From TPM Reader SR …

In the late summer of 1991, I was at the beach with my best friend from law school and another friend in the midst of an exhausted drunken bender following the bar exam. People who go through any kind of professional licensure or credentialing exam after a course of instruction, or, I suspect, a dissertation defense know the sense of complete mental exhaustion, the feeling of recovering from having one’s mind and body completely drained, that follows weeks and weeks of grueling, high-intensity cramming for a high-stakes, high-pressure, high-difficulty test. What follows isn’t so much celebratory as an almost sullen lassitude and very inward directed focus because the exhaustion is the herald of uncertainty about the immediate fugure (“did I pass?”) and momentous life changes ahead regardless.

Into this stew dropped the news of the coup by old-school Soviet hardliners against Gorbachev.

By now we know that the meeting between Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did not quite go as the Republican leader hoped.

From TPM Reader SK …

I’ll start with a tangent: I just learned that you were raised by a biologist. I’m an evolutionary biologist, some of my work is on reproductive behavioral ecology in primates. That evolutionary framework really helps understand Trump’s behavior, like you said! He barely behaves like a modern human (certainly an old testament human), more like a Gorilla or polygynous old world primate like a baboon where dominance is the only currency that matters.

From TPM Reader AG …

I loathed Trump from the first time I was aware of him. I have always despised bullies, and Trump was the ne plus ultra of bullies. When he won in 2016, I was distraught at what American voters had done, and what the future would hold. Although I could not have guessed the details of what lay in store, the level of damage, outrage and devastation he caused were in line with my worst fears.

From TPM Reader BW …

I remember very well your post from four years ago about living in the house of the abuser and how the abuser’s presence warps everyone else’s reality, because it so accurately reflected my own experience. My father verbally abused everyone and physically abused me, while my mother observed the abuse, normalized it, and made sure it got swept under the rug.

From TPM Reader MN …

My post Trump reaction is surprising. While I was aware of a pulsing anxiety that had thrubbed through my psyche over the past four years, I was surprised how quickly the absence of the daily barrage of twitter madness would change things. Both my wife and I noted the morning after the inauguration was the first time we had slept easily in years. On some level we had accepted the daily madness, but hadn’t realized it had damaged our ability to sleep and that we had been living with a bigger ball of anxiety than we had acknowledged

Now our discussions revolve around what must happen over the next 2 years to lance the possibility of future demagoguery. Things Trump has clarified for us …

We start with TPM Reader EB. These are in response to this post from yesterday.

On one level, my experience of the end of the Trump presidency looks much like yours. Twitter banning him brought about a rather unexpected peace and quiet. I was expecting him to find some other platform to whine on (like Fox & Friends), and I expected the media to cover that as they have done in the past, and I fully expected him to continue after the election either whining more about how he didn’t lose or hyping up a 2024 run. That I don’t have to hear any of this is a welcome surprise.

In the waning weeks and days of Trump’s presidency, we knew from his public statements and retweets of widely debunked conspiracy theories that he had little left to work with in his push to overturn the election.

There is an understandable and wise desire not to breathe too big a sigh of relief. Most of us realize that the reality and threat of Trumpism is far from over. Indeed, there could even be another Trump presidency in four years, though I think that’s quite unlikely. I want to ask you something different: How have you experienced the end of Trump’s presidency? I mean at a basic experiential level.

As much as I have written about the centrality, power and chaotic force of Trump’s Twitter feed I was not prepared for the impact of his account being suspended in early January, a couple weeks ahead of Biden’s inauguration. It was like he just ceased to exist and I voice I’d heard – literally or figuratively – barking in my head for more than five years just went silent. From what I can tell it hit him just as powerfully. Losing his twitter megaphone seems to have undone him.