'People feel drained': anti-Trump Americans face temptation to tune out

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

‘People feel drained’: anti-Trump Americans face temptation to tune out
The president-elect’s first term brought a wave of protest. This time, visitors to New York’s Washington Square Park are struggling for energy to resist

Eight years later, the response of many centrist and left-leaning Americans to a Trump second term has been more muted. For many anti-Trump voters – and even some institutions – the return of Trump prompts a feeling of just wanting to ignore it all, including politics more broadly, and focus their energy elsewhere.

----------------------------

“For me it’s an exhaustion,” said Josh Marcus, a 39-year-old tech worker from El Paso, Texas, who was visiting the park with his partner, Marisha Hicks, a stay-at-home mother. The pair had come on vacation to gauge whether it might be time to move back to New York, in part to leave Texas politics behind them.

“We went from disappointment that Biden was staying in,” Marcus said, which changed when “he dropped out, Kamala came in and we felt a little bit better and she had a chance. But it was the complete opposite when it came to election day.”

Hicks, 45, said she was in a period of mourning. “The first time it happened I was in complete shock. This time, I almost expected it. So now I’m personally focused on strategizing for the next four years.”

Both said too many losses to Trump – whether it be the Russia investigation, two impeachments, the failure of federal prosecutions and a felony conviction that appeared to do little to slow his momentum, if not the reverse – had led to a sense of inevitability.

“It kept happening,” said Marcus. “We’d be thinking, ‘Surely he’s not going to get past this?’ But then you just come to expect he will – and he did.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/02/trump-protest-fatigue