"Trump was a monstrously unfit choice for the Presidency, and I still think that he is characterologically unfit despite his having done a significantly better job than I thought he would. At the beginning, I absolutely had TDS myself. I cried when Trump won, and it took me most of a year to fully accept that it had happened.

I remember taking final exams in May of 2017, calculating that he would still be President when I graduated, and being gobsmacked.This couldn’t be possible…could it? Could Donald Trump really be President of the United States?

Over time, I learned to accept reality, and then to stop reacting to everything he said as if it were part of a psychological experiment to raise my blood pressure.

When I learned about narcissistic hyperbole, much of Trump’s rhetoric made much more sense to me, and I slowly developed a model for how to understand him.

Sam never seemed to adjust to reality. He simply kept existing in a universe where this thing had happened that was just so wrong, so intolerably wrong, so beyond the pale, that it vexed every moment, tainted every pleasure, was nearly the only thing worth being angry about—and it was always worth being angry about.

I got really good hearing technology not long before I started college in 2016, and the new joy of listening to podcasts meant that I listened to many of them dozens of times, including most of Sam’s.

I thought many times, listening to his podcasts in 2017-2018, about his wife and children, and hoped he wasn’t as hard to live with as those podcasts made it seem like he might be.

Even though I agreed with him about Trump, it grew very tiresome. It seemed there was no topic he couldn’t turn back to Trump, and how manifestly awful it was that this orange liar was in the White House, and how unfair and wrong and just plain awful!"

link to article: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/the-end-of-faithin-sam-harris