country not because I believe it’s functioning, but because I believe in the people trying to make it better. I’m staying in the fight because there is still meaning in writing what others are too afraid to say out loud.

I stayed up the night of the vote, reading the fine print, watching Speaker Mike Johnson try to slip it through while most of the country was asleep. I do this work not because it’s good for my health, but because I believe it’s necessary. And I do it, quite literally, for you, for the people who still care, even when it hurts, even when it’s terrifying.

If this kind of writing helps you name what you’re feeling or understand what’s at stake, I hope you’ll consider subscribing to my newsletter. I’m offering 50% off for the Fourth of July, not because I want to sell you something, but because I believe patriotism doesn’t mean silence. It means staying in the fight.

I write this at great personal risk. But I write it because truth still matters.

Please subscribe if you can. And even if you don’t, thank you for being the kind of person who reads this far. That alone gives me reason to keep going.

We’re not powerless. And we’re not alone. We’re living through something corrosive, yes, but we’re also living through it together. And maybe that’s the most radical thing of all. Because while our bodies weren’t built to endure this much fear and failure alone, they were built to adapt, to reach for one another, and to transform.

Let this moment change us, not into people who turn away, but into people who turn toward each other. Let it make us kinder. More loving. More awake. Let it make us dangerous in our tenderness. Fierce in our solidarity. We’re not meant to endure forever, we’re meant to transform. And if we do it together, we just might build something better.

And please keep sending me your boy problems! I love reading them!!

x Liz